As he sat inside the walled Istanbul house watching the Bosphorus Strait flow by, and awaiting one of the most elusive and enigmatic Russian businessmen, journalist Nick Purewal could be forgiven for thinking he was a long, long way from London’s Stamford Bridge stadium. Then, smiling and with an outstretched hand, in walks Roman Abramovich, the man who transformed Chelsea Football Club from London into serial winners and a modern powerhouse in European soccer, who is about to break his silence for the first time.
For a sports journalist who cut his teeth covering football transfers and tactical formations, this was far from the West London home of Chelsea FC. Instead of analyzing substitutions and squad rotations, Purewal found himself navigating the murky intersection of Eastern European geopolitics, sanctions, and oligarch millions – a story that reads more like a John le Carré thriller novel than the sports pages.
“I’m really glad I started off in news,” Purewal reflected to the Magazine on covering what became the most extraordinary sale in football history. “You couldn’t really cover football without a decent understanding of all those things, at least an understanding of how to cover that in the press. It’s a complete crossover of sport, politics, and business.”
The result of those extraordinary encounters is the book Sanctioned: The Inside Story of the Sale of Chelsea FC, a definitive account of this unique period in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, Abramovich was placed under sanctions by the UK government, and Chelsea “pulled off a complex transaction in three tense and troubling months – a quarter of the time many analysts would normally set aside for such a deal.”
The man who let his heart rule his head
Purewal’s book reveals the surprising origins of Abramovich’s Chelsea obsession, and it wasn’t a lifelong passion for the beautiful game. The Russian-Israeli businessman’s soccer awakening came at Old Trafford in April 2003, watching Manchester United face Real Madrid in a Champions League quarter-final.$24
But friends, such as Israeli agent Pini Zahavi, had other ideas. They twisted his arm to attend that fateful match at Old Trafford. Abramovich flew in from Moscow on a private jet and found himself walking the final stretch to the ground among the fans.
“That was when he first sort of understood what it was all about,” Purewal explained. “He felt the real energy of fans, the excitement building, everyone moving toward the same sort of cliff, sort of collective events, and everyone getting excited about it. He said there’s an energy he’d not really experienced before. He could really feel it.”
The flight back to Moscow that night changed everything. “He would normally just sleep all the way so he could be ready to work the next day,” Purewal noted. “They got back and on the plane, he basically said that not only could he not sleep, he just couldn’t sleep at all. He was sort of wired because he was basically like, ‘Right, we’re buying a football club.’”
By the time they landed, Abramovich had canceled all his meetings and summoned his advisers. Within two months of those conversations, Chelsea was his.
A reluctant emperor
For the nearly 20 years that he owned Chelsea, Abramovich remained largely silent, letting his unprecedented investment in players, facilities, and community programs speak for itself. This reticence, Purewal discovered, wasn’t arrogance or indifference – it was a deliberate management philosophy.
Sanctioned: The Inside Story Of Chelsea FC (credit: Courtesy)
Sanctioned: The Inside Story Of Chelsea FC (credit: Courtesy)
“One of the reasons he never spoke before was that he was determined to let his actions and his instructions speak for him, but also didn’t want to interfere,” Purewal explained. “He would make decisions on hiring and firing and put people in positions, but then he would give them space to do their job.”
Abramovich’s approach was remarkably hands-off. When staff needed his input, he would simply ask: “What do you think?” and expect a definitive answer, not a menu of options. “Pretty much every time, whatever they said, he would say, ‘Okay, great, that’s what we do. And it’s not your fault if it doesn’t work.’”
This management style extended to Chelsea’s groundbreaking work against antisemitism, which Purewal describes as unlike anything he’d seen in football. The club began a ‘Say No to Antisemitism’ campaign, and even brought The Jerusalem Post staff over from Israel to attend events.
“They took people who had football banning orders for racism, took them to Auschwitz, paid for them to go because their attitude was that education is the only solution,” Purewal explained.
But beneath this disciplined exterior lay genuine passion. When Purewal asked about that pivotal night at Old Trafford, “his eyes lit up, and he was talking really animatedly about it. You could really see that in that game, he became a football fan.”
The gathering storm
The fairy tale began to sour long before Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine. The 2018 poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury marked a turning point in British-Russian relations, and Abramovich felt the chill immediately.
The poisoning, carried out on March 4, 2018, was a failed assassination attempt targeting Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer who had worked as a double agent for British intelligence. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were exposed to a Novichok nerve agent in the city of Salisbury, England. Both were hospitalized in critical condition for several weeks before recovering and being released.
Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who responded to the scene, was also seriously affected by the toxin and required intensive care before his eventual discharge. Russian secret agents were highly suspected and seen on the city’s CCTV footage. They eventually came out in a highly mocked and scripted interview in Russia, claiming they were visiting the city’s famous cathedral spire.
“Ever since the Skripal poisoning, the mood toward Russians in the UK changed massively anyway, and the diplomatic relations between the UK and Russia were really poor, and [Abramovich] felt the brunt of that,” Purewal revealed. “He got to the point where he felt like a stranger in London. And London was the city he would have called home.”
The impact was immediate and personal. Chelsea’s ambitious new stadium project, designed to be “an icon for the city, a real sort of landmark,” was shelved. “He got to the point where he thought, ‘Why would I do this if I’m not welcome?’”
Abramovich had hoped the diplomatic freeze would thaw, allowing him to resume his London life. Instead, February 24, 2022, brought a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and the end of Abramovich’s Chelsea dream.
Twelve weeks to save a club
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Abramovich was placed under sanctions by the British government due to his close ties to the political elite in Russia. It eventually became clear that he would not be allowed to continue owning Chelsea, so he knew immediately what he had to do.
On March 2, 2022, he called two of his closest aides with instructions that stunned them: “Draft a statement that the club is for sale in full, and I want all of the proceeds to go to a foundation to help all victims of the conflict.”
“Even they were sort of shocked by the speed of that decision,” Purewal noted. “People thought it was coming, but it still caught people out.”
That evening, as the statement was released, Abramovich was already shuttling between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul, trying to facilitate peace talks. After making the call to sell Chelsea, he flew to Poland, then drove into Kyiv. It was there, in the Ukrainian capital, that he was purportedly poisoned.
The incident occurred on the night of March 3, 2022, after Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators had eaten food prepared for them in a Kyiv apartment. After eating chocolate and drinking water on the night of March 3, the three reportedly felt eye pain and skin irritation that did not ease until morning. What followed was a terrifying night that reads like something from a Cold War thriller.
“He was temporarily blind. And the skin was sort of peeling off his hands and face,” Purewal recounted to the Magazine about that night. The symptoms were consistent with chemical weapons poisoning. Abramovich and at least two senior members of the Ukrainian negotiating team developed symptoms of constant, painful tearing, as well as red eyes and skin peeling on their faces and hands. This included Ukrainian Crimean lawmaker Rustem Umerov.
The symptoms were severe enough to require emergency medical treatment. Despite doctors’ warnings that he needed more treatment, Abramovich insisted on attending scheduled meetings with the Ukrainian delegation the next morning, “still not really able to see properly, and his eyes constantly streaming, watering so his whole face was wet.”
Two days later, Abramovich and his team discovered that the Ukrainian negotiator assigned to meet directly with the Russians had been shot dead in the street. The group blamed the alleged poisoning on hardliners from Moscow who didn’t want the war in Ukraine to end. Reports from the time claimed that the level of poisoning was not intended to be lethal but rather to send a message to anyone attempting to work toward peace.
Later, investigative journalism group Bellingcat confirmed it was deliberate poisoning, offering to conduct more detailed forensic analysis.
Back in London, the government’s sanctions created chaos that bordered on the absurd. Chelsea was limited to spending £20,000 per match for away travel – “basically half what a Premier League team would spend even to travel to an away game within England,” Purewal said.
The situation reached farcical proportions before a Football Association Cup tie at Middlesbrough. Captain César Azpilicueta organized a whip-round among players to pay for flights themselves, only to be told this would violate sanctions. As the squad gathered to board a coach instead, a last-minute call came through relaxing the spending limits.
“Everybody went home because they could fly,” Purewal recalled. “Players were on the phones to wives and girlfriends saying, ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’ll pick up the kids from school… I’ll be back in half an hour. We’re not going to leave until later in the day.’”
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The arbitrary deadline of May 31, 2022, wasn’t just tight – it was potentially catastrophic. Miss it, and Chelsea would enter administration (similar to bankruptcy in the United States), taking with them more than 500 businesses and thousands of jobs in the area dependent on the club.
“Analysts were saying a deal like that would normally take about a year to go from start to finish,” Purewal explained. “They had 12 weeks.”
But it was the government’s handling of the process that truly exposed the amateurish nature of their approach. When Abramovich was sanctioned on March 10, 2022, Downing Street had to issue a temporary operating license just so Chelsea could continue to exist as a business. The restrictions they imposed bordered on vindictive micromanagement.
“Once they were sanctioned, the government had to issue a temporary operating license so they could still exist, still trade,” Purewal told the Magazine. “And they imposed on that an arbitrary deadline of May 31. There was no reason given for why they picked that deadline other than I think it was that sanctions are meant to be punitive. I think they decided that that would have been punitive.”
The human cost was staggering – and apparently irrelevant to politicians playing politics. “There are more than 500 businesses in the borough around Stamford Bridge completely dependent on Chelsea’s existence,” Purewal noted. “Those jobs would have disappeared overnight if Chelsea had gone to the wall.”
The Middlesbrough incident perfectly encapsulated the government’s incompetence and the uncertainty of what was actually legal or not under the sanctions. But it wasn’t an isolated incident. “Those sorts of things were repeated all the time,” Purewal noted, painting a picture of systematic governmental dysfunction.
Meanwhile, the people actually trying to complete the sale were working themselves into the ground. “Everybody involved was working 20-hour days for the whole period of time, with no break,” Purewal revealed. “You’d get to the point where you couldn’t keep going for the day, and so you’d have to go home in the middle of the night, or to the hotel. And there was only really time to have a shower and get changed and go back.”
Even Joe Ravitch, head of the investment bank Raine Group, running the sale process, found himself in surreal situations. “He was receiving death threats,” Purewal said. “He was saying his bosses had said that he should have private security, but he said, ‘I don’t need that.’ But he did check into his hotel in London under a false name.”
The root of the problem was governmental incompetence on a staggering scale. UK sanctions experts working for major law firms told Purewal the same story: Whitehall was completely overwhelmed.
“The volume and the pace of the work the government was having to deal with… they were overwhelmed, but also they were finding – and Chelsea found exactly the same thing, and so did Raine and everyone else near the suitors – you’d put questions to the government, and the answers that came back were often, ‘We don’t know.’”
The response was always the same bureaucratic shuffle: “They would say, ‘Well, you know, I’ll go away, pass it up the chain, it’ll come back down the chain.’ And the answer would be, ‘Don’t know.’ So they were grossly underprepared for what they had to do.”
Purewal reserved particular criticism for the senior political figures orchestrating this chaos. “I’d have some sympathy for a lot of the people involved, but not the senior politicians because it was their edifice.”
The government’s determination to stick to its arbitrary deadline for a sale, regardless of the consequences, revealed the true nature of its approach. “The government said there’s no way they would extend; they had the power to issue a new license at that time, extend it, or change the deadline, but they weren’t going to do that,” Purewal explained. “So if the sale hadn’t been completed by the May 31 deadline, then Chelsea would have fallen into administration.”
The Todd Boehly factor
Among the chaos emerged American Todd Boehly’s consortium, which ultimately prevailed in the bidding war. Purewal’s exclusive interviews with the new Chelsea owner also provide insight into how the Americans navigated this extraordinary process.
“That was remarkable too because it’s sort of the first interview of that type he’s given,” Purewal noted of his Boehly interview. “So that was really important to get that insight into how the new ownership won the race to buy the club.”
The sale completion brought relief, but it also revealed the true cost of political interference in football.
The frozen billions
Perhaps the most frustrating element of the entire saga remains unresolved. The £2.5 billion sale proceeds, intended for victims of the Ukraine conflict, remain frozen in a UK bank account, caught in a bureaucratic standoff that highlights governmental inflexibility.
Abramovich had enlisted Mike Penrose, former director of UNICEF UK, to establish a groundbreaking humanitarian foundation. Penrose assembled a board that included former UN under-secretary generals, and offered the government both a seat and veto power. They declined.
The dispute centers on scope. The British government insists that funds should only benefit Ukraine. Abramovich and his humanitarian advisers argue for helping all victims of the conflict, including refugees who’ve fled Ukraine.
“If you spend the money only in Ukraine, the big problem is, what about all the Ukrainian refugees who’ve had to leave Ukraine?” Purewal explained Penrose’s argument. “The people who are school age, if they are in England, sit A levels; they’re probably going to go to English universities. They’re probably not going to go home, are they?”
Penrose had secured backing from major US banks for 10-year funds with guaranteed returns. “He said that they could have set up something that would change humanitarianism forever because it would be something that would be completely independent,” Purewal explained. But all approaches were dismissed by the UK government.
Instead of the typical six-month delay in getting emergency aid to disaster zones, Penrose claimed his foundation could be “on the ground in two days, wherever we want to be.”
The government’s position has remained unchanged through multiple foreign secretaries. Even when Penrose offered to let politicians take full credit for the initiative, there was “still no movement.”
The saga continued even into June of this year, with the UK government warning that it may take legal action against Abramovich to ensure that the proceeds from the club’s sale are directed to Ukraine.
In a joint statement, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Foreign Secretary David Lammy said they remain open to negotiations but are “fully prepared” to pursue the matter in court if necessary. They stressed that their goal is to see “people suffering in Ukraine” benefit from the money as soon as possible, expressing frustration that no agreement has yet been reached with Abramovich.
The reckoning
Three years on from those dramatic events, Purewal’s book offers the definitive account of how global geopolitics crashed into English soccer with unprecedented force. The author’s unique access, including hours of interviews with Abramovich in two meetings, provides insights impossible to gather at the time.
“I felt for the longest time that everybody had had their say, other than him,” reflected Purewal on why the interviews finally happened. “Everyone else was talking about him – and not just talking about him but sort of trying to say what he thinks and does, and all those sorts of things.”
The timing proved crucial. As recent reports note, Abramovich addressed “the possibility of returning to Chelsea, and potentially football” in the book, saying, “Perhaps one day there would be a situation where I could attend a match and say a proper goodbye.”
For Abramovich, a Jewish orphan who rose from the streets of Russia to become one of the most powerful men in the world, the forced sale represented the end of an era built on passion rather than calculation.
“He was remarkably sanguine about the whole thing,” Purewal observed of the oligarch’s demeanor during their interviews. “That’s how all the people who know him really well would characterize him anyway because he has that sort of attitude of always looking forward.”
As one assessment notes, Sanctioned is “more than just a sports business book; it’s a compelling examination of how global politics, big money, and the beautiful game intersect in the modern era.”
The fall of Abramovich’s football empire and the sale of Chelsea FC due to events thousands of miles away remind us that in the modern game, no owner, however successful, however transformative, exists beyond the reach of geopolitics.
More and more clubs are being owned by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which brings its own issues, and Israeli soccer is no stranger to controversial owners. But Abramovich’s billions couldn’t buy him immunity from the consequences of his homeland’s actions, no matter how much he tried to distance himself from them.
In the end, the man who turned Chelsea into champions was not undone by poor transfers or tactical failures on the pitch but by forces entirely beyond his control. The boy who grew up with nothing, built the club into a modern-day powerhouse, and was forced to cede control because of circumstances he couldn’t influence, now watches from afar as others steer the club he revolutionized.