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Abramovich must learn from Manchester City if Chelsea are to achieve success

Chelsea owner, Roman Abramovich, may not need lessons on making money, but he could profitably learn from Sheikh Mansour on how to manage football. The particular lesson he needs to learn is the crucial relationship between owner and manager, always a key to success in the game.

Both Mansour and Abramovich inherited coaches when they bought their respective clubs. Mansour inherited Mark Hughes, Abramovich, Claudio Ranieri. The Emirati made one change and was much criticised for bringing in Roberto Mancini. At first it did not seem to make much of a difference, but two years down the line, we can see what a new world the Italian has ushered in at Eastlands, and how well he has used the Sheikh’s money.

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Insideworldfootball

The cult of the manager may have been developing since the 1960s, but football now faces a situation that not many could have imagined. This is the age of the manager as a celebrity, with his every action judged to be as important and worthy of highlight, at times even more so, than the players he manages.

This marks a fundamental change in the how the game is perceived. When Pelé described football as the beautiful game, he meant the show put on by the likes of him and his fellow players.

We now have the extraordinary spectacle of not one football event, but two simultaneous ones, where the off-field action surrounding managers, be it Jose Mourinho or Arsène Wenger, attracts as much attention, if not more, than Lionel Messi’s performance on the field.

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Insideworldfootball

The beginning of the football season always turns to talk of money and how much clubs have spent on the transfer market.

Yet what this misses is the age-old truth that money does not buy sporting success. Spending money can keep the fans happy and raise their expectations for the season, but is no guarantee of silverware at the end of the season.

This is something that Manchester City fans might well discover this season as they finally strive to wrest back some glory from their more famous city rivals. Managers under pressure always talk of how much the opposition has spent, but it is management more than money that matters in the end.

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Insideworldfootball.biz

Queen’s Park Rangers return to the Premiership will make their fans want to know is whether their rich owner will follow in the footsteps of Roman Abramovich. He is after all richer than Abramovich, indeed he is the richest man in Britain with a net worth of £24 billion ($39 billion).

But that’s not how Lakshmi Mittal sees things. QPR will not be a passion for him as Chelsea is for the Russian and, ironic at it may seem, that should be of some comfort to the fans of the West London club.

QPR, as Mittal himself acknowledges, is a club with a “chequered past” and what a past. Located almost next door to the BBC, it has had the sort of drama that could well inspire one of the corporation’s script writers. Since the club fell out of the Premiership in 1996, it has not only been in and out of administration but has had to cope with very unwelcome off the field headlines.

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Insideworldfootball.biz

The £225 million ($363 million) spend in the January transfer window has been greeted with awe, alarm and the sort of reaction that suggests something entirely new has happened.

That is not so.

Yes, the figure is a record. But that fact, by itself, does not change the basic realities of the Premier League.

Ignore the numbers for the moment and the Premier League is where it has been since the summer of 2003. Then, an unknown Russian called Roman Abramovich, flew to London, bought a West London club that had a great need for money, and changed the football landscape of this country.

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