Here in the UK, yet another Anglo-Russian controversy has broken out, this one perhaps even bigger than the Litvinenko saga. What could be bigger than a political assassination in the heart of London? Football, of course.

The controversy that is filling the pages of British newspapers concerns the abrupt departure of the manager of Chelsea Football Club, Jose Mourinho, from the club this month, after falling out with the owner of the club, Roman Abramovich. The controversy goes beyond football, because it emanates from a British reaction to a very Russian way of doing business.

It is true that managers often leave football clubs suddenly. It’s quite normal for managers who are failing to get results to be unceremoniously booted out midway through the season. But it’s unusual for the most successful manager in a club’s history to be booted out in this way.

For that is what Mourinho is. In the three years he’s been at Chelsea, he’s won the Premiership twice, the FA Cup once, and got to the later stages of the Champions League twice. Under his stewardship, Chelsea have gone from being the perennial underachiever of English football, to being arguably the best team in the country.

How much of that success is down to the skill of Mourinho as a manager, and how much is down to the deep pockets of Abramovich, is a moot point. The Russian tycoon, nicknamed Red Rom by the English press, has spent around £500 million on the club. That’s around a billion dollars.

But he wants results for his money. Chelsea failed to win the league last year – they lost to Manchester United – and are underperforming this year. And Abramovich reportedly wants the team to play more attractive football – he wants them not just to win, but to win in style.

This isn’t just the vain wish of a bored playboy – senior figures at the club say Abramovich’s plan is to build a world class business from the club, which attracts supporters and fans from all over the world through its beautiful football. Nice plan. At the moment, the club is around £80 million in debt, while other British clubs – Arsenal and Manchester United in particular – are several hundred million in the black.

The plan was going well until last year. But then Abramovich and Mourinho appeared to get different ideas about how to manage the club. Abramovich decided he wanted to bring in his friend, Ukrainian star Andriy Shevchenko, from AC Milan to join the team. He bought Shevvy for £30 million. The problem was that Mourinho didn’t want him there.

When Shevchenko came over, the 31-year-old didn’t play well and failed to score many goals. Mourinho repeatedly substituted him, and the two did not seem to get on. Abramovich then bought in a new director of football at the club, Israeli coach Avram Grant, specifically to get Shevchenko back in form. Again, Mourinho didn’t want Grant there.

So you basically had the unusual situation where the owner of the club was acting as its manager, telling the manager who would be in the squad, picking his own people to act as assistants to the manager, and trying to get the manager to play a certain type of football.

This is perfectly normal behaviour at a Russian corporate – the oligarch owns the company, and the CEO better do exactly as the oligarch wants, or the CEO can find himself another job. It’s a typically Russian, top-down, authoritarian-style management. But it’s a very unusual way for the owner of a football club to behave. Usually, they pick a manager, and leave him to get on with the job, picking his own players, and his own back-room staff.

Mourinho was increasingly unhappy in this situation, and a rift developed in the changing room between the players he picked and the ones that Abramovich picked. Poor old Shevvy wasn’t very popular among the other Chelsea players apparently.

Then Mourinho, when faced with criticism from Abramovich, called his bluff.

Mourinho was talking to Abramovich after a game last week, in the corridor in the Chelsea stadium, and Abramovich complained about the way the team was playing. Mourinho said words to the effect of ‘if you don’t like it, fire me’. That’s basically a bluff, like Ukraine saying to Russia, ‘if you don’t like it, turn off the gas’ or Khodorkovsky saying to Putin ‘if you don’t like it, arrest me’. You know that, in staring contests like that, a Russian will never back down. And sure enough, right there and then he told Mourinho he could leave the club, to the surprise of the entire country, including the Chelsea team, who are reportedly shell-shocked, and the other members of the Chelsea board.

Abramovich may well feel that he has every right to call the shots at Chelsea, when he has spent so much money at the club. But he has to remember, he himself is a relatively new arrival at the club. He’s only been the owner for four years. There are people who have supported the club for their whole lives, who’ve seen it through good times and bad. The fans adored Mourinho, and so did the players. He inspired them with his invincible swagger. The new manager, Avram Grant, is already the object of ridicule – he’s as unstylish as Mourinho was stylish, and only has the public support of one Chelsea footballer – Andrey Shevchenko. So Abramovich’s Kremlin-style management of the club is meeting something of an Orange revolution from the Chelsea fans, with them chanting Mourinho’s name at Grant’s first game in charge (which Chelsea lost).

If Chelsea do badly this year, as it looks likely they will, there’s a real danger of the Chelsea fans falling out of love with Abramovich, and him falling out of love with Chelsea, and wandering away to find some other toy to play with. This would be a pity, because his acquisition of Chelsea is, so far, the most visible example of Russian capital’s international expansion.

And the problems at Chelsea are already making problems for other Russian capitalists’ attempts to expand. Over at Arsenal FC, which is the club I support, a takeover bid is being waged by Alisher Usmanov, the Uzbek billionaire who owns steel, iron and gas assets around the CIS. He’s teamed up with a disgruntled former board member of Arsenal who wants to do to the club what Abramovich did to Chelsea.

But the thing is, Arsenal are already doing very well. They are top of the league, with the best manager in the league – Arsene Wenger – and they have a team full of young, talented and cheap players, unlike Chelsea’s team of expensive and underperforming mega-stars. Why do they need Usmanov and his Uzbek billions, particularly if Usmanov behaves like Abramovich, and insists that Wenger picks several Uzbek mates of his for the team?

Usmanov’s bid has not been helped by several articles by the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, detailing his crimes and misdemeanours, including a prison sentence during the Soviet Union, and of course, his close ties to the brutal Karimov regime in Uzbekistan.

Usmanov’s lawyers have since successfully pulled down Murray’s website, but in the process also pulled down the website of Boris Johnson, a Conservative MP who is running for the mayor of London. Cue lots of complaining about heavy-handed tycoons silencing freedom of speech.

I very much hope Usmanov doesn’t get hold of Arsenal. The club is enjoying a great spell in its history, and I don’t want to see that fat tycoon entertaining members of Karimov’s blood-stained family at Arsenal matches. On the other hand, I hope things work out between Abramovich and Chelsea, because for better or for worse, his ownership of the club has been a real link between Russia and the UK, in a time when such links are under serious strain.

Jules Evans, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, London

September 28, 2007