Former Socceroos captain Craig Foster has called on the world’s leading footballers to take a stronger moral stance against clubs with questionable ownership in the wake of the Roman Abramovich and Chelsea firestorm.
In an unprecedented ruling against a club owner, the Premier League ordered Abramovich to stop running Chelsea and sell after he was sanctioned by the UK government over Russia’s war on Ukraine and his close links to president Vladimir Putin.
But Chelsea is far from the only football club with thorny ownership questions and Foster, one of Australia’s leading advocates for human rights, said players had a responsibility to do more.
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“We’re talking about human rights here, conflict and crimes against humanity, genocide and apartheid,” Foster said on the latest edition of Stan Sport FC.
“Sport has never dealt well with those issues throughout its history… it’s always been very confused about the way it should act.
“I would love to see Lionel Messi, for example, say ‘look, I was going to go over to this club PSG, but I disagree with what’s happening there’. I think that would be a hugely influential and important statement (Paris Saint-Germain are owned by Qatar Sports Investments).
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“It’s not going to happen in the near term because the culture of global football at the moment is that anything goes, essentially, and everyone has been feeding at the table.”
Foster also took aim at certain Chelsea supporters that felt their beloved club was being unfairly punished by the Premier League and UK government.
Banners and chants supporting Abramovich have been prominent at recent Chelsea games.
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“Many of the comments are one of victimhood, that we are being prejudiced here and this is wrong,” Foster said.
“With no regard to the fact that Ukrainians are dying. So within this issue the most important thing is people are being harmed in other parts of the world and sport has been able to look away from that for a long time.
“I don’t think that’s right and for all of us, we need to start to ask very different questions.”
Foster was joined on Stan Sport FC by The Independent’s chief football writer Miguel Delaney, who attended Chelsea’s 1-0 win over Newcastle United at the weekend.
Newcastle was purchased by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in October, giving hope to fans dreaming of a first title in almost a century but concerning human rights activists that the kingdom had gained a foothold in the world’s richest football league.
“It should be the sort of moment to stand back and look at where football is because on one side you had a club whose owner has just been sanctioned for a long standing relationship to a Russian dictator who’s engaging in a disgraceful invasion and is threatening a nuclear war,” Delaney said.
“And the other side it’s a club owned by a state in Saudi Arabia, through their sovereign investment fund, who are waging an even worse war right now in Yemen, that’s considered a greater humanitarian crisis.
“And to go with all sorts of human rights concerns within Saudi Arabia itself. And yet you had Saudi Arabia flags in the Newcastle end. Now why are those flags there other than to celebrate the ownership when there should be huge questions asked of the ownership?
“The Chelsea situation even illustrates that before you get to anything about the wrongs of how states shouldn’t be allowed to own clubs, that we’re in a very, very tricky position if we’re allowing clubs to have ownerships that are so entangled with geopolitics.
“It was the sort of issue that the game thought it could control for so long, that it would never have to confront, and eventually something happens in the real world and everything spins out of control.”
Australia’s best footballer, Sam Kerr, is a star player for Chelsea, and Delaney said the government sanctions and uncertain ownership situation would greatly affect her too.
“How are Chelsea going to treat the women’s team going forward?
“Because it had been something that the hierarchy under Abramovich had been usually concerned with.
“They were hugely invested in having a women’s team that was as successful and had as much of a role as the men’s team. And I think that’s a big question for the next hierarchy, are they’re willing to invest as much?”
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