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Showing posts from July, 2013

Is Winning all that matters?

In sport, is winning all that matters? Two stories this week have raised this intriguing question. The first was the 10 year anniversary of Roman Abramovitch’s reign at Chelsea. His millions turned a fairly good to average Premiership side into one that won all the major trophies at some point over the past 10 years, even the Champions League through their perhaps lucky but certainly plucky displays in 2012. In a recent interview on Sky TV, Matthew Syed pointed out however that this success has been built on dirty money. Abramovitch’s fortune was made when he and a group of other oligarchs made a deal to support Boris Yeltsin in return for the cut-price acquisition of much of Russia’s mineral wealth. Resources that should have gone to support the people of Russia ended up in the hands of a few wealthy moguls. The discussion on Sky was intensely revealing. Syed raised significant moral questions, which seemed to baffle Sky’s usual pundits, who could only see the football success Abramo