On the surface, then, it is not hard to understand why people might think this Saudi buying of Chelsea players is all just a little too convenient. Somewhere along the line, the people doing the buying and the people doing the selling have interests that are, let’s say, mutually aligned.
There is, of course, an alternative explanation: that Chelsea has a stock of high-profile players it no longer requires, and that the Saudi authorities — working out how to spend the PIF’s money — have spotted an opportunity, in essence, to buy in bulk. Coincidence, in other words. Nothing untoward to see here at all, just the usual mechanics of the market.
And that may well be true. Certainly, those involved with Chelsea and the Saudi clubs insist that it is. But that does not mean the perception is not a problem. Saudi Arabia’s bailing Chelsea out of a mess of the club’s own making would compromise soccer’s integrity. Saudi Arabia merely looking as if it is bailing out Chelsea, though, is not a whole lot better.
In his trilogy on the Roman orator and politician Cicero, the author Robert Harris depicts the story of Publius Clodius Pulcher, a sociopathic, rabble-rousing politician who slips into Julius Caesar’s home to witness the rites of the Good Goddess, a ceremony only women were permitted to attend.
Clodius is caught. A scandal, and a trial, ensue. Caesar insists he did not allow Clodius to enter, and nor did his wife, Pompeia. He maintains her innocence absolutely, in fact. But he is the chief of the official Roman state religion, the pontifex maximus. And so he divorces Pompeia. What matters most of all, he realizes, is not just that his wife — and his family — “are free from guilt, but even from the suspicion of it.”