And also, he wanted someone to be the spokesman of the event as well. So, Richard and Matthew hooked up and Matthew agreed to be the person in the studio that would actually give updates on where Richard was in the world when he was going on his balloon trip. And as before, Eghbali assures that all of these business interests are couched in and enabled by developing (or maintaining) a winning culture at the club (the asset). None of this works if the team’s not successful.

During World War II Waddingtons helped prisoners of war by hiding escape maps pinned on silk inside the games. The tokens were made out of real gold and real money was put with the monopoly money, once it was found out that German guards were not searching the boxes themselves. This was achieved by MI9 and Waddingtons working together to produce the games and setting up fake aid charites, sending both regular aid and escapee maps hidden in everyday objects such as cards, pens and of course board games. But Russia's invasion of Ukraine earlier this year forced a wholesale rethink in Britain over this relationship and in turn emboldened Abramovich's critics, many of whom had been cowed into silence. In the context of Chelsea, Abramovich did not help matters by being slow to condemn the war, not mentioning it at all in his Feb. 26 statement in which he tried to distance himself from the club while retaining ownership, passing "stewardship and care" to the Chelsea Trustees. The youngest entrepreneur ever to enter the den was so young that he wasn’t even allowed to stay after delivering his pitch. Shaye Sharma and his Football Billionaire board game really impressed the dragons, with Peter Jones ultimately winning the negotiations with Sharma’s father, who took over the reins when Shaye left the den. I am sure we would have been synonymous with being the capital city’s club and still kept the name that we have loved forever, I think.” Opposition to such largesse continued, but it was not until Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that a debate over Abramovich's ownership took over mainstream discourse.The only thing we have to keep in mind is that none of this will happen overnight. The plan will take time, will take patience, dedication, and, ideally, flawless execution. Waddingtons was a family run company that started out as a theatrical printer in 1896 and then moved on to printing card games in 1921. Waddingtons got the rights to the game Monopoly in 1935 the same year that Parker Bros, in the United States of America got the rights to the game. In the original UK edition of Monopoly, the streets on the Monopoly board are named after London streets, after one of the Waddingtons employees when down to London for a short trip with this purpose in mind. On the original board there is one error; Marlborough Street should be Great Marlborough Street. We thought Chelsea [was] frankly an asset, a business that was not terribly well managed on the football side, sporting side or promotional side, so meaningful opportunity at the club and we’ll get to it for us, who needed the beachhead to then look at multi clubs. [We] looked at it and we think European sports is probably 20 years behind US sports in terms of sophistication on the commercial side, and sophistication on the data side. [...] These are global assets, global audiences which we think we can certainly help grow.”

Ultimately, if you’re investing capital into a training facility, an academy, a stadium, if you’re improving the team you’re going to have a lot of public support. [We] think winning and a good product on the pitch and commercial success go hand in hand. You have to have a good product to generate sponsors for the content to work. [...] You’ve got to win. Winning on the pitch, you can do it efficiently as opposed to not, but you have to do that to have commercial success.” I think Matthew just wanted Chelsea to have the investment that it needed to break that monopoly at the top of our premier division at the time. And equally, you know, break that monopoly that the European clubs had on the European (Cup) competition. I knew it was in his mind and I feel that it would have been difficult for him to actually push that name change,” he says. “There had to be another way of doing it (growing Chelsea) without the name change. But then he was the visionary who probably would have found the other way. It is just that none of us had thought about it. Arsenal and United founded their financial success in the conventional way at the time: broadcast income, matchday revenue and commercial activity were the key drivers to growth, fuelling investment in the squad. Chelsea shattered this financial sensibility almost overnight.

Abramovich's impact on Chelsea

Yet within six months Harding had been banned from the directors’ box by Bates, with the pair at odds over their respective visions of how to take Chelsea forward. Mr Abramovich came out. He was with [long-time associate and Chelsea board member] Eugene Tenenbaum. I started rattling off my CV -- the guy who does the Chelsea fanzine, I ran on the pitch and bowed down and kissed Ruud Gullit and Gianfranco Zola's feet. I do not think Richard would have wanted to have been that sort of figurehead chairman, like Ken was, and like Matthew possibly could have been. He never said that he wanted to be that figurehead chairman to me. I think, because Richard has so many other interests elsewhere and he is not a football man… you never heard him speak about football. You never heard him talk about a favourite team. So, whether he would have wanted that full scale ownership, I cannot speak for him either.” Bates (left) and Harding at Stamford Bridge in happier times (Photo: Dave Shopland/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)

However, I recently came across this article written in July by a Manchester United supporter and a journalist for Red Army Fanzine – Sean McGuire. Long story short, he went on about how Manchester United is all about heart, while simultaneously criticizing rich clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea. With Richard, he had an interest in what Matthew was doing, so I think he probably thought that there was some way in which he could push his own brand. So, if there was a way in which he could push his brand, Virgin, this puts him in a different category to Matthew. It would have been a very different reason for coming on board with some kind of ownership. Whether that would have come to any sort of fruition in a way where the name could have been shared in some way, I do not know. But I know that it was definitely putting Chelsea forward as London’s premier team, which could have had some commercial legs abroad as well.” In 2003, Manchester United and Arsenal had won 10 out of 11 titles between them since the Premier League's inception in 1992 and had already seen off another big spender briefly threatening their duopoly. STREAM ESPN FC DAILY ON ESPN+ Abramovich's approach was in many senses a nightmare for other owners because he bankrolled success independently, absorbed short-term financial pain in the pursuit of success and, crucially, attended matches with a regularity not replicated by, say, the Kroenkes at Arsenal or the Glazer family at Manchester United, prior to his visa being withdrawn in 2018.

Video of the full conversation was published about a month later, and now, thankfully, Football.London have transcribed all of Eghbali’s words, so we don’t have to sit through the public-speaking of a person not very good at public speaking. Clearly that’s not what he gets paid for. There is much navel-gazing now over where the money was coming from. Putin's war has asked difficult questions of everybody, ranging from how we power our homes because of Europe's reliance on Russian oil and gas, to the morality behind the sport we enjoy. There is a World Cup in Qatar later this year which will prompt similar introspection. Dan Thomas is joined by Craig Burley, Shaka Hislop and others to bring you the latest highlights and debate the biggest storylines. Stream on ESPN+ (U.S. only). In May 1995, a board meeting held between Bates, Harding, Hoddle and managing director Colin Hutchinson discussed their aims to sign top players. They missed out on Paul Gascoigne and Dennis Bergkamp to Glasgow Rangers and Arsenal respectively. Significantly, they did succeed in adding former European Footballer of the Year Ruud Gullit, as well as Manchester United striker Mark Hughes, to the squad. But for the tragic helicopter accident, which occurred on a flight home after he had watched Chelsea lose a League Cup tie at Bolton, his connection with Branson could have led to the pair working in tandem to turn Chelsea, a club who had not won the title since 1955, into a renowned force known the world over — long before Abramovich’s money achieved that aim.

While he was admonished about his company name, the dragons were full of praise for Jason Gledhill’s micro campers and micro camper conversion kits. So captivated, Sara Davies put in an offer that would bring not only her onboard, but her dad, too. For those who don’t know, Davies’ dad used to run a decorating company, so it was too good of a deal for Gledhill to refuse.Abramovich had no prior relationship with Chelsea before 2003 and it is not disputed that his wealth originated from dividends and sales of privatised assets acquired from the former Soviet Union. Fellow oligarch Boris Berezovsky sued Abramovich in 2011 for €5bn over what he claimed were ill-gotten gains from the sale of the oil firm they co-founded, Sibneft (now a subsidiary of Gazprom). Abramovich won that case in 2012, but during the trial, Jonathan Sumption QC, acting for Abramovich, admitted that the process of auctioning Sibneft "was easy to rig and was in fact rigged." Sources, who have asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships, say that Branson’s interest was genuine, so much so he was prepared to change Virgin’s renowned red branding to blue to match the colour of Chelsea’s strip. The pencil drawing was found many years later by a man called Charles Darrow, at the home of one of his friends. From this, he then created a game that he named Monopoly, before selling the game on to the publisher Parker Brothers. This game became a success and was played in a large amount of households. When asked in an interview for Germantown Bulletin “how he had managed to invent Monopoly out of thin air – a seeming slight of hand that had brought joy into so many households” he replyed “It’s a freak… Entirely unexpected and illogical”.