Paul Hayward in the Telegraph on the ‘root causes’ of Chelsea’s success:
When the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in 1917 they started a chain of events that will almost certainly lead to Chelsea winning the English championship after a gap of 50 years. Without communism, there would have been no state assets for post-Soviet Russia to sell off; and without the Kremlin’s sale of the century there would have been no oligarchs and no Abramovich to drag Stamford Bridge back from the edge of financial oblivion.
The grand historical sweep is deliberate, because today’s Bolsheviks are tomorrow’s has-beens, and today’s sugar-daddy is sometimes tomorrow’s absent father. The immediate future, plainly, is blue, but it wouldn’t take much to restore red and white as English football’s dominant colours.
Starting tonight, hopefully.