A Russian oligarch who changed the face of soccer with unrestrained spending before being sanctioned and forced to sell his team by the British government regularly broke rules as he built the club, Chelsea, into a sporting behemoth, according to a Premier League investigation.
The violations by the oligarch, Roman Abramovich, included tens of millions of dollars in off-the-book payments to players, coaches, executives, unlicensed agents and secret investments in players registered to other teams.
Chelsea’s new owners identified and warned the league about some of the wrongdoing before buying the team in 2022 for about $3 billion, the highest price ever paid for a soccer club. The league then began its investigation.
The Premier League has over the past three decades grown into the richest, most-watched soccer league in the world and is regarded as one of Britain’s biggest cultural exports. That status has brought it to the attention of a global class of investors that includes some of the wealthiest individuals, companies and governments.
Owning Chelsea allowed Mr. Abramovich — who, like other oligarchs, made billions in the chaotic era of privatization of former state-owned assets following the fall of the Soviet Union — to reach a prominence and status that went beyond his wealth. The British government placed sanctions on Mr. Abramovich days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, citing the oligarch’s “close relationship” with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Abramovich had an immediate impact on British soccer after buying Chelsea in 2003, spending huge sums to turn the team, based in West London, into a domestic and international powerhouse. Under his ownership, Chelsea won five Premier League titles and also the Champions League, the most prestigious competition in European soccer, twice. The club had only won the English league championship once before his arrival.
Chelsea paid some of the highest wages and fees for players, vaulting the team into the top echelon of soccer and making it a magnet for international stars.
But many of those contracts were secured on the back of major rule breaches, the Premier League said as it published details of a settlement agreement with Chelsea’s new owners, led by the California-based private equity firm Clearlake Capital and the American investor Todd Boehly. The league’s investigation, which took almost three years to complete and involved poring through thousands of documents, found that the club had made about $66 million in secret payments.
The Premier League said that Chelsea would pay a fine of around $14 million, the biggest in the competition’s history. The team was also banned from recruiting players for its first team — though that penalty was suspended for two years — and was hit with an immediate ban of nine months on registering younger, academy players.
In a statement, the league said, “It was established that between 2011 and 2018, undisclosed payments by third parties associated with the club were made to players, unregistered agents and other third parties.”
Chelsea said it had “voluntarily and proactively disclosed to all applicable regulators potential historical rule breaches, including incomplete financial reporting that took place over a decade ago,” adding that it had handed over thousands of documents.
Rola Brentlin, a spokeswoman for Mr. Abramovich, declined to comment.
The Premier League said that the punishment would have been much more severe had the current owners not cooperated with the inquiry. Still, other teams have in recent seasons been issued harsher penalties, including deductions of league points, for arguably much less serious breaches, prompting criticism from some that the punishment was too light.
“When you allow people to circumvent the rules for minimum penalty, it sends out all the wrong messages,” said Niall Couper, chief executive of Fair Game, a campaign group that seeks to improve governance in English soccer.
For the Premier League, which has audiences and revenue that dwarf competitors in other countries, the details revealed in the investigation risked tarnishing its reputation. The 28-page report that accompanied the league’s statement showed that Chelsea had been regularly breaking fiscal and disclosure rules without the league discovering any problem.
Several top Abramovich lieutenants also held senior roles in English soccer. The Premier League said those former Chelsea executives had not cooperated with its investigation.
“The worry is who knew?” Mr. Couper said. “I personally do think people were worried about lifting the lid on what Roman Abramovich was up to.”
The revelations come as English soccer awaits the results of a potentially even bigger case, involving Manchester City. Like Chelsea, City enjoyed a transformation after big spending by its owners, the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates, who acquired the club in 2008. The Premier League has charged City, the most dominant team of the past decade, with about 130 breaches of its regulations in a case that it first began to investigate eight years ago. Manchester City has denied all wrongdoing.
Tariq Panja is a global sports correspondent, focusing on stories where money, geopolitics and crime intersect with the sports world.
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