Roman Abramovich remains ‘fully committed’ to Chelsea — report

Chelsea may have put the stadium redevelopment plans on hold on Thursday, but most reports agree that owner Roman Abramovich remains “fully committed” to the club he’s owned since 2003.

Over the past decade and the half, the 51-year-old “oligarch”, one of the richest men in the world, has proven a billion times over — in both soft loans and straight-up investments — that he acquired the club on more than just a whim, that it wasn’t going to be just a passing fad that he would discard after a couple years.

And so while the “current investment climate”, as Chelsea put it, isn’t 100 per cent favorable for him, at the club itself, it is still “business as usual” and the owner’s commitment to the club is “unwavering”. (Of course, technically Abramovich is the owner of Chelsea’s parent company, Fordstam, these days, not the Football Club itself, though in practice that’s little more than an administrative and accounting layer.)

That said, with the club already facing a summer of upheaval and change, this is just another thing that adds to the concern and confusion.