he hired some shit managers and the ones who were bought into start long term projects (AVB, Mourinho the 2nd time) were either ousted by the players or in Mourinho's case he brought it upon himself, perhaps willfully. The worst part of the argument against abramovich is that for about 9 ish years he never claimed to want a long term manager. Notice how things changed in the clubs philosophy after we won the CL and began to ditch the old guard. Its from then that our long term planning should be judged by as the first time around our team owed more to Ranieri and Abramovich than it did Mourinho (but rather than going on that road its easy to just ignore it). Also during that period managers like Hiddink, Avram Grant and Benitez (who was actually good for us) were interim so they dont count either. When Scholari it was actaully Drogba who went to Abramovich because he was trying to replace him with Adriano i think. its not popular but our board is actually excellent from a commercial aspect, the club has grown hugely since he took over, we dont get ripped off on transfers anymore and sell players for good money and sooner or later we will bare the fruits of the academy which has been a work in progress since he got here (im sure there are still dumb people that will suggest michael mancienne, billy clifford and more were good enough) thats part of the reason Arsnen was sacked I think for failing on the academy front, but if you look at Man City who supposedly have a world renowed academy they are still years behind us in development, they did their academy reboot in the exact way we did (buying ready made to improve your profile/quality while you start your own production with young kids). We're now at the stage where our youth are ready to come in (lots were ready 2 years ago but Mourinho....) that is where Man City will be in a few years time with their Davenport, Diaz crop and some others who are younger like McAtee.
Our recruitment policy since the new board came in has been a lot better than it used to be when we spend whatever to get anyone (a lot of flops who Mourinho was responsible for too that get left out). Within our budget and FFP we do brilliantly. And Man City who are so well run have achieved much less success with the money they have spent than we have (equally in a very weak league if there current board were around when the PL was good they would win fuck all if their last 2 title wins are anything to go by). Man City copy us on a lot of things, their board members are even copying our loan system. A lot of the shit that gets said about our board starts from mongs and its repeated by more mongs to the point where people believe it. You can find people that think that Marina fucking Granovskaia is scouting players ffs... Mourinho spend £200m on top of an already hugely expensive squad and he is 8th in the league, they are also getting demolished by mid table turkish sides. that is disgraceful from a manager who was apparently held back by our board of all people