Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich has the power but still there's no Champions League glory A frantic urge to win the Champions League completed with a more abstract wish to see entertaining football on the turf of Stamford Bridge. This second of those dreams is the one that has caused all the mess. Mourinho's spirit still stalks the club's Cobham training ground and has defied the exorcists. Luis Felipe Scolari, who on Monday predicted "hell" for Andre Villas-Boas's successor, was hired as a Brazilian World Cup-winning alchemist who would bring Abramovich a bit more fun for his heavily appropriated money. After the arch realists, Guus Hiddink and Carlo Ancelotti, had come and gone, the owner's romantic hankerings were loaded on to Villas-Boas, who spoke from the starting gun about his mandate to change the Chelsea culture in favour of excitement. In November, after one mediocre performance, he declared: "We think we can continue defending this philosophy and we'll defend it to the death." The barricades were manned until Villas-Boas's own managerial death, which Abramovich inflicted while effectively blaming the players for forcing him into it, this time after 256 days and 40 matches. Abramovich may care to know that the other top Champions League managers are profoundly grateful to see this volatility maintained. They fear the consequences should he ever stick with a Mourinho or an Ancelotti. The creeping sense yesterday that Putin's ally will pursue Barcelona's Pep Guardiola is at least consistent with the work started by Villas-Boas. It also extends the hope that Chelsea can finally become a self-renewing entity with a core creative identity, minus troublemakers. Another of Abramovich's itches has been resentment at how much it has cost him to buy three Premier League titles and no European Cups. Piet De Visser, one of his many overlapping confidantes, was quoted as saying not long after Mourinho left in 2007: "Mr Abramovich is fed up that he has to keep paying millions and millions for big star players. He had to pay an absolute fortune to get players like Didier Drogba and Michael Essien. "This is why he has asked me as a private scout to look out for top-class young players who will be the Chelsea stars in three years" time." This second project has mostly failed, leaving John Terry, Frank Lampard, Petr Cech and Drogba still at the club's political heart and no appreciable flow of young talent from the academy. From the boardroom to youth level the structure put in place by Abramovich expresses an almost Muscovite culture of grace and favour, with the owner providing the "krysha" (or roof) for those he tends to protect. In February 2010 Mourinho said: "I think that he [Abramovich] sometimes thinks too much with his heart and helps people in football that he likes instead of thinking about getting the best for the job." Mourinho's own clashes with the proprietor set the pattern. Conflict escalated when De Visser and Frank Arnesen began to assume more control of transfers and the owner's own whims came into play. Andrei Shevchenko and Michael Ballack stand out as vanity buys, though Ballack served them well. Khalid Boulahrouz, Salomon Kalou and John Obi Mikel were among those traceable to Arnesen. Three months before he lost these power struggles, Mourinho had been told on Chelsea's tour of America that Abramovich wanted "a more expansive and attractive game." That old chestnut was still new back then but looks pretty hoary now. After his departure, which left him in limbo for the best part of a season, Mourinho said: "If it were up to the fans I'd have a contract for 20 years and I'd continue working without a problem. They never left Stamford Bridge crying because we never lost [in the league]. The day they lose a match at home they will remember they went three years without losing a single league game there. At the time this sounded like resentful posturing from a coach who had picked the wrong fight. For Chelsea to go back to Mourinho now (in the event of Guardiola saying no), Abramovich would have to accept this sour history being quoted back to him, if only by the media. Mourinho would also demand that no director of football or Abramovich apparatchik could interfere a second time with his work. Since Mourinho was fired Chelsea have won one English title and two FA Cups, and reached a Champions League final under Avram Grant. Mourinho won Serie A and the Champions League with Inter Milan and is on course to win the Spanish title with Real Madrid, despite Barcelona's artistic superiority, which has forced him to reconnect (a bit) with his club's long stylistic heritage. His 185 games in charge of Chelsea read like an epoch compared to the pop-in reigns of Scolari, Villas-Boas or even Hiddink, who consistently declined to take the post full-time, with good reason. Mourinho, Guardiola and Rafael Benítez offer three points on the spectrum and only Abramovich has the power to choose which one Chelsea should land on. The power, but evidently not the knowledge.