AS they were royally smashed by Manchester City on Saturday evening, perhaps it was finally dawning on some of the disappointed Chelsea fans watching this hopelessly one-sided FA Cup tie that it feels a little rotten when the opposition dopes itself with cash, buys all the best players and has virtually won before a ball has been kicked.

There was little sophistication about Chelsea’s emergence from a lifetime’s sleep under Roman Abramovich, but in recent times they have found they are no longer the only spoilt, rich kid in the playground.

What was the reaction? To sing Abramovich’s name of course, the oligarch officially sanctioned by the UK government last year, and a demand to go back to impatient managerial sackings. All this despite Chelsea’s new ownership pretty much following the same model of buying anything that blinks in the transfer market. This is not careful squad development and diamond-eye scouting.

The flipside is that we had to once again listen to a series of pundits, as they are called, purr on about City’s attractive football and the stars that they could afford to leave on the bench with no reference to how this fantasy was constructed.

Only last month, “football” appeared briefly worried that the World Cup in Qatar was being used to sportswash reputations, but there are only ever brief burps about how clubs like City and Newcastle have developed as they have.

Abramovich was not working in an aluminium plant in Russia as a teenager dreaming of one day owning Chelsea. He’d never heard of them, and circled the Premier League for an opportunity to buy a club – any club.

The more high-profile, the more secure he could feel stepping away from the warring factions in Russia from which he had emerged with untold riches. I’m glad he was deterred from Arsenal; not that handing stadium naming rights to one of the national airlines of the UAE and collecting sponsorship cash from the Rwandan tourist board is supremely palatable.

It is “here we go” again time with the appearance of Qatar once more, and its sporting investment group which has clearly made it known that it wants to invest in a Premier League club. It already owns Paris Saint-Germain, who find it has more than enough money to pay for Neymar, Messi and Mbappe all at once. There’s no historic affection for one club in this model, no love affair, no local business person wanting to invest in their childhood team. No authentic connection.

Not that this matters to Spurs fans who this week hope Qatar picks them. If it does, everything any of them once said about Chelsea’s shortcut to success will have to be rubbed from history, and any solidarity with those who boycotted the World Cup erased.