LONDON -- Gathered with his Chelsea directors, Roman Abramovich stopped the football talk to raise deep concerns.
This was in November 2017, and Abramovich was alarmed by a rise in anti-Semitic incidents, particularly in Britain -- and even in his own stadium. Rather than just focusing on trophies, the Premier League club's Jewish owner believed Chelsea could be a force for social change, to transform the minority of fans hurling abuse at Stamford Bridge.
"We're just sitting, talking ... and he brought up what he had noticed and what he was concerned about," Chelsea chairman Bruce Buck recalled in an interview with The Associated Press, "and of course everyone said he's someone that can do something about it."
For more than a year, Chelsea has been working with Jewish organizations to harness the power and influence of the world's biggest sport to promote a more inclusive environment at games and, more broadly, educate new generations about the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust.
A group from the club, including academy players, has visited the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. A Holocaust survivor, Harry Spiro , addressed the first team squad about the horrors of the Buchenwald and Theresienstadt camps.
"I thought they'd be on their iPhones," Buck recalled. "He told his story for about 45 minutes and every single player and every single coach sat there mesmerized."