In April 2003, an interested spectator was inside Old Trafford
to see a thrilling Champions League Quarter-Final between Manchester United
and Real Madrid. The game ended in a 4-3 United win, but an aggregate defeat and elimination.
Not that that mattered to Roman Abramovich, who had enjoyed a captivating night
and left the ground determined to own his own football club.
Three months later he would. He passed on the opportunity to buy Tottenham Hotspur and was
also told that Arsenal weren’t for sale, but in July 2003, the 36-year-old Abramovich paid £140m
for control of Chelsea, becoming by some margin the richest owner in Premier League history.
English football had known wealthy men before but Abramovich – who was worth a reported £7bn –
was richer than all of them put together.
This, then, would be a new era, and – fittingly – it began with six weeks of
pure transfer decadence that had never been known before, and would never be seen again.
Abramovich reached an agreement to buy Chelsea after just half-an-hour
of negotiations. There was a reason for that: the club, then owned by Ken Bates, was on its knees.
Outwardly, they had been a symbol of the Premier League’s new, cosmopolitan age.
They were the club from the richest part of town, who courted style and celebrity.
Inwardly, though, bad contracts, poorly considered signings and institutional naivety
had left Chelsea heading towards bankruptcy. So close did they come to it, in fact,
that only a win over Liverpool in the final game of the 2002-03 season
and subsequent qualification for the next season’s Champions League had kept them in business.
The night before that game, the club had organised for a US marine veteran to give
a motivational address to the players. Before kick-off, in the dressing room,
it had actually been the club’s chief executive, Trevor Birch, who had led the team-talk.
It was unorthodox, but it worked. The players delivered a 2-1 win, securing fourth place,
precious broadcasting revenues and – ultimately – a very different future for the club.
And Abramovich would set that new tone from the beginning of his ownership.
“I don’t want to throw money away” he told the BBC in what proved to be a very rare interview,
“but it’s really about having fun and that means success and trophies.”
Had Abramovich had his way, his reign would have begun in truly seismic fashion.
A decade later, Alex Ferguson revealed that he was approached about becoming Chelsea manager
in 2003. One Manchester United employee would be tempted way, with Chief Executive Peter Kenyon
taking up a similar role at Stamford Bridge in September, but Ferguson
wasn’t for turning – still, it was an early indication of how grand Abramovich’s plans were.
And any remaining doubts would be dispelled by the time the new season began.
Chelsea didn’t so much enter the transfer market, as they stormed it.
Claudio Ranieri’s team already had talent, but what followed was the most aggressive
period of recruitment the sport had ever seen. Abramovich may have been
a football novice, but his takeover had been brokered by super agent Pini Zahavi
and, once in control, that expertise remained in his corner.
More importantly, though, and unlike any other owner in the Premier League
or across European football, Abramovich also had the means and ability to take
whatever he wanted. Financial Fair Play was yet to be conceived and so without
artificial curbs on a club’s spending, the only restraints came from an owner’s wealth.
Which, in Abramovich’s case, meant very little – and that point was made immediately.
Prior to his arrival, the most spent by an English club in a single season had been
Manchester United’s £77.3m outlay in 2001-02. In less than two months, Chelsea – who’d
subsisted on free transfers for the past eighteen months - would almost double that.
The first shot was fired on the 15th July, with £7.5m spent on highly regarded West
Ham full-back Glen Johnson. The next day, Chelsea would make the first of two raids on Real Madrid,
signing Cameroonian midfielder Geremi for £9m.
Elsewhere that month David Dunn was swapping Blackburn for Birmingham for £5.5m,
Tottenham landed the sought after Bobby Zamora for £1.5m, and Arsenal snapped up Borussia Dortmund
goalkeeper Jens Lehmann on a free. As if to make the point that they now existed on a different
plain, Chelsea responded by spending £31m in 24 hours, rebuilding their left side with Southampton
full-back Wayne Bridge and Blackburn winger Damien Duff, both of whom joined on the 21st July.
Abramovich was serious and his money was very,
very real. With that proven, no rumour was too outlandish and so, as the players marched
steadily into Stamford Bridge and television pundits puzzled over potential lineups,
the British tabloids gorged themselves on what Chelsea might do next.
The answer came on August 6th, with another £27.6m spent in a single day.
Joe Cole, who had grown up a Chelsea fan, signed from West Ham,
and Juan Sebastian Veron moved south from Manchester United.
It wasn’t even close to being over. On 14th August, £17.1m was spent on Parma’s Romanian
forward Adrian Mutu. On 25th August, Russian midfielder Alexei Smertin joined
for a further £3.5m. And, the very next day, in the biggest deal to that point,
Inter Milan’s Hernan Crespo became a Chelsea player for £23.4m.
Crespo was a star of the game and, on the final day of August, he was joined by another: Claude
Makelele, lynchpin of Real Madrid’s European Cup winning side the year before, joined for £18m.
Chelsea were a big club prior to Abramovich’s arrival and players like Ruud Gullit,
Gianfranco Zola, Marcel Desailly and Gianluca Vialli had given them legitimacy in the 1990s.
Never had their ambition been supported by such overwhelming resources, though, and
never had they been able to plunder major clubs in quite the same way.
David Beckham’s transfer to Real Madrid might have been the costliest deal completed in the
summer of 2003, but of the 20 most expensive players to move in Europe during that period, ten
headed for Stamford Bridge – a startling seven of the top ten. Put another way: seven transfers in
excess of £10m were agreed during that off-season and Chelsea were responsible for five of them.
It was remarkable. And it was unprecedented. It was also six weeks that changed football for good,
creating a new standard for what was required to compete
at the top of the game, creating a template of sorts for superclub creation.