‘I thought Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea takeover was good – then I realised the true reality’

Chelsea won multiple Premier League titles during Roman Abramovich’s time as owner, but the influx of money in the early 2000s wasn’t good news for everyone involved

More than 20 years ago, Roman Abramovich shook up English football with his takeover of Chelsea. The Russian businessman replaced Ken Bates at the helm, and his first summer saw the Blues spend big in the transfer market.

An outlay of more than £100m was huge by 2003’s standards, with a number of the new recruits going on to win the Premier League under Jose Mourinho. Claude Makelele and Joe Cole were among those to arrive when Claudio Ranieri was in the dugout before thriving under his successor Jose Mourinho.

But what did all of this mean for the players already at the club when Abramovich arrived? Some, like John Terry and Frank Lampard, reached even greater heights, but it was a different story with Carlton Cole.

A product of Chelsea’s academy, Cole made his Blues debut as a teenager, scoring his first ever Premier League goal during the 2001/02 season. The sight of some of the world’s best arriving at Stamford Bridge initially excited the striker, but that excitement didn’t last long.

“When it happened, for me, I felt that the Roman Abramovich takeover was brilliant,” Cole said at the launch of Ladbrokes’ Gaffer of all Accas. “I thought they would start to promote from within and try to improve the players that they already had at the club. But soon we realised it was a high-pressure situation.

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“Claudio Ranieri didn’t have any time to nurture anymore,” added Cole, 41. “He was told he had to win the league straight away because Abramovich immediately pumped so much money into the club. I saw things change, and it wasn’t in favour of me.

“The youth really took a hit. If you weren’t established, you probably wouldn’t be in the squad. So I had to go out on loan because if you want to make a statement, you go out and buy the best striker in the world.”

Cole had spent a short period on loan at Wolves in 2002/03, helping them win promotion to the Premier League, but also got minutes – and goals – under Ranieri at his parent club. The following year, though, new striker Hernan Crespo was leading the line in West London and Cole was on the other side of town on loan at Charlton.

Another loan followed the next season, with Mourinho giving the frontman a year at Aston Villa after further bolstering Chelsea’s attack with the signing of Didier Drogba. Cole returned to his parent club the following season, but was sold to West Ham in the summer of 2006 after just 31 Chelsea appearances – plenty of those from the bench.

“When I talk to other players from that period, they were uncomfortable too,” Cole added. “They didn’t know what was going to happen, either. We had the likes of Gianfranco Zola, William Gallas, Marcel Desailly and Manu Petit – great players at the club who didn’t know whether they would fit in.

“We knew that Frank Lampard was going to be a stalwart because he was a great player. The same with John Terry. But it was deemed that I needed to go out and get experience, so I was really disappointed about that.”

Cole was eventually able to carve out a solid career at West Ham, making more than 250 league appearances for the club across two spells. It was under former Chelsea team-mate that he played his best football, scoring 10 goals in back-to-back seasons when Zola was West Ham boss between 2008 and 2010.

Looking back, he offered up a theory on why he never got to do the same at Chelsea. “I saw my peers… playing regular football, and I was never going to get that because the money hadn’t been invested in helping me,” he said. “It had been invested outside. So it was always going to be a hard task for me to break into a team like that.”

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