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Walk into Stamford Bridge as we approach the business end of the season and you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve stumbled into the court of the Medicis.
Fiendish plots abound as players jockey to be first to the launch pad, and that all-important summer move to Barcelona or Real Madrid, Milano or Internazionale. Agents hunker down over their laptops and Blackberries, murmuring come-hither litanies to furtive chairmen with one hand on their wallets and the other thrust down the front of their mohair suit trousers. The mass exodus gathers apace, and you’re all invited.
EXCLUSIVE! Didier Drogba will leave Chelsea for the bargain price of £20m this summer. Barcelona is his confirmed destination.
He will be joined there by Frank Lampard, who was spotted last weekend in the hills outside Catalonia with his Catalonian girlfriend, shopping for things from Catalonia.
Ricardo Carvalho will also leave Chelsea to set up a reunion with former Chelsea boss José Mourinho, who is tipped to take Frank Rijkaard’s job at… er… Barcelona.
To pay for all these players, Barcelona are in talks with Chelsea over a complicated deal that would see the SW6 side move to the Camp Nou for the next 5 seasons. Barcelona will pitch-share with Espanyol and Stamford Bridge will be cryogenically frozen until the technology to sort the ticketing system out becomes available.
On the day that the biggest money-spinner of all – the UEFA Champions League™ (please note product may contain clubs that are not, strictly speaking, Champions) – strolls back into town, a delicious piece of irony and skulduggery haunts the back pages. The transfer of Mikel Jon Obi, the subject of so much rancour between Chelsea, Manchester United and Lyn Oslo, has been called into question once again. At the time, this nasty little story featured a Norwegian club desperate to get their money’s worth for a player described by Mourinho as “pure gold”, more than one deeply unscrupulous agent, a contract with Manchester United that never was, or possibly was, or whatever, and finally the lad himself arriving to play for Chelsea. Since then, young Mikel has gone on to show a composure and elegance on the ball extremely rare in one so young, but a temperament off the ball that could charitably be described as rash.
Well, turns out that Obi, or Mikel, may never have had a professional contract with Lyn Oslo after all. It’s been alleged that Morgan Andersen, director of Lyn, forged the original deal, making the transfer that never was (to United) null and void. And this would mean, in a rather entertaining turn of events, that United would have to repay the compensation from Chelsea (rumoured to be a cool £12m).
Hmm. Sounds like karma to me.
Good to see the word Catalonia rather than Catalunya being used. Well done. Even better to see the once feared lost Catalonian used too. Well done.
Posted by: Simon | February 20, 2008 at 12:37 PM