Football in recent years have turned to be a big money spinning business. Clubs now spend big to recruit the best legs to compete and win trophies. Chelsea has spent over £225m on player recruitment in the last two years and these venture has finally yielded results for Jose Mourinho’s side who went trophy-less last season but have won the Premier League and League Cup to their honour.
Chelsea ended their 5-year Premier League drought to become champions of England again with three games to spare. Jose Mourinho has now taken his career haul to 22 trophies, his third league triumph with Chelsea.
Chelsea has spent over £225m on player recruitment in the last two years and perhaps the most significant addition was Diego Costa, who was brought in to bolster the strike force.
The £32m striker netted 19 league goals between August and March to shout Chelsea to the top of the table. His recent absence with a recurrence of hamstring problems has coincided with the team losing some of its early-season swagger.
Mourinho has gone two years without winning a trophy, having won one in each of the nine seasons before that, but has added more than £80m of talents to strengthen his side this summer.
The Blues also made £85.7m from summer sales from Ashley Cole, Demba Ba, Romelu Lukaku, David Luiz and Patrick van Aanholt to boost their financial status in order to compete in the transfer market.
Spain internationals Diego Costa (£32m), Cesc Fabregas (£30m), Filipe Luis from Atletico Madrid (£15.8m) come in, with club legend Didier Drogba returning on a free transfer.
Chelsea was also busy in the January transfer market where they landed Fiorentina hit man Juan Cuadrado for £27m allowing Wolfsburg sign £24m André Schürrle after 18 months at Stamford Bridge.
Chelsea have emerged from a week of complicated negotiations by signing the Colombia winger Juan Cuadrado from Fiorentina for a fee that could rise to £26.8m, the largest outlay by a Premier League club on this transfer deadline day. Romelu Lukaku joined Everton for £28m.
Former Arsenal captain Cesc Fabregas, recruited from Barcelona last year, has also faded in the second half of the season but his assists in the first half of the campaign provided the impetus for the title charge.
At the bedrock of the triumph has been Chelsea’s sturdy defence, which has conceded league-low 27 goals.
The Barclay Premier League has been contested for over 22 seasons. Every year over the past two decades the players, managers, clubs and the League have created some great moments and matches that tell the story of a season.
Only five clubs have lifted the Premier League trophy since its inception in 1992: Manchester United, Blackburn Rovers, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City.
Chelsea players danced around the field after securing the title in a hard fought 1-0 victory over Crystal Palace on Sunday that confined the recent cautious ideology of Mourinho’s team.
”Today was not a game to enjoy,” Mourinho said. ”Today was the game to finish the job.”
But it was a trophy that was really won in the opening months of the season, with Chelsea having been atop the standings from the opening weekend. With only two losses in 35 games, Chelsea was rarely troubled in its pursuit of a fourth league title in 11 seasons – and the fifth in its 110-year history.
”This is unbelievable, we’ve worked so hard this year to get over the line,” captain John Terry said as the blue and white streamers descended on the Stamford Bridge field. ”Today was a tough match, a little bit nervous, but we got over the line,” he added.
The victory was enough to establish an insurmountable 13-point lead and dethrone Manchester City, which has now failed in both its title defences since 2012 despite huge investment from its Abu Dhabi owners. Chelsea is 13 points ahead of Arsenal, which has four games left to play.
”We showed absolutely everything since day one, everything football demands from a team,” Mourinho said. ”We had fantastic attacking football, we had fantastic domination … we defended amazingly well,” he further stated.
The team earlier won the League Cup in March and Mourinho’s third Premier League title success confirms that the Portuguese coach is back at the pinnacle winning ways in England.
Chelsea had only won the topflight once in its first century in 1955 when Mourinho delivered the Premier League title a decade ago after the club’s fortunes were transformed following the 2003 take-over by Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich.
During Mourinho’s six-year absence, Chelsea won the league only once in 2010 under Carlo Ancelotti and the Portuguese manager returned to Chelsea with the club’s finances now constrained by UEFA Financial Fair Play rules.
Last season may have been excruciating for the newly rebranded ‘Happy One’, with the squad he inherited lacking in key areas.
Never more was the weakness evident than upfront as Chelsea struggled to win tight games due to the absence of a goalscorer. This summer, however, Mourinho had undertaken extensive surgery to his squad to create a balance, Blue Machine at Stamford Bridge.
Diego Costa is the game-changer, while the signing of Cesc Fabregas has led to Mourinho purring that the former Arsenal midfielder is the final part of the engine.
The ‘Happy One’ has finally bailed himself out by guiding Chelsea to win their first Premier league title in five years and the first Premier League trophy since his return to England in 2013.
Anthony I. Nlebem
@AnthonyNlebem
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