IAN LADYMAN: While Man City have cracked the code, Chelsea too often are just throwing darts in the dark

When Roman Abramovich paid £140m to buy Chelsea in the late spring of 2003, Manchester City had just played their last ever match at Maine Road. They lost 1-0 at home to Southampton and literally sold the door to Kevin Keegan’s office for £70 and chairs for £12 each.

It’s fair to say that Chelsea’s money arrived in the Premier League quite some time before City’s. While Peter Kenyon – briefly employed by Chelsea as CEO – promised to ‘turn the world blue’, City did not even wear the most prominent color in their own city. Abramovich’s money had taken Chelsea to two league titles and a pair of League Cups by the time Abu Dhabi’s petrodollars washed ashore at City in August 2008.

So it’s worth asking now how a club with such an advantage over the club that is now Europe’s dominant force has managed to fall so far behind.

Of course, Abramovich himself is a large part of the answer. The Russian’s billions brought Chelsea success, glamour, silverware and ultimately a bulging academy. It gave Chelsea and the Premier League their first glimpse of the magnetically brilliant Jose Mourinho. Seventeen major trophies in 19 fascinating years. It was a journey.

But at the same time, Abramovich has never given his club anything like what City have now. His football formula had many goals and glory. But it never had enough of the boring, prosaic things like strategy, planning or future-proofing. No, it never had that, while City – after an uncertain start – became a slave to it.

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So while Chelsea went from manager to manager, bouncing from first place to nowhere and back again in the Premier League, their emerging rivals in the North West built one of the most enduring and enduring football operations in the world.

The Premier League and its investigation into City’s financing may one day have something to say about this. But for now, all we can do is look at someone like new wide player Jeremy Doku and accept that Pep Guardiola and his friends at board level have cracked the code.

Doku, 21, is a Belgian striker who joined from Rennes a week before the end of the transfer window. There wasn’t much fuss about the signing, just as there wasn’t about the arrival of Croatian defender Josko Gvardiol, also 21, a few weeks earlier.

But watching Doku tear through the West Ham defense in his second league start last weekend was witness to a player seemingly made for Guardiola’s team. It arrived oven-ready at the touch of a button as Riyad Mahrez walked out the door to Saudi Arabia. Gvardiol has made four appearances in the league and looks the same at home.

This is where planning takes you. It ensures that you can evolve quietly. It makes things change while hardly anyone notices. Liverpool have also succeeded at times, with players such as Colombian Luiz Diaz.

However, Chelsea failed to do so. They’re not the only ones, but it’s true nonetheless. Abramovich’s Chelsea welcomed some rare talents, but there was also plenty of self-indulgence. Hence the boom and bust nature of the owner’s tenure.

And now the regime of current owners, Clearlake Capital, whose co-founder Jose E Feliciano said in Paris that week that their stewardship of Chelsea has given them ‘more control than we expected’.

He added: “We own a dozen companies bigger than Chelsea, but you don’t ask me about that. They’re not reported every day by The Telegraph and Daily Mail.’

Interestingly, City Gulf’s owners also struggled with all the attention in their early days in football. The press doesn’t ask many questions in Abu Dhabi. But they quickly got used to it and Clearlake should probably do the same, especially as long as they continue to burn money so erratically in the market.

Chelsea have spent more than £1 billion on 25 players in the last three transfer windows, but when you look at the squad it is difficult to figure out the how and why. Press the city buttons to execute deals that have been in the works for months and years. Chelsea seems to do it like monkeys press keyboards on typewriters.

This week it emerged that Chelsea are looking to invest to replace the aging Stamford Bridge stadium, while also trying to reduce player costs. That’s quite a contrast.

City have already done all that. Their own stadium is still owned by Manchester City Council, but that remains a special feature and nothing more. The lease has a term of 250 years. Enough time to dominate the football in a way that Chelsea never quite could. Two clubs play the same money game, just in different ways.

Spare us the nonsense Mikel, Ramsdale has been cancelled

I’d pay to watch Mikel Arteta’s exciting Arsenal team, but I take a lot of what he says with a bucket of salt.

Recently, the Arsenal coach responded to questions about his formations by saying he used 43 different formations in the Community Shield against Manchester City. Someone should have asked him to name them all.

Now, after replacing goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale with new signing David Raya, Arteta claims the England player has not been dropped and he plans to use both men in the same match.

“We have all the qualities in another goalkeeper to do something when something happens in a match and you want to change the momentum,” Arteta said. ‘Why not?’

It is a brave and novel idea to use goalkeeper substitutes as you would a field player. However, I don’t think this will happen for a minute. Ramsdale are relegated, pure and simple.

When Brian Clough sent his team home with the fans

Last week’s column discussed managers and authority and the increasingly thin skin of some modern players.

Graham Stenton then got in touch to tell a story from the late 1970s about a heavy defeat for Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest at Southampton.

The big man was so disgusted that he turned away the team bus and made his players carry their dirty gear to the train station. Shilton, McGovern, Birtles and Francis found themselves with their own disgruntled fans all the way home.

It didn’t work, mind you. Forest lost four of their next five. Even a genius gets it wrong sometimes.

Blades calculate the cost of their own wasted time

Four of the nine goals Sheffield United have conceded in the Premier League have come in the 88th minute and beyond.

They cost Paul Heckingbottom’s team five points and as a result they now sit seventeenth instead of twelfth.

If teams that are blatantly trying to waste time, as the Blades did at Tottenham, can’t handle the extra minutes that are now a regular feature of top-level matches, then they might want to ask themselves why exactly they are doing that.

Rodgers’ return looks more baffling by the day

Celtic’s defeat at Feyenoord means manager Brendan Rodgers has won just two of nineteen Champions League group games in his career.

This statistic points more to Celtic’s diminished European status than to Rodgers’ abilities as a coach. But it also hardens my view that he should not have returned to the Glasgow club this summer.

Last time out, Rodgers won all seven domestic trophies at his disposal between his appointment in May 2016 and his departure to Leicester in February 2019. The only way the 50-year-old can improve his legacy is to succeed in Europe and that will be terribly difficult.

I would have liked to see Rodgers given the job of turning around a big English club like Leeds. That would have been a challenge. Going back to the familiarity of where he was so successful before clearly had an appeal, but I don’t understand it.