One of the greatest transfer windows in football history: Chelsea’s in 2004 under Mourinho. 🇨🇮 Didier Drogba from Marseille 🇳🇱 Arjen Robben from PSV 🇵🇹 Ricardo Carvalho from Porto 🇨🇿 Petr Čech from Rennes!

These types of post are torture at this point.

All of this or mudryk lol

“Mr. Abramovich pay, pay and don’t speak”.

Man buying a world class keeper, centre back, winger and striker sure sounds like a good idea.

The Paulo Ferreira disrespect

Robben was a menace. Still gutted it didn’t work long term

Arjen and Petr were signed on pre-contract agreements the previous winter! But they did indeed join us that summer

We also got hilario, Paulo ferreira, tiago and mateja kezman that summer from what I remember, possibly alexei smertin too.

Ferreira was great for a while and ended up being a very loyal senior figure despite not playing much later on, he was a champions league winner with us in 2012 despite brana and bosingwa playing ahead of him mostly

Tiago was also actually very regular and an impressive figure in our historic 2005 title win, even though he did go down quite easily he was also up for the battle in some fierce matches and brought great quality at times too – that howitzer in the 3-0 win at old Trafford will always be a favourite goal edit – but he promptly left again straight after that title win

Something is tugging at my grey matter that we also signed Scott Parker that summer? I remember he was asked once whether he treasures his title winners medal and he said he didn’t even know where it was, he didn’t feel like it was his title win as he barely played and didn’t contribute to it in his view

You could argue the previous year’s summer window was also seminal, we got duff, bridge, Crespo, veron, glen Johnson, geremi, Joe cole; not all successes, but some massively influential names there too

Edit – looked it up and forgot jarosik in 2004/05 too, that was a winter signing though and he left pretty quickly too

Forgot mutu in 2003 as well! I guess we don’t really want to remember him getting coked up, but he was a big signing at the time. Also jesus christ Makelele was that summer too, one of our greatest ever players. And Parker and smertin were actually both signed that season too, no way! We revamped the squad so much that year, time dulls the memory but abramovich really hit the ground running there.

2003/04 – duff, bridge, veron, Crespo, Parker, smertin, mutu, glen Johnson, makelele, geremi among others

2004/05 – Drogba, robben, cech, hilario, ferreira, carvalho, tiago, kezman, jarosik among others

I know we are all eager to see who they choose for our next standout future 19 year old defender.

Clearlake would have bought Freddy Adu and Cherno Samba instead.

That window was all about the outgoing transfers, we did perfectly fine in 03/04 but could’ve evolved, so we released a bunch of key players and reshaped the core. Drogba alone replaced Hasselbank, Crespo, and Carlton Cole, Lampard alone replaced Veron and Petit, Terry replaced Desailly and Melchiot, then signed Carvalho on top of that. 

That being said while the transfers listed here were incredible, we also signed some duds that summed, Roman had a scattergun approach to transfers back then just like Clearlake, and he was just establishing Cobham academy  and investing heavily in infrastructure, just like Clearlake is doing now. 

Difference between Clearlake and Roman of that era was listening to managers: Roman was perfectly fine sacking managers left and right but he always valued their insight above anything else, Mourinho told him exactly to sign and he was right. Pochettino gave Clearlake that kind of insight and he has to walk away because they undermined him at every step 

The 2004/05 transfer window in modern terms would be like if we were forced to sell Enzo, Cucurella, Fofana, and James because they weren’t content with fighting for top 4, so we replaced them with superior players and won the league 

The Coach is Special one