Premier League at 25: 2002-2007 - BBC News
The Oligarchs
Sometimes you can see the future coming. When Wayne Rooney scored his first league goal for Everton in October 2002, 16 years old and 30 yards out against England’s long-time goalkeeper, you didn’t need to be told to remember the name. Less than two years later, his country’s most exciting player at their most recent major championship disappointment, the teenager signed for the Premier League’s most successful club for a record-breaking transfer fee. What fewer envisaged was that it would be three more years until the combination yielded another title. After United won their eighth Premier League in 11 seasons in 2003, Alex Ferguson decided it was time for one of his periodic rebuilding-from-the-top summers. So it was that David Beckham got his Galactico move to Spain, World Cup winner Fabien Barthez would be lobbed no more and the criminally underwhelming Juan Sebastian Veron was palmed off on Chelsea. In their place came a series of flops – David Bellion for £2m, Eric Djemba-Djemba for £3.5m, Brazilian midfielder Kleberson for £6m – and one uncut diamond, the 18-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo.

Cristiano Ronaldo (right) and Kleberson (left) - one would go on to become a Manchester United legend. The other would not

His £12.24m price-tag, slightly less than Ferguson would shortly afterwards pay for Louis Saha, would prove arguably the greatest bargain in the league’s burgeoning history. That it was almost an afterthought at the time was because Veron was just a small part of the £110m that Chelsea would spend following their takeover from the brink of bankruptcy under Ken Bates by unknown Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. What do you buy the shy billionaire who has everything? Glen Johnson at right-back and Scott Parker to sit on the bench, it would transpire. They also bought a striker in Adrian Mutu who would score four goals in his first three matches and end up, after a positive test for cocaine and a series of court cases, owing his new club £17m in damages. Hernan Crespo was another of those trophy buys to promise more than he would eventually deliver, his 12 goals in his first season dwindling into loans back to Italy and a second coming at Stamford Bridge that few noticed. In the background were those who would really bring back the silverware - Claude Makelele for £16m, Damien Duff for £17m, Joe Cole joining his old West Ham team-mate and friend Frank Lampard for £6.6m. It would take time and a new manager in place of Claudio Ranieri to make the blend work. Meanwhile at Arsenal, Arsene Wenger cooked up the Invincibles, the first team to win the top flight unbeaten since Preston 115 years before, led in stirring fashion by Thierry Henry, buttressed by the midfield assists and goals of Robert Pires and Freddie Ljungberg. Ljungberg dyed his hair Gunners red and displayed his abdominal muscles in a series of commercials for Calvin Klein, and complained later that the ads led to him being groped in nightclubs. Neither scenario would have troubled his predecessor on the Arsenal flanks, Paul Merson, but Wenger’s finest team wasn’t all beauty and no beast: Pascal Cygan played a key supporting role in a remorseless defence, while the first of the manager’s summer signings had been Philippe Senderos, and his second Jens Lehmann.

It was a short-lived dynasty. In June 2004 Abramovich made his most important transfer move of all, bringing Porto manager Jose Mourinho to the club. Coaching would turn the former interpreter’s hair from black to grey, but not before the silverware had piled up, and fast: a first league title for Chelsea in 50 years, achieved with a record points tally and the fewest goals conceded yet. Much of that first championship-winning team had been inherited – Lampard, Makelele, Duff, John Terry. The key additions under Mourinho came through the spine – Petr Cech, Ricardo Carvalho and the most important of all, Didier Drogba, who just a season before had been playing for a town of 7,000 people in the middle of the Brittany boondocks. Supporters of rivals welcomed their own overseas investors with expectant arms, only to discover that a foreign passport and a heap of cash were no guarantee of success. Randy Lerner at Aston Villa, Tom Hicks and George Gillett at Liverpool and Eggert Magnusson at West Ham all promised much and delivered less. Malcolm Glazer seldom spoke at all as he took over Manchester United, but the debt he brought with him would make the pips squeak. Mourinho and Chelsea would repeat themselves in 2005-06 so everyone understood just how special they were. Less-heralded clubs enjoyed their own relative surges – Bolton to sixth, Wigan to 10th, Reading to eighth – while others dawdled in their wake, Manchester City finishing 14th, 15th and 16th in the slump before their own storm. The Premier League kept changing, even as its 15,000th goal was scored, even as no-one predicted it would be scored by Fulham defender Moritz Volz. By 2006 three of its clubs had shirts sponsored by internet betting companies, something which no-one would have put money on at its birth, the global reach of the competition illustrated by Everton advertising a beer from Thailand under its own Latin crest. Ferguson, never likely to stand still and watch as Mourinho moved in, made the critical move in his team’s comeback by signing Nemanja Vidic and Patrice Evra within days of each other in January 2006. Michael Carrick joined that summer, and with the kids Ronaldo and Rooney grown to men and producing 50 goals between them the following season, the title was once again back at Old Trafford.