Didier Drogba to swap one football-mad billionaire for another: Chelsea star set for move to China

 

He scored the decisive penalty to win the Champions League for Chelsea and finally achieve owner Roman Abramovich’s £1billion quest to rule European football.

Now Didier Drogba is to swap one eccentric football-mad billionaire for another, as he is set to move to Chinese club Shanghai Shenhua.

The 34-year-old is expected to confirm his free transfer to the little-known club where he will be paid £250,000-a-week by online gaming tycoon Zhu Jun.

Following in the footsteps of former Chelsea strike partner Nicolas Anelka – who moved to China in January –Drogba will try to realise Zhu’s dream of making Shanghai Shenhua a major player on the global football stage.

Like Abramovich, Zhu bought a football club with little chance of success and pumped in hundreds of millions of pounds in a bid to reverse its fortunes.

The 45-year-old businessman made millions when he won the exclusive license to operate and distribute fantasy game World of Warcraft in China – which is now the most popular game on the internet.

As Drogba learned with Abramovich, wealthy owners can be demanding and quick to fire coaches when they do not bring immediate success.

Zhu sacked esteemed French manager Jean Tigana – who used to coach Fulham – after a few bad results earlier this year. Anelka is now player-manager.

The Chinese industrialist is also infamous for interfering with the team and even forced the manager to play him for five minutes at the end of a pre-season friendly between Shanghai Shenhua and Liverpool in 2007.

While Abramovich has won the eternal gratitude of Chelsea fans for winning the Champions League for the first time in the club’s history, Zhu is not popular in Shanghai.

In 2007, he bought a controlling stake in Shenhua and immediately merged it with another Shanghai football club to the fury of both sets of fans. Zhu then sacked Shenhua’s popular manager Wu Jing Gui in the same week that Wu’s mother died. This season, he further angered supporters when he decided to make the club play all of their cup games in Wuhu in Anhui province, a full four hours’ drive from Shanghai.

Drogba has all this to look forward to as he brings the curtain down on his Chelsea career after eight successful years in London.

Abramovich bought the Abidjan-born forward from French club Marseilles for £24m in 2004 and he went on to win three Premier League titles, four FA Cups and two League Cups with Chelsea.

Drogba’s arrival in Shanghai cannot come soon enough, with the club currently struggling in tenth place in the Chinese Super League.

Zhu has tried to sign Drogba for months and spoke of his pursuit on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter in March, saying: “It’s like flirting with a girl. Perhaps she will resist you at first, but if you continue to ask her out, it always ends well. Never give up.”

Meanwhile, jubilant Chelsea fans were recovering today from a 36-hour party after welcoming home their Champions League heroes.

The triumphant players paraded the trophy on an open-top bus ride through west London yesterday and were greeted by thousands of ecstatic supporters.

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