Manchester City vs Chelsea
A teaser to begin with, sports betting fans: do you remember the summer of 2003?
It was the summer when the landscape of football games in the English Premier League changed.
At the end of the 2003-04 season, the dominant duo in English football may still have claimed the main trophies (Arsenal won the league, Man Utd the FA Cup), but the newfound wealth of Chelsea with oligarch Roman Abramovich was very evident.
For successive summers, multi-million-pound fees – the likes of which had not been spent by one club in England ever before – were invested by Chelsea.
The likes of Hernan Crespo, Damien Duff, Juan Veron, Claude Makelele, Adrian Mutu, Geremi, Scott Parker and Joe Cole all arrived in West London on big money and big transfer fees as Chelsea set about becoming the dominant force in English football.
Twelve months later, Didier Drogba, Arjen Robben, Petr Cech, Ricardo Carvalho, Paulo Ferriera and, perhaps most crucially of all, Jose Mourinho were added to the mix.
Chelsea went on to be crowned champions of England for the first time since 1955, seal League Cup success and narrowly miss out on a place in the Champions League Final.
Bankrolled by Abramovich, they have been a major player domestically and in Europe as trophy after trophy followed.
Fast forward another few years to the summer of 2008 and Sheikh Mansour’s takeover of Manchester City which led to equally large undercurrents swirling through English football.
Indeed, it is fair to say that since his arrival virtually a decade ago, City have actually made Chelsea’s spending seem tame.
It is because of these two owners that the likes of Eden Hazard, Sergio Aguero, Willian, Alvaro Morata, Pedro, David Silva and Kevin De Bruyne, to name just some, are now gracing the fields around the country on a weekly basis.
Billed a few years back as ‘El Cashico’, as a nod to the Spanish rivalry of Real-Barca, these two clubs have shared the same path to Premier League success: surpassing the traditional giants of English football with more than lavish spending bankrolled by generous benefactors.
The two nouveau riche powerhouses meet again this weekend with only one certainty (apart from the obvious fact that City will take back the Premier League crown from Chelsea this season) – that both will spend big again this summer in an attempt to dominate the landscape.
Like it or not, money talks; and that is why this fixture needs no introduction.
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