If Chelsea fans have any regrets at all about Didier Drogba’s memorable part in their club’s history, it’s probably the fact that the Ivorian great only arrived aged a grand old 26 years.
Drogba was a late bloomer, not making the cut at the highest level until he was already in his early 20s, when his career took off at French club Le Mans on signing his very first professional contract.
He switched to Ligue 1 side Guingamp before long, following it with a move to Olympique Marseille that brought him to the attention of Europe’s biggest clubs.
Chelsea had only just joined that company, with a heap of dosh to show for it, and the new owner, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, was only too eager to splash some of it to announce that presence.
Even so, the Russian oligarch needed a fair bit of convincing by Jose Mourinho, the first manager appointed in the new era, to part with the club-record £24 million fee required to land from Marseille a target the Portuguese had had his eye on for a while.
His start was tough — so tough, in fact, he almost forced an exit after just a season — but Drogba eventually came good, repaying that investment and then some.
By the time his chapter as a Blue was closed, Drogba had scored 164 goals, winning — among others — four Premier League titles, as many FA Cups, and Chelsea’s first Uefa Champions League trophy.
Yet the greatest honour for Drogba, the crowning glory as far as his time in London was concerned, came in 2012, when he was voted by appreciative fans as the club’s greatest-ever player. It doesn’t get much better than that, does it?
Chelsea got nine years of football out of Drogba across two stints either side of spells in China and Turkey — testament to his remarkable longevity, more than anything else — but, given a greater part of that came when he was no spring chicken, we’d never know what a younger Drogba might have offered.
Or perhaps, in a sense, we just might.
The Pensioners, under new ownership, with American Todd Boehly calling the shots after the club was wrested out of Abramovich’s possession last year, have been busy recruiting promising youth who could make a mark in the present and, more importantly, help shape the club’s long-term future.
Twenty-year-old Ivorian striker David Datro Fofana, acquired from Norwegian outfit Molde earlier this month, is one of those refreshing new faces.
It’s not just a nationality, or even two-thirds of his initials, that Fofana shares with Drogba; it’s also a Premier League-tailored physique (he stands just about 0.07 metres shorter), and an appetite for goalscoring which he has provided ample proof of since making the move from his homeland in 2021.
He spent the first season adapting to a completely new environment. The next term, having properly acclimatised, Fofana sparked to life, scoring 22 goals in 39 games across all competitions, and powering Molde to league and domestic cup glory.
Europe’s elite were alerted to this wunderkind, given the identity and reputation of the last young striker from Molde to emerge a sensation and grab everyone’s attention: Erling Haaland — you may have heard of him.
And thus commenced a race that Chelsea, flush with new money, have now won.
The €12 million paid to Molde secured the most expensive transfer ever out of Norway, comfortably exceeding even the €8 million received from RB Salzburg to negotiate the departure of Haaland some three-and-a-half years prior.
“Chelsea have been my favourite club since I was little,” Fofana told Norwegian outlet TV2 sometime ago, not so surprisingly, considering his famous countryman’s exploits at Stamford Bridge, which, naturally, he went on to make reference to.
“Drogba played there, so they have always been my club. So it’s my dream.”
Well, of course…
That dream has now been fulfilled, and the next challenge is to strive to live it to the fullest, as his boyhood hero did; a tough act to follow, I know (as, I suspect, he does, too), but there are genuine reasons to believe Fofana has an even higher ceiling than Drogba’s.
For starters, he is younger, and presumably has more time in which to make an impact. Then there is the fact that Fofana is much more than what Drogba was — an able target-man, yes, but blessed with searing pace and a bag of tricks that serve him well when taking on a man.
It’s interesting how Fofana himself — on Chelsea’s books for the next six years, plus the option to extend for a further year — sums up how he has become the player he is.
“I was shaped on the streets,” he says.
“I’m not like the others, not educated. I am not a product of the academies, everything comes from the streets. Street football has a bit of everything: technique, physicality and finishing because you play with tiny goals. You have to be very accurate to score.”
Not being moulded by some European academy means Fofana hasn’t had his innate flair and penchant for self-expression squeezed out of him, which enables him to play across the expanse of the frontline, with the right-wing being his second-favourite position (after centre-forward).
If there is any reason for caution, it probably is that Fofana — unlike Drogba, or even Haaland — hasn’t proven himself yet in a division whose standard is much closer to the Premier League’s than Norway’s Eliteserien.
No rush, though; there would be time for current Chelsea boss Graham Potter — no stranger to working with talent of a Scandinavian flavour, having coached successfully in Sweden at the dawn of his career — to trim and smoothen those rough edges.
Chelsea needed Drogba to start firing as soon as he was signed, his big transfer fee demanding no less, but no such demands would be made of Fofana. There are senior strikers ahead of him in the pecking order, anyway, even if none has a real hold yet on the position.
Romelu Lukaku was unhappy in his single season back at the Bridge before returning to Inter Milan on loan. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang hasn’t looked any more enthused since being drafted in at the start of the season to fill the room left behind by the Belgian. Armando Broja — the academy graduate of a similar profile to Fofana — is out injured and, even when fit, isn’t a sure starter.
Should he fulfil the expectations that make him such an exciting prospect, Fofana needn’t find it too hard working his way to the very top of the list — and, like Drogba, to the summit (or thereabouts) of the Chelsea pantheon.
Enn Y. Frimpong — Ink & Kicks
