On the final day of the 2003–04 season, Arsenal’s players danced the can-can on the pitch at Highbury after completing its Invincibles season with a 2–0 win. Even in the moment of celebration, success can be tinged with a sense that the path is likely to lead only downward, but there was no reason then to anticipate decline, far from it. Three months earlier, building work had finally begun on the club’s new stadium, which would increase capacity by more than 50% and lead to a wide range of commercial opportunities.
Seven miles to the southwest, at Stamford Bridge, Claudio Ranieri performed a tearful lap of the pitch after Chelsea’s 1–0 win over Leeds. He hadn’t formally been sacked then, but everybody knew that after failing to mount a serious title challenge despite vast investment in new players, Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich would replace him, probably with the exciting young manager of Porto, José Mourinho.
Even now, when it is more shaped by money than it has ever been, football retains its capacity for mischief. The next time Ranieri visited Stamford Bridge would be 12 years later, when he was presented with the Premier League trophy—not as manager of Chelsea but of the team who had lost at Highbury as he had said farewell, Leicester. Earlier in the season it had been at Leicester that Chelsea had suffered the defeat that led to Mourinho's being dismissed by Abramovich for the second time. But mostly, money wins out, and, in that regard, Abramovich took football into a new age.
