IAN LADYMAN: Where Man City have cracked the code, Chelsea are like monkeys hitting keys on a typewriter

When Roman Abramovich paid £140m to buy Chelsea in the late spring of 2003, Manchester City had just played their last ever game at Maine Road. They lost 1-0 at home to Southampton and literally sold the door to Kevin Keegan’s office for £70 and seats for £12 a pop.

It’s fair to say, then, that Chelsea’s Premier League money arrived a good while before City’s did. While Peter Kenyon – briefly employed by Chelsea as chief executive – was promising to ‘turn the world blue’ City did not even wear the most prominent colour in their own town. Abramovich’s cash had swept Chelsea to two league titles and a couple of League Cups by the time Abu Dhabi petro dollars washed up at City’s door in August 2008.

So it’s worth asking now just how a club with such a head start on the one that is now Europe’s dominant force has managed to fall so far behind.

Abramovich, of course, forms a huge part of the answer himself. The Russian’s billions gave Chelsea success, glamour, silverware and eventually a bulging academy. It gave Chelsea and the Premier League its first glimpse of the magnetically brilliant Jose Mourinho. Seventeen significant trophies in 19 fascinating years. It was some journey.

But at the same time Abramovich never gave his club any of what City now have. His formula for football had plenty of goals and glory. But it never had enough of the boring, prosaic stuff like strategy, planning or future proofing. No, it never had any of that while City – after an uncertain start – have become slaves to it.

So while Chelsea went from manager to manager and bounced up and down the Premier League from first to nowhere and back again, their emerging rivals in the north-west built one of the most enduring and sustainable football