Mercenary Mutu is top of the flops

There was Juan Sebastian Veron, for instance, the £15m former Manchester United midfielder who started just five Premiership and five Champions League games before going on loan this summer to Inter Milan.

Or Hernan Crespo, Veron's Argentine compatriot purchased at a mere £16.8m from Inter and who managed a total of 20 starts in Premiership and Champions League games without making any real impact.

The vulgar sums invested by Abramovich on these mercenaries, largely at the behest of uber-agent Pini Zahavi, might be pocket money to the Russian. But even a man of his wealth must wonder sooner or later whether he is being taken for a ride.

The modus operandi at Chelsea is hardly conventional and, from those who still work at The Bridge in the post-Ken Bates revolution, one gets a picture of a club who have lost their soul and who are now all about the selfindulgence of those recruited by the new regime.

One of them is Peter Kenyon. The former Manchester United chief executive and a friend of Zahavi was introduced by the agent to Abramovich, who subsequently recruited him to run Chelsea.

Kenyon and Zahavi have been assiduous in spending their owner's money and mind-boggling figures flash across the landscape for players who see Chelsea not as a club to embrace but simply one to milk for all they can get.

The bond between the boardroom and the paying punter has been broken and even some of the loyalists are beginning to wonder what direction the club is taking. The same applies to the dressing room.

Compare Mutu, Crespo and Veron to the Arsenal trio of Henry, Bergkamp and Pires - not as players but as men who care for the shirt they wear, who have embraced the traditions and reputations of the club they have adopted.

Arsenal have acquired virtuosos who perform better for their club than they do for their country. Chelsea have bought mercenaries who give for their country but not for their club.

Mutu is symbolic of the problem. Last August he petitioned for a loan to Juventus and Chelsea agreed, subject to a £6.6m transfer fee being agreed next season. Abramovich held a peace meeting and Mutu stayed.

Within a month, Mutu had collected a three- month driving ban for a high-speed 4am chase through the streets of Bucharest after refusing to pull over for police. The incident prompted a doctor to advise him to visit a mental health specialist.

Then there is Mutu's turbulent love life, with his messy divorce from glamorous TV presenter Alexandra, with whom he has a one-year-old son Mario, coming under intense media scrutiny.

The pair were dubbed the Romanian Posh and Becks when they married in 2000 and, like their British counterparts, it was not long before their marriage was rocked by accusations of infidelity. Divorce proceedings began in Bucharest last month.

The last two weeks have seen his spectacular row with Jose Mourinho. He and Mutu have clearly reached the point of no return.

It hardly comes as a shock that Chelsea refused to comment on the drug test story, though there were hints last week that Mutu might have much bigger problems than going to play in Romania's World Cup qualifiers this month without his manager's permission.

It is a sad story because Chelsea could do with a topclass striker at the moment, one like Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, the man Mourinho sold to Middlesbrough and who has scored six Premiership goals already this season.