Didier Drogba: the striker who won Chelsea the Champions League

Some strikers are at their best when nothing is at stake. Didier Drogba was the other kind. He scored in the finals, in the semi-finals and in the games that decided a season, and he did it with a body that other defenders could not move and a temper that sometimes cost him.

He was also late. He did not play a top-flight game until he was 23, did not reach the Premier League until 26 and did not win the Champions League until 34. The career that came out of that slow start covered eight clubs on three continents and ended with 303 goals.

The numbers

The curve has two peaks and a long middle. The first is Marseille, where one season changed his life. The second, in 2009–10, is the best of his career. In between came years of less frequent goals but more decisive ones, and the later seasons in North America show how long he kept scoring.

From Le Mans to Marseille

Drogba's first club was Le Mans, then in the second division, where he arrived as a young forward who scored occasionally but not often. A move to Guingamp in 2002 was the turning point: a full season in Ligue 1 with 21 goals in all competitions, enough to attract Marseille.

His one year at the Stade Vélodrome was the season in which everything arrived at once. He was named Ligue 1 Player of the Year for 2003–04, finished as the UEFA Cup's top scorer and took Marseille to the final, which they lost. Chelsea paid £24 million for him in July 2004.

Chelsea: the years of winning

He arrived at Stamford Bridge for José Mourinho's first season and stayed eight years on his first spell. The first two Premier League titles came in his first two years, 2004–05 and 2005–06, with a League Cup in the first of them.

He won the Premier League Golden Boot twice, in 2006–07 and again in 2009–10. In that second season he scored 29 league goals, finishing ahead of Wayne Rooney's 26, and clinched the title with a hat-trick in an 8–0 win over Wigan on the final day. Six days later he scored the only goal of the FA Cup final against Portsmouth, a free kick, completing a double.

The cup-final striker

What separated him from other forwards with more goals was where he scored them. He scored in all six English cup finals he had played in by 2010, and became the first player to score in four different FA Cup finals when he added the winner against Liverpool in May 2012. In the League Cup final of 2008, a 2–1 defeat to Tottenham, he scored again and became the leading scorer in League Cup finals, with four.

Munich, 19 May 2012

Chelsea faced Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, played in Bayern's own Allianz Arena. Thomas Müller put the hosts ahead in the 83rd minute. Five minutes later Drogba met a Juan Mata corner with a header to level it at 1–1 and send the match into extra time.

Then he nearly gave it back. In extra time he fouled Franck Ribéry in the box and Arjen Robben took the penalty, which Petr Čech saved. The match went to a shoot-out, which Chelsea won 4–3 after Čech saved from Ivica Olić, Bastian Schweinsteiger hit the post and Drogba, taking the fifth kick, scored the one that won the trophy.

"As far as I was concerned, he won the Champions League for Chelsea."

— Sir Alex Ferguson on Drogba, July 2012, as reported by Sky Sports

The 2008 final

Four years earlier the same competition had ended very differently. Drogba had scored both goals in the semi-final win over Liverpool that took Chelsea to their first Champions League final. In the final against Manchester United, a 1–1 draw went to extra time and then to penalties. He was sent off in the 117th minute for slapping Nemanja Vidić, and never took the kick he was reportedly meant to take. John Terry slipped on the fifth and Chelsea lost 6–5.

That red card is the other side of the legend. It was the first for violent conduct in a European Cup final. The man who made the 2012 final possible was the same one who, in 2008, had left his team with ten men.

After Chelsea

Chelsea announced on 22 May 2012 that he would leave when his contract ended, and he went to Shanghai Shenhua that summer. A spell at Galatasaray followed, with a league title in 2012–13 and the Turkish Cup a year later. In 2014 José Mourinho brought him back to Stamford Bridge for one more season, and it ended with another Premier League title and a League Cup.

He finished in North America. He scored 21 league goals in two years for Montreal Impact, then joined Phoenix Rising of the USL in April 2017, became a minority owner and in November 2018, at 40, scored in the game that won the Western Conference. He retired later that month, and stayed on with the club in its bid to join MLS.

Ivory Coast: the captain and the ceasefire

Drogba played 105 times for Ivory Coast and scored 65 goals, the most in the country's history. He was captain of the generation that took the national team to its first World Cup, in 2006, and it is his role outside the pitch that people remember alongside the goals.

After the win over Sudan that sealed qualification, he made an impassioned appeal to the camera for peace. It played a part in a ceasefire in the Ivorian civil war.

He retired from international football on 8 August 2014.

Why they call him a legend

Drogba was not the most graceful forward of his time or the one who scored most often. What he had was timing. His goals came in finals and at the moments when a season turned, and a single header in Munich did more for Chelsea than any other goal in their history.

The Premier League inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2022, and the Africa Cup of Nations is the one trophy that stayed out of reach.