When Adrian Mutu tested positive for cocaine and was sacked by Chelsea

“I’m not, like, a criminal or something.”

Adrian Mutu is defending himself during an interview in 2018, but the defiant message could have come at any point in the last 16 years. For the former Romania international is once again being asked about when he got sacked by Chelsea.

Mutu has some notable achievements from his playing career. He is a four-time winner of the Romanian Footballer of the Year award, is joint top-scorer for his country’s national team with the much-revered Gheorghe Hagi on 35 goals (having made 49 fewer caps) and played for Inter Milan, Juventus and Fiorentina.

But wherever he goes, there is one story above all others that people want to talk to him about: when he was dismissed by Chelsea after testing positive for cocaine and then banned from football for seven months.

To make matters worse, Chelsea successfully sued him for compensation and he has been fighting a legal battle in the courts ever since against the £13.5 million he was ordered to pay.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

In the summer of 2003, striker Mutu was one of 11 players Chelsea signed following Roman Abramovich’s takeover. At £15.8 million from Parma, he was the fourth-most expensive of them behind Damien Duff (£17 million), Hernan Crespo (£16.8 million) and Claude Makelele (£16 million). The fee was a measure of the high esteem in which the 24-year-old was held.

Crespo, Duff and Mutu (Photo: Neal Simpson/EMPICS via Getty Images)

At home in Romania, football fans couldn’t contain their excitement and the media couldn’t get enough of the rising star who was doing their country proud on the European stage.

Costin Stucan, a reporter for sports newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor, explains: “For Romanians, it was a good time for football. Mutu signed for Chelsea and Cristian Chivu signed for Roma two weeks later. Romanian football at that time seemed to have a bright future. The people were expecting a new golden generation, the next one after the side which reached the quarter-finals at World Cup 1994.

“The Premier League was popular. Some Romanians had played in it in the 1990s such as Ilie Dumitrescu, Gheorghe Popescu, Dan Petrescu and Florin Raducioiu. But when Mutu signed for Chelsea, it was, ‘Wow — finally we have a big player signing for a rich club again’. Mutu was seen as the new Hagi.”

To find reasons for how it all went wrong for Mutu in English football, you have to go back to the start.

There was a buzz around him in Romania from a very early age, when he was playing at a rather modest club called Arges Pitesti.

When the opportunity came to sign him in 1998, Romania’s biggest sides Dinamo Bucharest, Steaua Bucharest and Rapid Bucharest were all fighting for his signature.

Dinamo were so desperate to win the race, they asked one of his agents, Giovani Becali (the other was Becali’s brother, Victor), to keep him hidden away. “I took Mutu to my house and kept him there for 10 days until he signed a contract with Dinamo,” Giovani recalls. “One of the Dinamo shareholders came to my house with $700,000. He showed the notes to me, they had dust on them and had a very strange smell. He paid the money and the boy signed his contract with Dinamo.”

As Romanian journalist Emanuel Rosu explains to The Athletic: “This kind of craziness has been following him around since he was a teenager. It is an important background for what follows.”

By the time Mutu was preparing to move to west London, he was used to making headlines on the front, as well as the back, of Romanian newspapers. An impressive 22 goals in 36 appearances for Parma caught Chelsea’s eye for all the right reasons, but back home there was also a lot of talk about his failing marriage to Alexandra Dinu, a famous actress and television presenter in their homeland.

Mutu arrived in England with talk of divorce already underway. It meant he set up home in a west London flat, which he rented from countryman and former Chelsea defender Petrescu, with only a close friend connected to the Becali brothers for company.

Chelsea agreed a salary of around £45,000 a week, plus a £330,000 signing-on fee and goal bonuses. This was a significant sum, especially for a 24-year-old who was now effectively single and living in a big new city.

One of the first things Mutu did was buy an Aston Martin Vanquish for around £200,000. Giovani Becali claims Mutu could have soon bought another using the amount he’d paid in parking fines because the car was left wherever he liked around London.

There was another sign of his extravagant nature when he wore diamond-stud earrings at his introductory Chelsea press conference. At first, his newfound wealth was backed up with what he could do on the pitch.

“His finishing was unbelievable,” former Chelsea reserve goalkeeper Neil Sullivan explains to The Athletic. “When you were doing small-sided games or finishing drills, he was exceptional. What he could do with both feet and his head, he stood out.

“You could tell he was a class act. He was a big name with a big reputation and you could see why from first impressions. You thought Chelsea had made a great signing. He always liked to stay on after the end of sessions to practise penalties, which I was happy to help him with. But we moved in different circles. I was a bit older than him so I didn’t get to know him that well.

“But he hit the ground running, scored a few goals early on and did really well. He had a good run in the team. I wasn’t aware he was having any personal issues at all.”

It seemed the only ones with issues back then were opposing defenders. Mutu scored the winner on his debut against Leicester City and added another the following week in a draw with Blackburn Rovers before a fine pair to help seal victory over Tottenham Hotspur gave him four goals in three Chelsea appearances. A loud shout of “Mutuuuu” became a popular chant from the crowd.

Mutu celebrates his goal against Tottenham (Photo: Harry How/Getty Images)

Mutu learnt English quickly, too, and won favour in the dressing room by flying six of his new team-mates to Italy with him when he went back there to pick up an award.

Goals in victories over Lazio and Everton that autumn maintained his positive progress on the football field, but his affection for London’s nightlife was already becoming a concern.

After Chelsea lost a Champions League group game at home to Besiktas in October, he managed to get fellow Romanian Daniel Pancu, who played for the Turkish visitors, into trouble.

“He went out drinking with Pancu after the game,” agent Becali told Romanian TV’s Digi Sport Matinal show last year. “After the game, the Besiktas coach, Mircea Lucescu, called me and said, ‘Giovani, I can’t find Pancu. He is not here at the airport, we have to leave without him’.

“We looked for Pancu in London, we didn’t think about calling Mutu at first. In the end, the option was obvious. We called Mutu. I told him directly, ‘Go, put Pancu on the plane! Make sure he’s on the plane. That he goes to Istanbul’.”

Drugs weren’t the issue at this stage, but something clearly wasn’t right. There were niggling injuries that didn’t help and a run of 13 games without finding the net either side of the New Year.

Despite suggestions he had formed close relationships with Marcel Desailly, John Terry, Mario Melchiot and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink at Stamford Bridge, sources suggest he became increasingly quiet and sullen around the place.

It didn’t help that Chelsea were still using their old Harlington training base. The changing “room” there was actually split into four rooms so all the players didn’t mix regularly. Sullivan says: “I was in a different room to Adrian in the changing room and barely saw him. That was just the way it was. I didn’t see him that much outside of training because that was how the dressing room was. We moved in different circles.

“There were a lot of players coming in that summer, a lot of people trying to settle in, make friends and make an impact, not just Adrian. Everyone was trying to find a peer group. It was a lot more British/Irish-based back then — we had Duff, Scott Parker, Joe Cole, Glen Johnson, Wayne Bridge, myself… Frank Lampard and Terry were already there, so a lot of people knew each other from the England set up. It was easier for us to settle in.”

Little did his new colleagues know but Mutu’s brashness at the outset was a bit of a front. Stucan was sent to London to cover the striker’s first few days as a Chelsea player and met up with him on a few occasions. The journalist remembers Mutu’s nervousness being obvious.

It was something the two reflected on during a live interview on Gazeta Sporturilor’s Facebook channel only last month. Clearly, with the benefit of hindsight, Mutu has been able to recognise what was going on. This wasn’t just about him trying to make it at Chelsea, but also having to live up to the expectations of everyone in Romania who saw him as the heir to Hagi’s throne — the successor to a man who had played for Real Madrid and Barcelona.

After all, he had been handed the iconic No 10 shirt of his idol when playing for the national team. “I was not prepared for that kind of pressure,” Mutu said. “People were judging me on that (emulating Hagi). When I joined Chelsea I was young, I was very confident. I’d just had a fantastic season in Parma. But England was another world. When I arrived in London I realised what a superclub, what a superteam, a superplayer means.

“Now I realise that when I signed for Chelsea, that is when my real mission started, my real work started as a professional. A player that reached that level needed to be highly trained in his mental skills. At Chelsea, the patience with the players just ended. Nobody was waiting for you. We had 25 super footballers in our squad, you didn’t have time to hesitate for a second. You didn’t have more than two games at your disposal to make errors.

“You couldn’t be angry or upset. Your rival, the player in the same position as you, is probably as good as you are. You had to be 100 per cent in the sessions. If I wasn’t, Crespo was 100 per cent, Hasselbaink was 100 per cent, Didier Drogba, who arrived a year later, was 100 per cent. You had to manage that pressure and, at my age, I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t know how to manage that pressure.

“At Dinamo, I trained just a bit with that pressure, but that was not the same thing. If you’re not training a player under that pressure, he does not know how to manage it when he faces it. After the pressure, the anxiety arrived for me. It was a state of anxiety. In those moments the enthusiasm becomes mental fatigue. You are empty mentally. Physically you are doing it, but mentally you can’t gather yourself, can’t motivate yourself. In these times the player is looking for ‘things’.”

By ‘things’, the now 41-year-old was referring to the vice that would bring his time to England to a premature end. Drugs.

Mutu got on pretty well with his first Chelsea manager, Claudio Ranieri. The fact they could converse in Italian meant communication was easy. But no matter how hard Ranieri tried, he couldn’t make the player understand the importance of getting his personal life under control.

The Romania international confessed in November 2004 that he had first turned to cocaine in February of that year. He had a low tolerance to alcohol, was finding getting drunk too easy, so wanted something else to “feel good”.

Mutu and Ranieri at the player’s unveiling in 2003 (Photo: Alessandro Abbonizio/AFP via Getty Images)

Before Ranieri left — he was sacked at the end of that 2003-04 season — he compiled a dossier on the squad for his successor to read. When it got to Mutu’s name, the review carried a warning that while he could decide a match on his own, his private life needed a lot of attention.

The man who read all this, and inherited the problem, was Jose Mourinho. The Portuguese had a good relationship with the Becali brothers, having first met them while on a scouting trip for then-employers Barcelona when Bucharest hosted the 1998 European Under-21 Championship.

He did not waste any time in arranging a get-together. Becali told Romanian newspaper Libertatea in 2009: “Mourinho knew about Mutu’s problems with the drugs. He called me and asked me to go urgently to London for a meeting. Mutu was also there. We spoke for three hours. He told me that he knew about Mutu’s trouble and he asked him to stop. Mutu didn’t say a word, his eyes were fixed on the floor for the whole discussion. But he just couldn’t stop doing it.”

Mourinho admitted there had been such a discussion five years earlier, shortly after news of the scandal first broke. He said: “When I met Adrian on his first day in pre-season, it was with his two agents. I told all three I had information that the player was on cocaine. All three were laughing and saying it was a big lie. They said it was completely untrue.”

Things got messy pretty quickly. Chelsea arranged their own private test in July — a practice that would incur a £40,000 fine from the Football Association in 2006 as it was against protocol. While it came back negative, the club still passed on the details to the anti-doping authorities to carry out their procedure, which they did a few months later.

Before the results of the second sample were known, Mutu had already been relegated to a minor role under Mourinho. The press was told his lack of game time was because of a knee problem, but something didn’t ring true. As it turned out, he was starting to miss training sessions without permission.

He played just 49 minutes, coming off the bench against Crystal Palace and Aston Villa, in the first few months of that 2004-05 season. When Mourinho tried to stop him from playing for Romania in October due to lack of fitness, Mutu ignored him and played the full 90 minutes of a World Cup qualifier against the Czech Republic.

Playing for Romania in October 2004 — against Mourinho’s wishes (Photo: Michael Ruzicka/AFP via Getty Images)

The situation went public with Mutu insisting he was in “open conflict” with Mourinho and didn’t care if he was fined — which he was — on his return. FIFA president Sepp Blatter also got involved, speaking out in support of the player. However, it was shortly after this that Chelsea announced Mutu had tested positive for a prohibited substance.

“It was absolute madness in Romania when that happened,” Romanian journalist Emanuel Rosu admits. “When he failed the drugs test, it was three weeks of coverage here. The subject was explosive. All the news programmes started with him. Every station, small or big, went to London to cover the case.”

Chelsea didn’t deliberate for long. Before the month was out, they released a statement saying Mutu had been dismissed. “We want to make clear that Chelsea has a zero-tolerance policy towards drugs,” it read. “In coming to a decision on this case, Chelsea believed the club’s social responsibility to its fans, players, employees and other stakeholders in football regarding drugs was more important than the major financial considerations to the company.”

Mutu complained the decision was made before an official FA hearing took place. He was also unhappy about his lack of support compared to that shown by Arsenal when Tony Adams and Paul Merson had problems in their personal lives in the 1990s. The Professional Footballers’ Association felt the same but Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon responded to the criticism emphatically: “Mutu was offered the chance by Jose Mourinho and others to admit he had a problem. He did not take that chance and lied about it.”

By the time he faced the FA at the start of November, Mutu was prepared to reveal all. His honesty, expression of regret and willingness to attend the rehab centre Sporting Chance was a major factor in him being handed a seven-month ban, which was considered lenient at the time.

There were conspiracy theories back in Romania, as well as in Mutu’s own mind, that the saga was all some form of revenge on Mourinho’s part for refusing instruction not to play for his country in October.

It is not something he gives credence to anymore, as he told Gazeta Sporturilor: “I don’t think Mourinho wanted to get me. Right then, and for a long time afterwards, I suspected him and I believed certain voices from various entourages that he had done this to me on purpose. Now I think you have to be crazy as a coach to do this sort of thing. I remember Mourinho came to me at the beginning of the relationship and he told me he wanted to build the Chelsea team around me.

“He would be crazy to kick me out so soon after he told me something like that. It was a lesson for me. I have no problem with Mourinho. I’ve met and spoken to him since. It was all my fault and that’s it.”

That would be an extraordinary enough story to tell, but it didn’t end there.

Mutu, whose subsequent appeal against his dismissal was rejected by the Premier League and then the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), joined Italian club Livorno in January 2005 while still serving his suspension. He was then sold on to Juventus less than a fortnight later without playing a game for Livorno.

Juventus gave Mutu a route back into football, playing alongside Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Photo: Giulio Napolitano/AFP via Getty Images)

Having made what they saw as a strong stand morally and ethically, Chelsea didn’t think they should lose out financially. In May 2006, just before Juventus sold Mutu to Fiorentina for around £5.5 million, they went to FIFA to claim for compensation from the player.

It was the first of many hearings held in various places, unabridged details of which would leave even The Athletic’s most patient reader with a pounding headache.

Here’s a general summary instead.

Chelsea initially asked to be granted £22,661,641. They argued it was to cover Mutu’s replacement, who they decreed to be Shaun Wright-Phillips (signed from Manchester City for £21 million in July 2005), plus the damage to their reputation and legal costs. In May 2008, FIFA ruled in Chelsea’s favour, though the total sum Mutu was instructed to pay was lower — £13.5 million. Twelve years later, however, there is no indication a single penny has ever been paid. Neither Chelsea or Mutu would provide an update when contacted by The Athletic.

Mutu has had appeals to CAS, the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland and, most recently, the European Court of Human Rights (in 2018) all thrown out. There was a point in 2013 when FIFA decreed Livorno and Juventus could be deemed liable for the £13.5 million, but CAS overruled them 18 months later.

One source suggested Chelsea are still actively pursuing Mutu, but given the amount of time that has passed and the size of the sums involved, it is hard to envisage any money changing hands.

Mutu rebuilt his post-ban career with Fiorentina in Italy (Photo: Claudio Villa/Getty Images)

You would think all the drama would make Mutu learn his lesson.

An impressive 69 goals in 143 appearances for Fiorentina did show what Chelsea were missing out on. However, in 2010 he tested positive for another banned substance, the appetite suppressant sibutramine, and was given a nine-month suspension (later reduced on appeal to six months).

Unlike Chelsea, Fiorentina stood by him — but they weren’t rewarded. His final season with them, 2010-11, was a big disappointment — Mutu scored just four times and caused more controversy by going AWOL for a period.

Fiorentina’s patience ran out and he became a journeyman with stops at Cesena, Ajaccio in France, Petrolul Ploiesti back in Romania, India’s Pune City and back to his homeland for a spell with Targu Mures before retiring for good in 2016.

So, what of Mutu now? One might assume his life is continuing on a downward spiral. Far from it.

This January he was named head coach of the Romania Under-21 team. Yes, you did read that correctly. He is being entrusted with the country’s next crop of talented youngsters.

Before you think those in charge of football in Romania have lost their minds, the fact is that Mutu’s tale looks like becoming a positive one. From the darkest depths, he has turned things around. As he said himself recently: “I’m less than 10 per cent of the man I used to be.”

Now happily married to his third wife and with five kids to look after, the party boy has become a role model and a taskmaster. For example, when he sees one of his players starting to indulge himself with an attention-seeking haircut or tattoo, he is quickly on their case.

“I put my life on track, I decided to become another person,” he told Poland’s English Breakfast Extra YouTube channel. “Now I am a father and a coach, I have to be an example for everybody else. I hope the players learn from my mistakes so that they don’t do it.

“I had bad experiences in my life, I paid for it, but I came back from it. I tell my players they have to be football players for 24 hours, when they eat, when they go to sleep, when they go out. They have to always think, ‘Is it good for me?’ and whether it’s going to affect their performance.

“Football has changed a lot, it’s a lot more physical, the rhythm is higher. Footballers have to be prepared 24 hours a day. It’s not enough to just do two hours in the training camp.”

Mutu is certainly ambitious, setting his sights on becoming a coach on a par with former Chelsea managers Antonio Conte and Maurizio Sarri. In January 2018, he spent a week with the latter at Napoli to learn a thing or two.

By accepting this new post, following brief stints at Romanian club Voluntari and Al Wahda Under-21s in the United Arab Emirates, he will be back in the limelight in his homeland. Romania got to the semi-finals of the most recent Under-21 Euros in June last year, a run which included a 4-2 thumping of England, and when football resumes after the COVID-19 pandemic, Mutu will be under pressure to maintain the momentum.

How is he perceived in Romania now? “Some think he’s a great player who made a mistake, others say he was a good player but a junkie,” local sports journalist Costin Stucan concludes. “He didn’t redeem himself fully after what happened at Chelsea.

“He wasted a golden opportunity: to play for Chelsea and become a real star in the Premier League and one of the biggest in the game.”

No matter what he goes on to achieve as a coach, it is unlikely Mutu will ever be allowed to forget.

(Top photo: Daniel Mihailescu/AFP via Getty Images)

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