The former PL striker opens up about nearly joining Tottenham before Abramovich intervened.
Carlton Cole has lifted the lid on a remarkable piece of transfer history, revealing that Roman Abramovich personally intervened to block his move to Tottenham Hotspur after he had already completed his medical at the north London club, in a story that perfectly encapsulates the intensity of the rivalry between the two sides.
Speaking on the Saux What podcast, Cole described a sequence of events that took him from the finishing line of a completed Spurs medical to an extraordinary meeting with one of football’s most powerful figures, all within the space of a single phone call. He said (h/t TBR Football):
“I got bought. I was supposed to go. I did my medical at Spurs. I’d done it. As I was driving home I got a phone call from Eugene. So Eugene was Abramovich’s right hand man. He says, you’ve got to come back to have a meeting the next day with Abramovich because he’s not happy that you’re going to Spurs. I was like, well, I’m a spare part here, you’ve just won the league. Mourinho’s not got no plans for me.”
What followed was a meeting that Cole could hardly have anticipated. Abramovich had requested his presence at a gym next to the stadium, where the Russian owner made his position abundantly clear in the most direct terms imaginable.
“So I went to the gym right next to the stadium and met Abramovich in there with my uncle and my dad. We were having a coffee and he just says, listen, I don’t do business with Spurs.”
Five words. Deal dead. Medical completed. Didn’t matter.
Carlton Cole was a hit at West Ham
Cole was subsequently sold to West Ham in July 2006, where he went on to enjoy the most productive period of his career, scoring 67 goals in 293 appearances for the east Londoners (79 G/A in the Premier League). Having managed only eight goals in 32 Chelsea appearances, the move to Spurs would have represented a genuine opportunity for a player who needed regular football and a fresh start.
The story carries a particular resonance in the current moment. Conor Gallagher and Dominic Solanke have both made the journey from Chelsea to Tottenham in recent years, completing moves that Abramovich’s era would never have sanctioned. The rivalry between the clubs remains fierce, but the rigid refusal to conduct any business whatsoever with a direct competitor, extended even to fringe players who were clearly surplus to requirements, reflects a different era of football ownership entirely.
That Abramovich was willing to disrupt a completed transfer simply to prevent a player he had no use for from joining Spurs speaks volumes about how seriously the Chelsea-Tottenham rivalry was taken at the very highest level of the club during his tenure. For Cole, it remains one of the more extraordinary moments of a career full of memorable stories.