November 3, 2024

The Football History of Didier Drogba

Born in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire on March 11, 1978, Didier Drogba is a professional football (soccer) player from Ivory Coast.

 He holds the record for most goals scored in Côte d’Ivoire in international matches and has won two African Footballer of the Year awards (2006, 2009).

Drogba was taken to live with his professional footballer uncle in France when he was five years old. He spent three years in Côte d’Ivoire before returning home to return to France after another three years.

 At the age of 15, Drogba started as an apprentice with Levallois, a second-division team outside of Paris. In 1997–1998 he moved to Le Mans FC, where he signed a professional contract in his second season.

Drogba joined Guingamp in January 2002, and in 34 league games, he scored 17 goals. His accomplishments led to a transfer in 2003 to Olympique de Marseille, where he scored 11 goals in European competition and 19 goals in 35 domestic games to help the team reach the 2004 Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Cup final, where it was defeated by Valencia, Spain, 2-0.

Drogba was traded by Marseille to Chelsea FC in England in 2004. The following season, Chelsea won its first Premier League title in fifty years, but its new center-forward struggled. Despite his tendency to lose his temper easily during games, Drogba was a quick thinker, an alert player, and a man full of confidence in his abilities.

 The support from the public was still lacking even in his second season, during which Chelsea successfully defended their title. However, by the end of the 2006–07 season, when Chelsea was unable to win the league for a third consecutive year, Drogba had won over the majority of the league’s suspicious Chelsea supporters with his 20 goals as the leading scorer and his 33 goals overall for the season.

Additionally, he scored the team’s lone goals in the finals of both the Football Association (FA) Cup and the Carling Cup, which helped Chelsea win both trophies that season. 

In the 2008 Champions League final, which Chelsea lost to Manchester United on a single penalty kick, Drogba again infuriated the crowd by hitting an opponent and receiving a red card. With Drogba in the lineup, Chelsea won its second FA Cup in 2009, giving him some sort of redemption. With Drogba leading the league in goals scored (29 in the regular season), Chelsea won the FA Cup and the Premier League championship the following year.

He led Chelsea past Bayern Munich in the 2012 Champions League final, when he scored both the team’s only goal during regulation and the game-winning penalty kick in extra time. This was Chelsea’s first European club trophy.

Drogba signed with Shanghai Shenhua in the off-season that followed, although he only appeared in 11 games for the team before rejoining Galatasaray SK of Istanbul in January 2013 to resume playing in Europe. In his debut season with the team, he assisted Galatasaray in winning the Turkish first-division championship. He signed a one-year contract to return to Chelsea in July 2014.

 He signed a contract with the Major League Soccer team in North America, the Montreal Impact, the following year. He became a player and a part-owner of the Phoenix Rising in the United Soccer League’s second division in 2017. But he gave up playing competitively the next year.

It was in 2002 that Drogba made his debut for Côte d’Ivoire abroad. He led Côte d’Ivoire to the African Cup of Nations championship game in 2006, but the squad was defeated by Egypt on penalty kicks. Drogba’s nine goals in eight preliminary games propelled the Ivorians into the World Cup for the first time, and his performance in the World Cup qualifying matches was crucial to his win of the African Footballer of the Year title that year.

Côte d’Ivoire qualified for its second straight World Cup in 2010 after Drogba guided the side to a fourth-place result in the 2008 Cup of Nations. He led Côte d’Ivoire to a second-place finish in the 2012 Cup of Nations and helped them qualify for the 2014 World Cup.

 Unfortunately, his team, Les Éléphants, lost their final group-stage match and the chance to go to the tournament’s knockout stage due to a stoppage-time goal on a penalty kick. Drogba stated shortly afterward that he was retiring from international competition.

Following a contentious presidential election in 2011, Drogba’s home country of Côte d’Ivoire descended into civil conflict. As a result, Drogba was named to an 11-member truth and reconciliation commission that was set up to lessen divisions within the nation. In 2014, the commission turned in its final report. 

Drogba founded the Didier Drogba Foundation in 2007 and was active in charitable activities.

The Football History of Didier Drogba