John Terry has revealed that a standoff with Andre Villas-Boas resulted in several young Chelsea players being demoted to economy class during a pre-season trip.
Villas-Boas joined Chelsea in 2011 but lasted just under nine months as manager before he was sacked following a run of just three wins in 12 Premier League games.
Terry, who remains Chelsea’s most-successful captain during his 19-year stint at Stamford Bridge, admits he was unhappy with Villas-Boas’ leadership and has revealed an incident in which the Portuguese, who went on to manage Tottenham, lost out in a confrontation with the senior members of the squad.
‘There’s all these kind of rumours that player power was too big – it wasn’t, it genuinely wasn’t,’ Terry said on Up Front with Simon Jordan podcast.
‘When I was there there were managers in charge, so Mourinho was in charge, anything higher than that Abramovich was in charge, it was very clear for us group of players.
‘Anything in the dressing room was my, Lamps, Didier [Drogba], the senior players’ responsibility to control that, it was very clear.
‘So when AVB came in, I’ll give you a little story, we went to Hong Kong when he was first manager, we get on the plane and I’m sitting in economy on a 13-hour flight.
‘And we’ve got Josh McEachran, Nathaniel Chalobah, a couple of other young players all in first class. And this was part of AVB going, ‘no player is bigger than me, everyone’s the same’.
‘I get on the plane, it turns out Lamps is flying out first class and I’m flying back in first class. So if you fly out in first you come back in economy but basically it wasn’t good enough.
‘So, I’m going on the plane, ‘no, we’re not going anywhere until these young players go back in economy and the first-team players, that have built this club to where we are today, go back in first’.
‘We’re on the plane, people were up and down, AVB comes up, ‘what’s the problem?’. I go, ‘well, we’re not going anywhere until the young players move’. And to be fair to the young players, they’re going, ‘listen, JT, this is really uncomfortable, we’ll go back’. And I’m going, ‘no, it’s not your decision, he [AVB] has to own it’.
‘This is one of his first things in front of everyone.
‘In the end, it spins. First-team players go first, younger players go economy. That’s how it should be. These younger players are striving to be where we’ve got and he tried to make a statement on day one and he failed instantly.
‘Because I promise you the plane wasn’t going. If it was going, it would have gone without myself, Frank and Didier.’
