Trevor Birch: ‘It took only 10 minutes to do Chelsea deal with Roman Abramovich but I had to Google him first … I wasn’t sure if Jeremy Beadle was going to jump out’

Evening Standard

Trevor Birch was the man who welcomed Roman Abramovich into Stamford Bridge but he did not last long under the billionaire.

In fact, it was little over a month after the £140million takeover at Chelsea in 2003 that the Russian decided to replace Birch with Peter Kenyon as chief executive.

But then Birch sensed early on that he was not on same wavelength as the oligarch.