History better come quick for Chelsea galacticos

English Premiership:  Andrew Fifield on how a place in history is there for the taking for Jose Mourinho's men

Last summer, Chelsea released their official Monopoly game. A little presumptious, perhaps, for a club that had just won their first league championship in 50 years, but it transpired to be a prescient move. If there were any doubts 12 months ago that the west London club had exerted a stranglehold on the rest of the Premiership, a second title, won with ridiculous ease last season, scotched them. From boardroom to board game, Chelsea's dominance is absolute.

The challenge now for Jose Mourinho's star-studded squad is to become only the fifth club in the history of English football to win three consecutive league crowns, a feat which would give their achievements a truly historic gloss. The Champions League may be Mourinho's ultimate ambition - the manager remains irked at the manner of his side's exit from the tournament in the last two seasons - but a hat-trick of championships would fulfil his stated ambition after he won the first of them in 2005.

"We are not yet one of the big clubs in the world and we want to be," he said. "The aim is to make Chelsea dominant in England, so we need to win more titles. If I can win three championships with Chelsea and one or two more cups, if we can get a table full of trophies and one Champions League, I think the job is done."

Mourinho's signings this summer suggest he is a man in a hurry. Michael Ballack and Andriy Shevchenko, arguably the world's greatest midfielder and forward respectively, have arrived for €50 million and a combined salary of around €350,000-a-week, yet both are about to turn 30, the age at which footballers generally start to dwindle.

Both players have been bought not to establish a lasting legacy at Stamford Bridge, but to guarantee immediate success.

For the rest of the Premiership, the psychological impact of Chelsea adding two of world football's genuine heavyweights to a squad already bulging with top-calibre talent is potentially crippling. It has certainly made the champions' already concrete-clad self-belief even more impregnable.

"With the team of the last campaign and the reinforcements, we are favourites to win a third consecutive title," said the midfielder Claude Makelele. "I believe rivals are scared of us. Little by little, Chelsea have come to look like a gathering of the best players in Europe and each year the team are improving. We are not invincible now, but almost."

From any other player at any other club, such a boast would be deemed spectacularly ill-advised - an open invitation to fate to reduce preening pride to rubble. But from Makelele, whose public utterances are usually as understated as his quietly effective performances in the holding midfield role, they appear simply a bald statement of fact.

Chelsea now have club football's finest attacking midfielders in Ballack and Frank Lampard. Up front, Shevchenko's ruthlessness and Didier Drogba's brawn are a potent mix. Defensively, the steel wall constructed by Makelele, John Terry, Ricardo Carvalho and Petr Cech shows no sign of crumbling.

The only chinks in Mourinho's armour are located in the full back positions, and even these could be filled if Ashley Cole completes his painfully protracted move from Arsenal and William Gallas can be persuaded to sign a new contract.

The pretenders to Chelsea's supremacy have just two hopes. The first is that a turbulent summer has permanently undermined the Blues' famed equilibrium.

Mourinho has admitted to being shocked by Gallas' rebellious mutterings - "it is a new challenge for me to have unhappy players," he observed recently - while the departures of popular figures such as Eidur Gudjohnsen, Damien Duff and Glen Johnson will not have helped team spirit. The new signings might inject quality into Chelsea's squad, but their galacticos mentality - especially in Ballack's case - will not sit easily with the "all for one and one for all" ethos created by Mourinho and his chief lieutenants John Terry and Frank Lampard.

The second is that Chelsea, rather than feeling inspired to further their domestic achievements by back-to-back titles, will succumb to complacency. Alex Ferguson certainly hopes so. "I am producing a team that will last years," he said, explaining his willingness to give youth its head at Manchester United.

"The youngsters have a hunger to achieve but when you have an old team maybe all the challenges have gone for them."

There are obvious holes in this argument, not least that the senior citizens Ballack and Shevchenko will both be eager to prove their manifold qualities to a brand new audience in England. But the gist of Ferguson's theory is undeniable. When players have achieved all there is to be achieved - at least in domestic competition - what is the driving force?

And then there is Mourinho himself. The Portuguese might find it easy to inspire his squad, but who motivates the motivator?

Mourinho should listen to Ferguson, as the Scot knows only too well the problems of leading a club back into battle while the memories of victory are still fresh. After winning three Premiership titles, one FA Cup and one Champions League between 1999 and 2001, United began the following season by winning just six of their first 15 league matches. A miserable season yielded nothing more than a third-placed Premiership finish.

"We weren't hungry fighters any more," recalled United's former captain Roy Keane. "We'd bought into the glory, the hero stuff, we were living legends.

"The desire wasn't there, none of us had it. Not in sufficient quantities.

"Instead of making things happen we were waiting for one of our hero-colleagues to do it for us. Wall-to-wall doubles, a treble and a hatful of Premierships had taken their toll."

It is one of the great curiosities of sport that success can be as corrosive as failure. Mourinho has felt the burn himself, having marked the occasion of Chelsea's league triumph last season with a diatribe against the struggle of overseeing football's richest club.

"This is the worst place in the world to be a manager," he grumbled. "You can win, you can achieve, but it is never enough."

Mourinho may have been granted the exclusive Shrewsbury Road square on Chelsea's Monopoly board, but he has regularly claimed to have felt undervalued in England. Perhaps he is right: there was general dismay at the club's style of football last season and acknowledgement of their achievements has usually been explained by Roman Abramovich's €500 million investment.

But a third consecutive league title and the Champions League trophy would change all that. A place in history is theirs for the taking.