Keith Duggan Sideline CutFrank Lampard is right. Chelsea will have to win more than this year's Premiership title if this team are to lay claim to any enduring legacy. Fifty years have passed since Chelsea won the league and while the remorseless and often entertaining ascension to this season's position of dominance has been a joy for long-suffering Stamford Bridge fans it is not enough.

That lone 1955 triumph did nothing to alter the lightweight and pampered reputation that followed Chelsea for years. It was most memorably shown in the famous footage from 1970 when Chelsea and Leeds met in the FA Cup final and the cameras depicted how both sets of players liked to relax in the evenings before what was then a gala occasion for English football. The Leeds boys were gathered in what looked like a shoe cupboard, drinking tea and playing cards. The Chelsea gang emerged from sports cars and smiled at the cameras as they escorted glamorous companions into a Mayfair club.

Until Roman Abramovich stepped out of the hazy shadowland of eastern Europe's oil industry, Chelsea seemed congenitally designed to fill a function in English football as a curiosity, sometimes colourful and quite good, but ultimately inconsequential.

The Lancashire teams had soul and tradition. In London, Arsenal always mattered and Spurs generally managed to gift an occasional generation of fans with something magical and memorable. Unlikely teams - Wimbledon in 1988, for instance - managed to stun their own fans with once-in-a-lifetime heroics. But not Chelsea.

It is often noted that Chelsea's 1955 success was almost by default, caused by the failure of the habitual league winners to amass anything like their usual average of league points. Of course, that cannot be said of Jose Mourinho's 2004/2005 representatives, who have scored more goals than any team except Arsenal and conceded a miserly 12.

The one rider to Chelsea's unofficial coronation as champions is that you search the horizon in vain for a foe at full strength.

It can easily be argued that Mourinho's arrival coincided with a winter that has advanced the sly and debilitating loosening of Alex Ferguson's grip on Old Trafford and the English game in general. It could be contended he was fortunate Arsenal and Arsene Wenger somehow froze on the eve of their now-forgotten drive for invincibility, that their loss to Manchester United as they closed in on a 50-game unbeaten run created a sense of imbalance they never truly corrected.

Of course, it could also be contended Manchester United's rise from their own bumbling fortunes through the 1970s and 1980s happened mainly because they were the only English club who had the mass appeal capable of matching the Premiership's and Sky television's nascent sophistication.

There are always reasons beyond the immediate why one team succeed even as another fade. It would be churlish to deny Chelsea's entertainment value this season, and their rise as the new standard-bearers of the English game means a welcome league medal for Damien Duff, one of the most popular young sportsmen to emerge from this island.

But it is difficult not to be churlish about Chelsea. Forget the general uneasiness about Abramovich's billions or that while his celebrated employees at Stamford Bridge earn megabucks for their artistry, employees at his Sibneft oil company survive on two quid a day. Forget the repeated argument that Chelsea are the first club to buy a league title, because the scales have always been tilted in favour of heavyweight clubs.

The most troubling aspect of Chelsea's rise is that it has led to an instant acceptance that the English game is nothing more than a commodity.

Consider the club's behaviour in the Adrian Mutu affair. Having sacked the 25-year-old Romanian after learning he had sniffed cocaine, Chelsea subsequently won permission to sue him - or, more pointedly, his new employers, Juventus - for loss of earnings. Mutu's conduct or intelligence or character can all be called into question. But the statement released by Chelsea that they regard his behaviour as "gross misconduct" is hard to stomach, particularly when one remembers the graceless scenes at the end of the club's game at Stamford Bridge against Barcelona. The leering justification of Ricardo Carvalho's dubious winning goal, the boot-boy antics of Mourinho as he paraded the field in victory, the abusive man -handling of Ronaldinho and the lies Mourinho seemingly made up for fun about Barcelona coach Frank Rijkaard: those all merited the description "gross misconduct".

Consider, in contrast, Manchester United's dealings with Rio Ferdinand. The big England defender is a nuisance and is overrated, and after he passed on a mandatory drug test early last season in order to go shopping, United had good cause to show him the door. After all, Ferguson had no compunction about guiding a (truly) great defender like Paul McGrath to the fastest exit route when he first arrived in Manchester. But maybe the Scot has mellowed since then and maybe he finds it harder to understand the complexities of the loyalty system in operation today. That is probably one of the many reasons for his admiration of Roy Keane, whose sense of loyalty has always been fierce and inflexible. For whatever reason, Ferguson has stood firm by Ferdinand. It was ironic that Ferdinand's defensive blunderings led to the Everton goal last Wednesday night that left Ferguson seething on the Goodison sideline, that loss the latest in a bleak run for the club.

Compared with Mourinho, Ferguson suddenly looks like a slightly outmoded and addled man wedded to 20th-century values and searching in vain around England's football grounds for faces that have long departed the game. The toughest of all the tough Scots is starting to look like a sentimentalist.

Chelsea have been smart and brave and decisive and admirable under Mourinho; and claims that money alone won the 2004/2005 season are brutally unfair to the manager and players like Lampard, John Terry and Claude Makelele. But there is always the feeling about Mourinho that he struggles to hide his contempt for the very league upon which he has made such a blinding impression.

That is why there was something piercing about the sign at the League Cup final held aloft by a Liverpool fan informing Chelsea that "money can't buy history, heart, soul". The sign may well appear again when the two clubs meet in the historic Champions League semi-final first leg at Stamford Bridge. It seems like a strange and fated occasion, with Liverpool returning to this stage precisely 20 years after the shameful night in Heysel.

Liverpool are locked into their past, Chelsea are fixated on the here and now, and the smart money will be on the champions elect to run with gleeful irreverence over a club who will never tire of romanticising their great nights in Europe. But just maybe Mourinho is in for a taste of humility and circumspection over the next fortnight. Maybe the easy, dismissive way with which he took ownership of the domestic season will be compromised by a late and improbable sting from Liverpool.

Chelsea have already beaten Liverpool three times this season. That fact alone should give the new team cause for worry.

Winning the league is historic for Chelsea but it will not be long until it pales into just another title footnote dwarfed by the feats of long-disbanded teams that dominated for entire generations. Lampard understands that, and with Abramovich's money available to bring more glittering names to Stamford Bridge over the summer, he is right to be talking of future glories.

Winning the league every half-century is fine, but in the grand scheme of things it counts for little. And quite a few seasons yet stand between Chelsea and greatness.