The EFL can produce and create cult heroes for clubs up and down England – and into Wales, and that is what Michael Chopra became at Cardiff City in the 2000s.
As well as having become a cult hero across three different stints with The Bluebirds, Michael Chopra was also an exemplar piece of business conducted by the Welsh outfit.
Having been signed for a fee of just £500,000 from Newcastle United, Chopra would go on to net Cardiff ten times that when they sold him to Newcastle’s arch-rivals Sunderland just a year after he joined.
Now, at the age of 42, the Newcastle-born striker has returned to playing football after a four-year absence from the game.
Michael Chopra was a gun striker for Cardiff
Having come through at hometown club Newcastle in the 1990s, Michael Chopra turned professional with The Magpies in 2000 and went on to play 31 games for them, scoring just three goals across a six-year period.
During those six years, Chopra spent time out on loan at Watford and Nottingham Forest in the First Division; scoring five goals in five games for The Hornets before impressing with a stint at Barnsley in the 2004-05 League One campaign.
Having scored 17 goals in 39 appearances for The Tykes in the third-tier, Chopra returned to form a part of the Newcastle squad that finished seventh in Alan Shearer’s final campaign on Tyneside in the 2005-6 campaign, playing 20 games that season across all competitions.
Cardiff City, Brian Barry-Murphy
Cardiff City, Brian Barry-Murphy
However, the summer of 2006, as Newcastle eventually brought in the likes of Damien Duff, Obafemi Martins, Giuseppe Rossi and Antoine Sibierski; Chopra departed St James’ Park on a permanent basis and moved to Cardiff for a fee of just £500,000.
In the 2006-07 Championship season, arch poacher Chopra went on to score 22 goals in 42 second-tier appearances for a Dave Jones managed Cardiff side that finished firmly in the middle-of-the-table.
Cardiff collapsed at the back end of that season, collecting just two points from their final nine games to finish 13th – and that had coincided with Chopra himself with just one goal after hitting his 21st of the season in their 35th match day and their penultimate win of the campaign in February against Preston North End.
With 12 assists to his name, too, though, the end of the season could easily be forgiven by Cardiff supporters and there was an awareness that, for a small fee, they had managed to bag one of the best players in the second-tier.
Michael Chopra netted Cardiff a huge profit
Michael Chopra
Michael Chopra
In that season, Chopra scored a match-winning brace at the Stadium of Light against a then struggling mid-table Sunderland side who eventually won the title under the management of Roy Keane.
His performance in that game as well as his performances over the course of the majority of the season saw Keane and Sunderland opt to go big on Chopra just a year after his move to South Wales, signing him for a fee of £5 million as they returned to the Premier League.
Chopra again immediately hit the ground running, this time in the top-flight, with the winner in an opening day defeat of Tottenham Hotspur before scoring a few days later in a 2-2 draw with Birmingham City.
However, those goals would account for a third of his tally across 33 appearances that season and, after moving to the periphery of things at the start of the following campaign, Cardiff re-signed him on loan in November 2008.
In his second stint at Cardiff, Chopra scored nine goals in 27 games as Cardiff finished just outside of the top six and the play-off places in the Championship.
Chopra returned to Cardiff on a permanent basis in the summer of 2009 and the man that once netted them a major £4.5 million profit within just a year of playing for the club was now back again and spearheading their promotion challenges, notching 16 in 41 and then nine in 32 in successive seasons as Cardiff achieved back-to-back fourth placed finishes in the second-tier.
Michael Chopra has returned to action in Wales
Michael Chopra Blackpool
Michael Chopra Blackpool
In the summer of 2011, Chopra departed Cardiff once again, once again earning them a reasonable fee of £1 million as he moved to Ipswich Town and went on to score 14 goals in his debut campaign for The Tractor Boys in the Championship.
Again, though, things tailed off for Chopra and after a forgettable stint in the 2013-14 campaign at Blackpool, he eventually moved on to the Indian Super League to sign for Kerala Blasters and then to Scotland to sign for Alloa Athletic in the Scottish Championship before returning to the Kerala Blasters.
Chopra has had plenty of off-field issues that distracted from his playing career, and he eventually went on to retire in India – before coming out of retirement in 2022 and joining West Allotment Celtic back in the North East.
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Michael Chopra at Cardiff City
Season
2006-07
2008-09
2009-10
2010-11
Again retiring after that very short stint, Chopra has once again come out of retirement this summer by signing for Cymru South outfit Trethomas Bluebirds at the age of 42.
Now playing in the second-tier of Welsh football, Chopra has thus far made just one appearance, a short cameo in a 2-2 draw at home to Caerphilly in early September.
A bizarre career that has seen Chopra go from being a real gun in the Championship and make an impact in the Premier League; the former England youth international is going again, once again, this time back in South Wales at a club named Bluebirds as a result of a Cardiff-supporting founder of the club.