A man from the Daily Telegraph once told me an interesting story about John Terry, Fabio Capello and one of those informal chit-chats England managers like to have with journalists. This one took place a few years back, when Terry was having one of those off periods when he seems to be slightly falling to pieces, panels flapping, hinges rusting, grabbing at the passing shirts like a man groping for the light switch in the dark.

Someone asked why Capello kept picking Terry when his form was poor. The answer was simple. Yes, there were quicker, fitter players. But when Capello and his men looked around the dressing room before kick-off they usually found Terry was the only England player not frozen into silence, bowed with angst or – in the colloquialism used – “shitting it” under the weight of the England shirt.

Terry was unafraid. He made the others less afraid. You can see it, can’t you? No matter where you stand on the John Terry moral universe, he would still be a pretty good person to, say, come with you on the train to Birmingham to help give a PowerPoint presentation to an aggressively sceptical sales conference audience. Or to go out on a sky dive with, just the two of you up in some howling fuselage above the Arapaho National Forest, the japes, the backslaps, the emergency chute slung away – “Don’t need it, mate” – JT hurling himself out first into that screaming void still talking about Lewis Hamilton or The X Factor. “I’m coming, John. I’m coming with you. Catch me. Catch me, John.”

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This ability to inspire from the front has been surplus to requirements during the current Chelsea run of seven league wins and six clean sheets. Just as for the first time in the Abramovich era, Terry’s absence through injury for a game as big as Saturday’s lunchtime trip to Manchester City is suddenly not really an issue, no longer a source of fretful speculation.

The news this week is that Conte plans to “phase out” his captain, with the suggestion Terry could even be off to Shanghai Shenhua in January. In a bizarro-world twist, Shanghai Shenhua are managed by Gus Poyet, the player Terry replaced to make his Chelsea league debut against Southampton 18 years ago, a sign, perhaps, of some late 1990s Chelsea Valhalla out there in the glare of the new world. Maybe Jody Morris and Michael Duberry are also in town and everyone’s off to Boujis later with Dane Bowers.

Either way, the signs are clear enough. Terry will turn 36 this week. He is by five years the longest serving current player at any Premier League club. He’s still out there: still leading, still captaining, still legending. But after 18 wild, glorious years the sense of an ending is now impossible to ignore.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Terry, the centre of attention after the Champions League final win against Bayern Munich in 2012, for which he was suspended but put on his kit to claim the trophy. Photograph: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images

Before we get lost in more formal goodbyes closer to the time, there are perhaps three things worth saying about the Terry years. First: hate him, loathe him or support Chelsea, this has been one of the great, unignorable English sporting lives of the current century. Terry has been relentlessly visible throughout the creation of a modern‑day powerhouse. Should Chelsea win another league title this season, they will be unarguably English football’s premier force since 2004, when Terry became captain and they first began to spend in earnest. In total Terry has now been present for 64% of Chelsea’s total accumulated silverware since the club were formed in 1905 as a fill-in for the empty Fulham Road stadium. This is in part Conte’s challenge: a first trophy outside the main span of the Terry Supremacy.

There has already been a change of tone and texture. The current three-man defensive wedge is mobile and aggressive. Whereas Terry has become more minimal with age, sitting deep, playing flatter, taking the air out of the game. In Chelsea’s last title campaign, he committed 13 fouls all season in the league, and made just over one tackle per 90 minutes.

He could perhaps have been a more striking, more expressive player in his best years. He might have used his ease on the ball to push his team forward: in 2011 Terry was rated the third most accurate passer in Europe; he still has more career goals than Andrés Iniesta. Instead he has pared back his game, playing within his limits and becoming an irresistibly familiar presence, the one constant through Chelsea’s modern triumphs those great, beaming hollering Terry features, victory sealed with the standard shots of triumphant post-match JT striding about shirtless, invariably cropped at the waist to give the unnerving impression of a man so committed to the cause he’s just played the full 90 minutes bullishly, unapologetically in the nude.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Terry with QPR’s Anton Ferdinand during the Premier League match at Loftus Road in October 2011, which led to Terry’s ban for using racist language. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA

So much for the good times. The second thing about Terry is, of course, his toxic mistakes, his wider unpopularity. The scrapes, the splashes, the priapism: this is no more than lurid detail. But the FA ban for using racist language during a match will remain an indelible stain. The court case alone provided an extraordinary glimpse into the dismal internal monologue of the professional game. Terry has apologised and admitted that his language was completely unacceptable He is at least right there.

Beyond this, as the waters start to close above his head, the most striking thing about Terry is simply his basic presence in extraordinary times. In a way Chelsea have been a case study, an outlier for the eviscerating changes in English football. Billionaire ownership, the large-scale bartering of success, the bolting on of a new, aggressively burnished brand to our creaky old Victorian community centres: there is in principle something deeply odd and uncharted about this.

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Just as being a billionaire is in itself inane – a process of being continually replete, existing within a sealed world of chinchilla‑skin helicopter rides and seven-star homogeneity – so the billionaire’s project club is also an inane idea and entirely anti-sport, a sanding down of edges and imperfections and thrilling variables into cold, hard, cash‑bought certainties. This is not sport. It’s not football. It doesn’t actually have to work at all.

Football can survive most things. But not the moment supporters stop caring about their club and its players. It is a challenge that is yet to hit but that always lurks just beyond the fringes and the fury. At Chelsea the age of Abramovich has worked so far, both as a spectacle and as a coherent whole that still feels like the same coherent whole. At times, at least in those raw early days, this has felt like it was in large part because of Terry’s vividness, his persuasive spirit, a player who has been not so much the brains or the heart of his club as its bowels, the hard colonic centre that ensures Chelsea have through it all still smelt like a football team.