Bubbling away in Roman Abramovich's 16-home, £11bn empire is the problem of what to do with the old guard. With Fernando Torres's £50m transfer from Liverpool, Chelsea's increasingly dictatorial owner has risked internal strife over the team's famously lavish wage structure and may use the issue this summer to purge the elderly.

As a student of Kremlin politics (and an expert now in the acquisitiveness of Premier League footballers), Abramovich knew paying Torres £175,000 a week was bound to arouse the jealously of a swarm of players now striding into their 30s. John Terry (30), Frank Lampard (32), Didier Drogba (32) and Ashley Cole (30) are the foundation of Chelsea's three Premier League titles under Abramovich's patronage but their influence is waning.

The defending champions, Chelsea now face a 12-game struggle to qualify for next season's Champions League – starting with Manchester United's visit on Tuesday. "It is not a good position for us, we know we have to do better, we want to do better," Cole says. "We are out of the FA Cup, the Carling Cup, we're never going to give up on the league but the Champions League is probably now the main focus for us to win because obviously not many people here have won that one."

Torres was not hired specifically to annoy the powerful dressing-room cabal who have shaped the club's fortunes since José Mourinho arrived in 2004. But his arrival will hasten the break-up of a mighty core. Only Terry is known to have secured a clause in his contract guaranteeing at least parity with Chelsea's highest earner but Lampard, Drogba and Cole would not appreciate being heavily outpaid by a new player who is currently living off old glories.

If Abramovich wants a clear-out, this is his chance. Over the past fortnight there have been clear signals that Terry is no longer an automatic choice at centre-back and that Drogba will be used as back-up to Torres and Anelka in a new 4-4-2 formation. Drogba accompanied Torres against Liverpool on the latter's debut but was then dropped for the game at Fulham, restored for an FA Cup fourth-round replay against Everton and demoted again for the midweek Champions League trip to Copenhagen.

Chelsea's improved display in Denmark prompted Carlo Ancelotti to say: "The key to this game was the good movement up front from Nicolas Anelka and Fernando Torres. We played quick up front to avoid the pressing and this why I say we played with intelligence." Of Torres, he said: "He shouldn't lose confidence because he didn't score. He played very played good for the team. What was important was his movement with Anelka and it was a good combination and I am happy."

Officially Ancelotti will choose his strikers game by game but as the team prepare to confront the league leaders there is no disguising the probable end of Drogba's 240-game stay in London. As Abramovich renews his spending drive to protect his original £700m-plus investment, Drobga is more vulnerable than his ageing comrades. Dumping "The Drog" would enable Ancelotti to alter the team's whole pattern of play away from Drogba-inspired directness in favour of a quicker, subtler style more in keeping with the current fashion.

Even before Torres decamped from Liverpool, Chelsea's annual wage bill was £172.5m, or 82% of turnover, on losses of £70.9m. Uefa's new financial limits on club will provide an incentive and an excuse for Abramovich to correct his own error in allowing an aristocratic squad to grow old together. The scale of his spending in January – £70m on Torres and the centre-back David Luiz – suggests a willingness to take draconian action to stop Chelsea slipping behind Manchester City and Spurs in the bigger contest with Man Utd and Arsenal.

David Luiz is 23, Torres 26, Petr Cech still only 28, the improving Ramires 23 and Branislav Ivanovic, who has just signed a new deal, 26. Salomon Kalou, who lives a charmed life, is 25. Mikel John Obi, at 23, has reached a point where many who thought he would be the next great defensive midfielder are now saying he has failed to train on. But with Josh McEachran (17) emerging as Chelsea's Jack Wilshere, Abramovich possesses a nucleus of players under 28 to lead the team out of the TerryLampard‑Drogba era.

How fast that procession moves may depend on the attitude of those senior figures when the current desperate mission to preserve Champions League status is over. None has the market value of two years ago, when Terry was being chased by Manchester City and Lampard apparently had the option of going wherever Mourinho went next. Cole would still command top dollar and Drogba would be coveted by most Premier League managers. More likely than a move across England, though, would be a return to Europe: possibly Marseille. In his autobiography he writes of Zinedine Zidane's birthplace less as an alma mater than as a kind of womb, which he was grief-stricken to leave.

Chelsea without Drogba would delight centre-backs who sport bruises from trying to stop him, physios who run on to the pitch in a permanent state of confusion about whether he is actually injured or just being a drama queen and officials at the club who have to clean up after his outbursts.

Drogba's "It's a disgrace" tirade at the cameras after the inept refereeing of Tom Henning Ovrebo in the second leg of the Champions League semi-final against Barcelona in 2009 was turned into an excellent rap video, and was one of many occasions when the Ivory Coast's most famous sportsman has revived the spirit of J'Accuse to make a melodramatic point.

He stirs disdain in opposition spectators and a particularly complex ambivalence among his own team's fans, who see him as the embodiment of Mourinho's determined, forceful style but also as a self-server who placed his own irritation with Nemanja Vidic in a Champions League final ahead of the club's raging urge to land the prize. Drogba's face-slap on Vidic in Moscow removed him from the subsequent penalty shoot-out and remains the low point in a history of self-indulgence.

But what a D-shaped hole he will leave. Obituaries will doubtless feature his deliberate handballs against Fulham and Manchester City a few seasons back, his swiftly retracted diving confession on the BBC and his constant threats to flee. When Mourinho was ousted, Drogba told France Football: "I want to leave Chelsea. Something is broken with Chelsea. The damage is big in the dressing room."

Mourinho manipulated him brilliantly, exploiting his need to be loved but also recognising his courage in the face of provocation, his willingness to fight for his place, under the right conditions. At half-time in one game Mourinho instructed his players to pass only to Andriy Shevchenko because "Didier is having trouble keeping hold of it". He also accused his senior striker of "betrayal" when news of supposedly chance encounters with officials at rival clubs floated back to Stamford Bridge.

No Chelsea manager since has devoted so much energy to keeping Drogba productive and happy. Luiz Felipe Scolari, who later bemoaned the team's "bureaucratic" or mechanical style, pushed him to the margins, but there was a rebirth under Guus Hiddink and Ancelotti, who extracted 37 goals from him in 2009-10. The Golden Boot and a Premier League-FA Cup double (he scored the winner against Portsmouth) will be the final adornments to his seven years in blue unless the old guard can finally land the Champions League title, at Wembley in May.

Mourinho once said of Drogba: "He is the kind of player I would tell: 'With you I could go to every war.'" Playing through a bout of malaria is ample proof of his fortitude. But power and influence desert all players in the end. Just as Scolari preferred Anelka as a lone striker so Ancelotti now favours Torres and Anelka to shake this Chelsea team from its tightness and torpor.

When the scrabbling to rescue a campaign that started with the Premier League and FA Cup trophies in hand is over the old guard will assess their political strength and make what demands they still can of Abramovich. Plainly Terry is no longer Mr Chelsea with an automatic right to call the shots. New faces, fresh talents, are taking over. When Terry urged his colleagues to "man up", the phrase "man down" also leapt to mind. In the queue to be the first casualty, Drogba is where he plays: right at the front.