At least in the annals of the popular modern history of the fully professional game, in the days since photographs went from curled sepia-toned scraps of paper to filter-warmed Instagram posts, there has never been such a thing as a player-owner. Not really. It is somehow appropriate that Didier Drogba, a man of invested career incongruity (we’ll get to this in a minute, I promise), would be the one to fulfill those dreams with Phoenix Rising.

There has never been much about Didier Drogba’s career arc that resolved itself out of a granulated haze to me. He is a man of contradictions, and the best example I can think of arrived at the conclusion of his year at Marseille, the ostensible hinge point of his career.

Drogba’s is a sensitive soul, perhaps surprisingly so. His launchpad to Chelsea was a one-year stint at Olympique Marseille, where he scored 30 goals in all competitions. Chelsea’s transfer fee after that season — they offered about $1 million for every goal he scored that year — was too good for Marseille to ignore. When Drogba learned the club sold him entirely because they didn’t want to regret leaving that much money on the table, he broke down in tears sitting at his locker for a final time. He took the money and felt burdened by the exchange all at once.

When rumors spread that Drogba was flirting with a return to the club earlier this year, he was told in no uncertain terms by the club’s supporters to “return to China.” There is confusion everywhere.

Drogba is, by dint of his resume as a player, a late career mercenary. He went to China in 2012 for a reported $200,000 a week, then left for the hardly en vogue Galatasaray in Turkey chasing $13 million at 35, enjoyed a nostalgic final tour at Chelsea in 2014 and then collected Designated Player money with the Montreal Impact for little more than a calendar year. On the bedrock of nothing else, it would be safe to assume that Drogba merely backed up his truck to a number of willing soccer banks and indiscriminately shoveled in cash for the last five years.

But watch Drogba play over any of those spells and this notion becomes a weak and desiccated thing. In China, Drogba joined a Shanghai Shenuha club that had finished last the year before and was applauded by neutral onlookers as a genuinely invested force on the field despite a dearth of quality almost everywhere else. A season at Galatasaray brought similar reviews, and after a hard-hustling if slightly underwhelming final go at Chelsea, his stint with Montreal was frankly unbelievable. He scored 11 goals in his first 11 matches, practically dragged the Impact into the playoffs in 2015 and left with a startling return of 21 goals in 33 games.

There was something gnawingly imperfect about Drogba’s time in MLS in that it hearkened back to a time when signing even the likes of Drogba – past 35, a half dozen clubs in the rearview and visibly diminished by the ravishes of time – was a goal unto itself. It was a different league by the time Drogba got here. Even then, he was beloved for a time. Two months after his arrival, Drogba corralled a group of starstruck Impact academy kids into the team’s locker room. Alongside teammate Ambroise Oyongo, Drogba pumped African dancehall music and held an impromptu dance contest. Even for a hard heart, this is a mechanical smile generator. Spontaneous PR doesn’t come more ready-made than this.

In any case, late-career Drogba was always a stalking contradiction, caught between shimmering visions of himself as both a careless mercenary and a man with a tireless work ethic once the whistle went. So it goes with North America’s only resident owner-player.

In a recent interview with the BBC, Drogba laid out some of the bedrock reasoning that went into his fairly shocking move to assume at least partial control of Phoenix Rising FC, one of the funnest teams in America even before Drogba made his decision. Drogba said he’d been offered sunset playing positions with a number of clubs, including in the Premier League, but the offer to part-own one came from just one place: the sprawling desert of Arizona. For a man concerned with upping his business acumen – what was China if not an expansion of his own personal global brand – that was a calculated carrot wrapped in bacon and then dangled. On the cusp of a play for MLS expansion status, Phoenix Rising knew precisely what it was doing, and it had very little to do with wins and losses generated by Drogba’s goals.

Make no mistake, this deal has very little to do with Drogba’s ability to actually play soccer. Had he valued that proposition, he certainly wouldn’t be playing in the USL, which is a fine up-and-coming league but has nothing on the competing offers he’d received. It was a business deal, wedding him with strange ownership bedfellows the likes of rocker Pete Wentz and DJ Diplo. Whatever their boardroom push was, it worked.

Drogba’s BBC interviewer jovially asked through a laugh whether he would ever acquiesce to a benching since he owns the team. “It’s important to respect the decision of the manager,” Drogba says, while Montreal fans curiously cock their collective heads to one side.

Drogba will play, of course, in all but the most extreme of circumstances – that is, if Drogba has a dinner date, or if Drogba had a bank errand, or if Drogba slept in. That is not a knock on Drogba’s now famous work ethic, which has served him well even through his criticisms as a sellsword, but rather as an acknowledgment of the ground we now occupy. Drogba is nearly 40 and he part-owns a second tier soccer team in Phoenix, Arizona. If you think this was not 90 percent about building the runway to owning an MLS franchise and 10 percent about kicking a ball, I’d suggest you look harder. If Phoenix Rising does not succeed in its MLS endeavor and Drogba does not then sell his shares in the team, you may call me Peaches until the end of time.

The underscore here is that Drogba The Businessman has finally assumed primacy over Drogba The Player. You are witnessing the transition as we live and breathe.