Terry secures world-beating £35m contract

John Terry signed the most lucrative deal in the history of English football last night with a £135,000-a-week contract with Chelsea that will earn him a staggering £35m over the course of the five years. The England captain is now the highest-paid defender in the world and has raised the bar in Premiership salaries to new heights.

The 26-year-old has been in negotiations for a new deal for the last year and talks were brought to an unexpectedly swift conclusion yesterday afternoon with the club. Terry's previous deal, worth around £80,000-a-week, would have had two years left to run come November. His new deal surpasses the £130,000-a-week paid to Andrei Shevchenko and Michael Ballack at the top-end of the Chelsea pay-scale.

Nevertheless, the Chelsea chief executive, Peter Kenyon, is still to secure the future of Frank Lampard, who now has less than two years left to run on his deal and appears no closer to signing the contract that has been offered to him. It would be inconceivable that Lampard, 29, would be offered less than Terry, although it is understood that the midfielder has found it impossible to make up his mind and is still entertaining the idea of a move to Spain.

A potential new club for Lampard would be able to buy out the last two years of his contract and sign the player for around £9m, the equivalent of the remaining two years' salary. That would also have been an option for Terry in January but the prospect of him leaving the club was always remote given his status at Chelsea among the players and fans.

It would be fair to say that no other club in the world would pay more than £7m a year in salary to a defender but then no other club in the world could ever value Terry as highly as Chelsea. A Barking boy whose family were staunch West Ham fans, he has been at Chelsea since the age of 14 and remains the strongest link between the supporters and a club that has changed beyond recognition in the last four years.

The negotiations have not always been simple and Terry has stood firm in pursuit of a figure that he felt reflected his status. The poor debut season endured by Shevchenko - and a distinctly average one from Ballack - have made Terry and Lampard even more determined that their deals should beat those of their team-mates.

Terry enjoys a close relationship with the club's owner Roman Abramovich, who has done nothing to discourage his aspirations to manage the club one day. The Chelsea captain and his agent, Aaron Lincoln, walked away from the talks in March when Kenyon told them that a nine-year deal was not an option. It is understood that some of the club's hierarchy had previously suggested they might get the player on a longer-term deal.

Terry's contract has been a political issue at Chelsea, especially in February when Jose Mourinho claimed after a Carling Cup game that his captain would only sign if he knew his manager was staying. It placed Terry in a difficult position between his manager and the Abramovich camp who were in opposition at the time.

Yesterday, Terry said that he had never wanted to leave Chelsea. "I'm really happy this has been concluded. There has been a lot of speculation but these things take time," he said. "I never had any doubts that I wanted to stay at Chelsea and that the club wanted me to stay."

"I hope that the fans can see that we are all trying to build something special here, both for now and for the future, and I want to be a part of that. I have been at Chelsea all my career and have the privilege of being captain. Now it's time to look forward to the new season, which we are all very confident about."

With the income from television revenue to be £900m a year for the 20 Premiership clubs over the next three years, Terry's deal reflects the fact that salaries have moved on to a new level. Last season Cristiano Ronaldo signed a new deal worth £120,000-a-week at Manchester United and increasingly the top players at clubs are moving on to contracts worth six figures a week. However, it tends to be the attacking players who get the bigger salaries. Craig Bellamy wages are understood to have doubled to £80,000-a-week after leaving Liverpool for West Ham.

Although Arjen Robben's remains the second major Chelsea player not to have signed a new deal, the club remain confident that he will stay. Kenyon described Terry's new contract as "an important day for Chelsea". "This was the right deal for us and John," he said. "We are committed to try and keep our players together on long-term deals."