Chelsea Are A Club with a Soul, Not A Hollow Shell

A comment on the treatment of Chelsea by media and rival fans

Contribution article from The Score!

I went to my first Chelsea game on March 12th 1988. It was Chelsea vs Everton, the score was 0-0. Chelsea legends and cult heroes Kerry Dixon, Steve Clarke and Pat Nevin all started the game, and Perry Digweed was in goal.

My Dad went to his first game 30 years before, when Chelsea beat Leicester 5-2 at Stamford Bridge in October 1958, with Jimmy Greaves in the starting lineup.

Chelsea’s been in my family for 65 years, and two generations. I love this club, and honestly that has nothing to do with the trophies. Chelsea is a community, a family. We’ve fought for our club so many times, no greater arguably than in the 1980’s when property developers tried to destroy the club, and Ken Bates helped form Chelsea Pitch Owners, and fans run the Save the Bridge Campaign. And like we often do, we won. We saved our club.

Chelsea was founded in 1905, and has a proud history. We’ve won every trophy we’ve entered at least once - and even before Roman Abramovich, the only major trophies we’d not won were the Champions League and Europa league. We won the league in 1955, the Cup Winners Cup twice and European SuperCup, as well as all the domestic cups.

Chelsea is a proud and historic club. We have much to be proud of.

Why am I telling you this? Because in the last 15 months, Chelsea Football Club has been dragged through the mud like never before. Most of us already knew the media disliked us, but the treatment of the club since sanctions were imposed on us in March 2022 has been generally awful.

During the sanctions and club sale there were numerous scaremongering stories from certain members of the written press - and I’ve not forgotten who wrote them. There were speculative stories, and others written well known journalists with no basis in fact. Even worse, Chelsea fans were treated almost like criminals, almost as if somehow it was Chelsea fans and employees who were partly responsible for the awful atrocities in Ukraine. People openly wrote articles in major newspapers saying we deserved to be relegated, deserved administration, many fans were celebrating our imminent demise, as were, embarrassingly, some journalists.

In their delight at us finally getting our ‘comeuppance’ people forgot the near 1000 members of staff at Chelsea whose livelihood was threatened, who could potentially lose their homes or be unable to make rent due to circumstances out of their control and for which they were not responsible for.

Real people. Real families. Terrified by scaremongering stories written solely to get likes, clicks, and stir up outrage.

Of course, there were some journalists who did themselves great credit and continue to do so. Ben Jacobs, Matt Law, David Ornstein for example, all acted with integrity and objectivity throughout this process and won the respect of many fans (this isn’t an exhaustive list by the way, there were many other journalists who were respectful to the club, but these three stood out).

It didn’t even stop with the takeover. Self-made billionaire investors who bought us, especially Todd Boehly, were immediately labelled by some people as reckless cowboys with no plan, a term which seemingly was given only due to their nationality. (That’s called xenophobia by the way).

When form deteriorated in January/February they came under the spotlight again. This time they were labelled by some as too controlling, clueless, clowns, and reckless with their spending. Chelsea were criticised for exploiting a legal loophole in FFP and amortisation rules, as if maximising the rules in your favour were a crime. Within a matter of days or weeks, it was announced the rules were being change to stop this.

They’ve rarely accurately judged our spending. In real terms we paid out £335m last season, with a long term commitment to the rest over several years, not £600m cash in one go. For example, of the £105m fee for Enzo Fernandez, we actually only paid out £30m cash this financial year.

But of course, that’s less click worthy and dramatic.

Immediately the media began saying we were in FFP trouble - which has nothing to do with club finances, and simply is about compliance with rules - and then this soon became ‘Chelsea are in financial trouble and have to have a fire sale’, which was never, ever true, simply a lazy headline for likes, clicks and to create unnecessary panic, written by people who most likely had no accurate idea of Chelsea’s finances.

Of course the media loved mocking us during our awful second half of the season, with a plethora of negative stats, dry jokes, mockery, disdain and people writing us off completely as a club, suggesting we had no chance of competing again and would never come back. (Believe it or not, this isn’t new to Chelsea fans. We’ve heard this so often by now we just laugh, as people are always proven wrong).

This summer, parts of the media and opposition fans seemed to be eagerly awaiting a fire sale and confirmation of Chelsea falling apart as a serious club, losing a lot of our best players, facing the consequences of our actions.

In reality, the players who look like leaving are ones we planned to lose from January, when the squad clear out was first planned and talked about by Matt Law. The only one who looks like leaving who wasn’t planned is Mason Mount - and even then there’s no guarantee this happens yet.

Far from taking whatever offer we could get for players in desperation, Chelsea have been tough negotiators demanding full value for our players.

But then of course, the coup de grace, Saudi Arabia. Three players who were already set to leave, Hakim Ziyech, Edouard Mendy, Kalidou Koulibaly, are set to join teams in the Saudi Arabian league for relatively small fees close to their book value. All players who are naturally a fit for that league, all who want to make the move.

Having already signed Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benezema, the Saudis are also targeting Son Heung-Min from Spurs, Ruben Neves of Wolves, former Chelsea loanee Saul from Atletico Madrid and four players from state-owned Manchester City.

Nothing too strange about any of this, right? Well, maybe a state owned club selling four players to another state owned club might be seen as controversial?

Nope. Nothing reported on that. No concerns raised whatsoever.

Instead, because the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia, who own the whole of Newcastle United and whose owner has a company who sponsors them, have a 5% holding in Clearlake Capital, who own 60% of Chelsea (not the whole club), people are speculating that a club selling three players at book value for very little cash profit on the books, are somehow involved in some clandestine conspiracy to save us from financial ruin (yes, people are actually saying this with a straight face).

Their argument is that we need money for FFP and want these players gone and have no other way to do so. Unfortunately for these critics, there’s a few holes in this.

First, Chelsea have plenty of easily sellable assets who aren’t first choice starters, like Conor Gallagher, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Callum Hudson-Odoi, and others who they could sell quickly to cover our FFP issues.

Second, we had a loan offer for Koulibaly from Inter, French clubs interested in Mendy, and Ziyech had loan interest from PSG in January. These players could easily have been offloaded to European clubs if they’d wanted and taken off our wage bill that way.

Third, the Saudi clubs seem to want more players from Manchester City than Chelsea. They are are overpaying for players from outside of Chelsea, and only market value for Chelsea players.

Fourth, if we were flogging deadwood players we can’t shift, the likes of Kepa and Pulisic would be the ones forced to go to Saudi clubs for ridiculous money. That’s not happening.

Nevertheless, in the last few days we’ve seen a swathe of journalists, ‘experts’ and rival fans take to twitter to condemn us, allege we’re actually owned by Saudis’, that PIF actually own us and influence all our decisions, how we’re corrupt, engaged in illegal activity.

On Monday, only days after the first link to a Chelsea player emerged, we had a major newspaper reporting clubs were calling for an investigation into the sales. Its’ truly remarkable how quickly this happens when Chelsea are involved. If things were equitable, then surely an investigation into Manchester City would following. given they are literally state owned and have four players linked.

But of course, it’s not.

The same parts of the media, twitter accounts and rival fans who went for us last year are now digging in again, one journalist even suggesting we deserved to suffer financially for the mistakes made in previous windows, saying action needed to be taken to take us down a peg and ‘punish’ us.

Quite frankly, with what happened last year, this was the last straw.

Chelsea Football Club is not not a punchbag to be passed around from journalist to journalist, it's not some evil criminal organisation from a Bond movie, engaged in secret criminal activity, and we’re not people’s ticket to easy likes with scaremongering stories.

Above all, we are absolutely not the soulless club we are almost always portrayed as.

Most fans I know are done with being treated like a pile of dirt on a shoe by certain parts of the media, and with certain parts of the press and a swathe of rival fans attacking us, making false, baseless, uneducated allegations about the club and the owners, and taking everything we do and turning it into a way to criticise or laugh at us.

Enough. Is. Enough.

I’m frustrated and angry that our proud and historic club, a club I love, is being seen and treated like some fake, plastic club with no tradition, no history, no character, and who contribute nothing of value to football or society. It’s simply not true, and it's gone on far too long.

The work of the Chelsea Foundation is award winning, the work the club does with Pride is phenomenal, Chelsea recently hosted the first Iftar in a Premier League stadium (see above), and who can forget the incredible, ongoing ‘Say No To Hate’ campaign. Then there’s the annual Stamford Bridge Sleep Out to raise money for charity. Not to mention the great work Chelsea Pitch Owners and the Chelsea Supporters Trust do on behalf of the fans and the club. These are all a true credit to Chelsea Football Club, and should be celebrated more often.

We’re not some johnny-come-lately plastic club. We’re a proud and historic club, now with 118 years of history. We have a loyal and committed fanbase, who have involvement and influence unlike many other fans in the Premier League through Chelsea Pitch Owners, and a foundation who do incredible community work. Our fans have been through tough times and good times together, and we still love our club.

The agendas, the attacks, the kicking when we’re down, the delight in us being in perceived trouble, has gone too far and it has to end. Chelsea fans have been through a lot in the last 18 months, our club almost ceased to exist 12 months ago. Enough is enough.

We deserve better, and Chelsea Football Club deserves better.

The Score