Chelsea

» Click for all Chelsea shirts and memorabilia

Latest Chelsea News:

Chelsea

Chelsea Football Club formed in 1905 by Henry Augustus Mears. London at the turn of the century failed to provide a single team to the Football League First Division. Mears had spotted the potential for a football club to play at an old athletics ground at Stamford Bridge. On March 14th 1905, a meeting convened opposite the stadium in a pub now called The Butcher's Hook. One item on the agenda was a name for the new club. Stamford Bridge FC, Kensington FC and intriguingly, London FC were all rejected. And so Chelsea FC was born.

Chelsea initially applied to join The Southern League but were turned away so Chelsea joined the northern-dominated Football League. In May 1905, the Football League AGM elected Chelsea to the Second Division without having kicked a ball.

The first competitive game was on September 2nd 1905 with a 1-0 defeat away at Stockport. The crowds, however, flocked to Stamford Bridge with 67,000 fans attended a match against Manchester United on Good Friday 1906 and by the end of the second season, Chelsea were promoted to Division One.

In 1915, Chelsea reached their first ever FA Cup final, playing Sheffield United at Old Trafford which they lost 3-0.

After the end of the First World War, crowd numbers at Stamford Bridge continued to rise, culminating in an October Saturday in 1935 when 82,905 crammed into the curving terraces for a league game against Arsenal - the highest official attendance ever recorded at the ground as well as remaining the biggest attendance in English league football too.

After the end of the Second World War, Londoners were desperate to see top level football once more so when Moscow Dynamo opened a tour of Britain against Chelsea and it seemed the whole city came to watch. The turnstiles were closed with a recorded 74,496 having passed through but the shut gates proved no obstacle to the football-starved masses. Just how many gained illegal entry will never be known - although estimates put the total crowd at 100,000. Such were the scenes around the pitch that the 3-3 result seems incidental but scoring Chelsea's third was a new centre-forward by the name of Tommy Lawton.

1959 saw the emergence of a teenage striking protégée. His name was Jimmy Greaves, probably Chelsea's best youth product ever. Greaves was without doubt a goal-scoring genius - still regarded by many as the finest finisher England has ever produced. By the time of his sale to AC Milan in 1961, Greaves had scored an incredible 132 times in 169 appearances.

With the start of the 1960's, Chelsea were desperately in need of an overhaul and promoted Tommy Docherty to manager. As the 60s moved into full swing, Doherty pruned out the deadwood and selected new players like Peter Bonetti, Ron Harris, Barry Bridges, Bobby Tambling and Terry Venables.

In 1965, Chelsea came close to winning the 'treble'. They beat Leicester City 3-2 on aggregate in the League Cup Final. Liverpool however, proved too strong in Chelsea's first FA Cup semi-final for 13 years and the League Championship dream was killed-off late in the season by two defeats up north - the first at Liverpool, the second at Burnley after Docherty had sent home seven players who had broken curfew at the team's hotel. In the Inter Cities Fairs Cup, Chelsea beat Italian giants Roma and Milan before losing to Barcelona at the Nou Camp.

After several bleak years at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s Chelsea ran into serious financial difficulties before Ken Bates, a businessman who had previously been involved with smaller clubs up north was approached to invest.Bates bought the clubs debts for £1. Six players were signed in the summer of 1983 for minimal money and the new-look team gelled instantly, winning the first game 5-0. It stormed to the Second Division Championship in style.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Chelsea signed their first £1 million-plus purchases, midfielders Andy Townsend and Dennis Wise, but the following seasons proved frustrating with Chelsea failing to rise above mid-table and far, far too often were knocked of the cups by lower league opposition. In 1993 Glenn Hoddle was made manager and Chelsea reached the FA Cup Final at the end of his first season.

A new millennium saw Claudio Ranieri, an Italian who had built knockout cup-winning sides at Fiorentina in his homeland and Valencia in Spain made manager but the clubs' debts still made the club ripe for new investment and on July 2nd 2003, Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea and a couple of seasons later José Mourinho was brought in from Porto to replace Claudio Ranieria as coach.