Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee/Image of Sport-USA TODAY Sports
Hello everyone and welcome to The Pride of London, a Chelsea Football Club fansite and blog dedicated to bringing you loads of Chelsea and international football related content. We hope to be your one-stop shop for Chelsea news, pre and postgame reactions, transfer rumors, player profiles, and so much more!
Before we jump in to any of that other stuff, let me introduce myself! My name is Khaled Abdallah and I’ve been a Chelsea supporter for about eight years. The question is, how does a kid from the San Francisco Bay Area come to support the Blues of West London? The answer is a summer full of a strange mix of watching World Cup soccer and a healthy dose of Winning Eleven 8 on the original Xbox.
Before the World Cup in 2006, I was a very casual fan familiar only with the national team soccer and the more traditional big name clubs around the world but being the new kids on the block, Chelsea was not one of them. Catching the fever watching international soccer, my friends and I transitioned from battling it out in Madden to arguing whether or not the wonder strike we just scored in Winning Eleven 8 was “on purpose”.
Most would play with United or “Man Red” as they were called in the game so I would choose Chelsea FC or “West London Blue” and fell in love. Making driving runs down the wing with Robben, doing the Zidane Pirouette with Joe Cole, hitting 30 yard screamers with Lampard, and scoring towering headers with Drogba were all ingredients to a potion that started my love affair with this wonderful club.
Chelsea Football Club has brought immense joy and of course great disappointment to my life and it seems silly to think it all started from a videogame that didn’t even have the license to display the club’s official name. Since I’ve started following Chelsea religiously, they’ve won four FA Cups, two League Cups, the Community Shield, the Premiership, the Europa League, and the greatest trophy in the world of cup football, the UEFA Champions League. Here’s to many more years of Chelsea dominance and more silverware than we can count!