Chelsea players, coaches blanked at London Football Awards for second year

The Chelsea FC Foundation kept the club from going home empty-handed from the 2019 London Football Awards. For the second year in a row, no Blues players or coaches heard their name called at Battersea Evolution.

It’s a good thing Chelsea have plenty of history to fall back upon (contrary to popular, they do have quite a history). None of Chelsea’s five nominees at the London Football Awards – Eden Hazard, Kepa Arrizabalaga, Erin Cuthbert, Ji So-Yun and Maurizio Sarri – won. The Blues were the only Premier League club nominated for an award to be shut out at the event (Fulham – poor, lowly Fulham – did not even have a nominee). Fortunately, the Foundation’s “Say No to Anti-Semitism” campaign won over their peers for Community Project of the Year.

The two-year drought at the London Football Awards comes after the Blues won at least one trophy in each previous edition of the event, and follows the high water mark of 2017 when Chelsea won Player of the Year (N’Golo Kante), Manager of the Year (Antonio Conte) and Outstanding Contribution to London Football (Frank Lampard).

The omission that may sting Chelsea fans the most was not in the winners but in the nominees, and that through no fault of anybody’s except the club. Callum Hudson-Odoi is one of the most talented young players in all of England – if not all of Europe – and certainly in London. But because he played so few minutes until the January transfer window, he did not rise to the level of a nomination for Young Player of the Year.

Unsurprisingly, that is the category where Chelsea historically have the fewest nominations and where they have yet to win a London Football Award. Andreas Christensen was nominated last year – the first for a Chelsea player – but came in behind Fulham’s Ryan Sessegnon. This year, the award went to West Ham’s Declan Rice.

Hudson-Odoi will remain eligible for the Young Player of the Year award for three more years. Obviously, he must first remain in London beyond this season. He will only stay with a guarantee of more playing time, and that will all but lock in him for at least one nomination in the years ahead.

The other award we were watching closely was Goalkeeper of the Year. Kepa Arrizabalaga was nominated in his first season in London, just as Thibaut Courtois was in 2015. Whereas Courtois won four years ago, Ben Foster took this year’s award, which is probably for the best given the events of the weekend. The last thing anyone would want is to relitigate the Carabao Cup final in light of Arrizabalaga winning an award just when we thought that silliness was behind us.

Perhaps in coming editions of the London Football Awards they will have categories for Youth Player of the Year or Loanee of the Year. That would at least play to Chelsea’s strengths while they figure things out on the pitch (at least the men – the women’s team seems to know how to do this whole footballing thing).