Chelsea FC have done a good job during the coronavirus epidemic representing what a club should to for its community. They are winning the battle for hearts and minds that is only partially carried out on the pitch.
This has been an interesting year at Chelsea Football Club. The football and the personalities around the club have resulted in the side being more well-liked than any time in the past 20 years. That was peculiar even before the season took a turn into the absurd and dystopian with the coronavirus. Chelsea have still managed to excel during that time.
While Liverpool and Tottenham took it upon themselves to exemplify everything that is wrong with modern football with their selfish money-first attitude towards the very staff who make a club a club, Chelsea have done the opposite. While supporting the NHS two-fold with food and housing during the crisis, they have also not furloughed (as of this writing) their staff or even tried to embarrass the players into taking a pay cut in the world’s most undistinguished way as others have.
Football is about more than sport. It’s about community, ideology and history. Often I have remarked that Chelsea are fighting more than a battle on the pitch – they are fighting one for the hearts and minds of people throughout football.
That has been one of the major issues with the team when they lacked a true identity on the pitch and as an establishment.
Are Chelsea a club that values youth development or immediacy? Is it simply about winning or how they win? Would they rather make money pinching pennies in the transfer market or by establishing long term relationships? Does the club value patient persistence or insincere immediacy? Would they rather do things the right way or the wrong way?
It appears there’s finally been a comprehensive answer to those questions. A delightful one, at that.
During a season in which a club legend has come back to the club to instill a sense of respect and gravitas in the most ambitious and talented youth-centered side the Blues have maybe ever had, Chelsea also chose to do the right thing in the London community. It is something to be proud of.
That will make this summer more interesting in terms of transfers.
For a long time Chelsea have fought at the back of the idealists’ pack. They carried the perceived notion that the club was too impatient and not a good place for some of football’s best to build a career.
Still the case?
Manchester City are banned from Europe. Manchester United are what they are now. Tottenham are burdened with debt from a new stadium and have a chairman who thinks it’s appropriate during a global recession to pay himself a bonus for a stadium that went over budget and over schedule while furloughing employees. Liverpool had to be forced by the public to reverse their stance on the same issue.
Chelsea have no such issues and, after years of budgetary restraint, have a bit of cash in the bank. Are thing changing? Are they suddenly running themselves like the London version of the perfectly managed Alpine giants Juventus and Bayern Munich?
For the first time, it appears maybe so.
Rumors also have emerged that UEFA is going to lighten the burden of Financial Fair Play for a few years to let clubs recover from this crisis more gradually. That’s particularly helpful for clubs with wealthy benefactors such as Chelsea. With many clubs struggling with debt and being forced to sell players for reasonable sums of money, Chelsea might be able to add some legitimate game-changers – perhaps even history changers – this summer.
How would a summer spend look if the side added any 3-4 of Lautaro Martinez, Jadon Sancho, Ruben Dias, Unai Nunez, Alex Telles, Philippe Coutinho, Gianluigi Donnarumma or Jose Gimenez? What a summer that would be.
Players have turned down Chelsea before because they didn’t like the increasingly negative culture: the short term-ism, the pressure, the inability to plan a career for themselves and the skewed and ever changing trajectory of the team on a yearly basis.
That is no longer the case. Chelsea appear set to have come out of this crisis in as positive a way as a group possibly could.