2022 has been a year to remember for Chelsea Football Club. From ushering in a new ownership group and saying farewell to the one that built the club into the one it is today. To Emma Hayes celebrating 10 years with the Blues to Graham Potter taking the reins.
CFC has been through a load of ups and downs as the seasons for each team begin to heat up. Through all of this drama, this year is without question one of the most historic in the club’s history. Some think that after seeing the Chelsea Women constantly lifting silverware at the end of each season in recent years, the Blues have been at the top of the mountain from the beginning. The truth is, the club’s women’s team started at rock bottom and worked its way through numerous obstacles into the powerhouse it has become today.
30 years ago in the month of October, the Chelsea Women’s Team was born, playing its first competitive contest of the modern era, and since then, the rest is history. From the CFC Ladies’ players selling lottery tickets outside of Stamford Bridge during match days to help raise funds for the women to Sam Kerr netting stunning goals to give the Blues their third straight league title in front of a packed Kingsmeadow crowd, the team has overcome unimaginable circumstances for it to reach the position it is in today.
As Hayes celebrated her 10th season at the helm, she reminisced about her first day of work, and where it all started with her at CFCW:
"“We’re talking about 10 am on Sunday, no one on-site…‘What do you mean we don’t have an office? What do you mean there’s no full-time players or staff?’ There wasn’t a single member of staff that worked for the women’s section, let alone had an office, let alone had a desk, or a filing cabinet. The starting point was zero, and that was terrifying and exciting all at once.”"
The Blues started as a club just trying to catch up with the Arsenals and Millwalls of the world back in 1992, but through continued investment and the desire to reach the highest of heights, Chelsea has taken its women’s team to levels, not even Julie Newell would have thought in the mid-1990s when her goal-scoring prowess earned the Blues first promotion. With an interest by the Chelsea supporters of a women’s team, Tom Farmer, the first manager of the Chelsea women helped the Blues rebound from a third-place finish in the Greater London Women’s League Division Three in the inaugural season to a promotion to the First Division to follow it up.
Crowds started from less than 150 in a stadium, but around 20 years later, a record attendance at Kingsmeadow of 4,790 fans broke the mark for the most fans at a Women’s Super League match not held at a men’s stadium. What makes the Chelsea Women so special is the drive for consistency and constant improvement. In the early days, the women’s team had a completely different sponsor to the men’s side, but in today’s day and age, both squads work closely together to form one large family that makes the fans a supporter of both teams simultaneously.
Former chair of the Chelsea Women, Adrian Jacob reflected on the beginning years of the club just before the Champions League final against Barcelona, stating, “At the time, women’s football was not professional. The WSL was not televised and there was no focus on it whatsoever. The girls were part-time, which was typical…You had big club names but they were affiliated to the club rather than being run by the club. Our staff, like Emma and her assistants, were working 90-hour weeks to keep things going.”
He continued, “All the girls were part-time, had other jobs, trained a couple of days a week, and trained at Staines FC at Wheatsheaf Park. There would be about 100 people and a dog, maybe sometimes two or three dogs there.”
The Chelsea Women’s team got its first taste of Wembley in an exhibition match before the men’s FA Cup final in 1997, and who would have thought that would be the start of the lifting trophies at the United Kingdom’s most prestigious ground almost a normality at the end of the season. The Blues would go on to seal the deal for its first trophy of the modern era against Reading in the County Cup and in the 1999/00 campaign, Chelsea locked up the first of what would turn out to be many trebles.
Turbulence followed in the next few seasons, but with the emergence of Roman Abramovich purchasing the club, and the release of the long-time boss George Michealas, the perception of the women’s team at the club began to slowly change. Despite that, Chelsea was still a part-time club until the second season of Hayes’ reign at the club. In her first season after taking over for Matt Beard, the Blues finished in sixth place in the WSL, demonstrating how much work there was left to do.
From tackling the lack of investment to the lack of popularity of women’s football for many years, Hayes remained at the heart of the operation, being the key figure in transforming this club into one that looks nothing like the one that kicked off on October 4, 1992. Finishing second in the 2014 campaign was the catapult that launched the Blues into a completely new stratosphere. Ji So-yun may have left the club this past summer to head back to her home country, but her move to the club in January 2014 was an intricate part of Chelsea’s history. As one of the world’s most talented midfielders, her willingness to join the Blues made the rest of the world take it seriously, and the dominoes would fall from there.
It is extremely difficult to sum up truly how much this club’s women’s team has gone through but at the end of the day, there is still growth yet to be done. Hayes is a manager who is obsessed with winning, and while one day she may have to pass the torch on, her character and attitude will live on through the club. From playing in front of just a few dogs to becoming part of the Chelsea family, and securing their own home in London, the Chelsea Women have come more than just a long way over the past 30 years.
As women’s football continues to take jumps in popularity, the ceiling for this team is limitless. From where it started to what it is now, the Blues have taken what was an ambitious start-up project at the time and turned it into a team that every club around the world fears on its fixture list.