A note on Wednesday’s fixture

This feels like déjà vu. Chelsea away to Naples: a fresh-faced manager who somehow manages to combine arrogance with a singular capacity to bore and annoy at the same time. In 2012 we were torn to pieces. That villainous trident — Ezequiel Lavezzi, Marek mohawk Hamšík and Edinson El Matador Cavani — ran us ragged. It was all too easy. Naples felt vast compared to the Bridge, endless acres of space to scamper into, to ping pass after pass and unleash shot after shot at an unusually leggy Petr Čech.

Then we had André Villas-Boas at the helm. Fans currently bemoaning Rosenior’s appointment as the least deserving in Premier League history would do well to remember the fiasco of AVB’s brief tenure. Abramovich had him pinned as a mini-Mourinho and, except for the utter lack of charisma, tactical nous, man-management skills, and Shakespearean press performances, he may well have been right — they did at least both hold Portuguese passports.

That performance in Naples was the last straw. Villas-Boas got the boot, and assistant and fan-favourite Roberto Di Matteo stepped up, guiding us to a miraculous 4–1 victory at home. Ivanović loitered in space to sweep home Drogba’s low drive across the six-yard box and win it. Ecstasy. In 2012, somehow, we went on and on and all the way to Munich to beat Bayern in their own backyard on penalties.

You never forget your first, as they say, and Chelsea fans these days are often found daydreaming about that run. I was seventeen then, in my final year of sixth form, and despite my school being the building next to Stamford Bridge, I’d never really been into football. But being a teenage boy without even the mildest pretence of supporting a team would be a bit like trying to claim to be a Jewish atheist in Belfast during the Troubles. You’ve got to have a confession of one sort or another. So whenever asked the equivalent question — Protestant or Catholic? — I’d answer: yeah, Chelsea.

That year, though, I really did get religious. Those two legs against Naples were my Damascene moment. And to fend off any accusations of glory-hunting, I’d invite a bookie to dust off the odds of Chelsea becoming champions after that first-leg defeat. They must have been astronomical. The route to victory embodied whatever truth there is behind the clichés of the Chelsea way: we like to win first; how we win matters less. If we can’t win, we should at least be hard to beat. A solid defence, a gritty mentality, and a charismatic striker with a habit of scoring in finals — that was the formula fourteen years ago. See how easy it is to fall into clichés?

Oh, how different we are now. Who would have thought a change in ownership could send such seismic reverberations through a club — its culture and even the way it plays football? On the pitch, Chelsea under BlueCo — a consortium of billionaires and private equity — have embraced a style befitting the current obsession with tactics and metrics. Players are measured to within an inch of their lives to maximise their “great expectations”: xG, xA, x-metres-run-into-space-squared, ad nauseam.

Off the pitch, it’s an uncanny valley of market-based assessments. Chelsea players almost appear human. They have names like Reece James and Enzo Fernández. But from the vantage point of BlueCo’s accounting department, they are more legible as stock options — investments to be bought and traded at the right moment. The squad is young — the youngest in the Premier League — youth guaranteeing enough time to see whether assets yield an adequate return. Fans fall in love with players for what they bring to the pitch: a tackle to rouse the stadium, a drop of the shoulder to dart into the box. But when every pass, sprint and shot is logged elsewhere, fed into a valuation formula, the romance curdles.

And as if one club governed by financiers’ logic weren’t enough, BlueCo’s model is one of shared ownership. A year after buying Chelsea, they acquired RC Strasbourg. Despite claims that the two clubs are distinct projects, the reality is obvious. Racing is a feeder club, its interest in winning Ligue 1 secondary to producing assets that may or may not be absorbed into Chelsea’s balance sheet. Even the manager is a plaything. Liam Rosenior is probably a very nice if boring person. But it is his position at the end of puppet strings — dangled beneath BlueCo’s green-greedy fingers — that deepens the fans’ disenchantment.

Bizarrely, the whole post-2022 spectacle has induced many of the Chelsea faithful towards unfashionable views on Russian oligarchs. It’s a contradictory emotion. No club suffered more from the Russo-phobia that followed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Abramovich was hit particularly hard. No one outside Chelsea ever liked his money or the way he splashed it in the early 2000s, but he left behind the world’s envy in the women’s team, a stellar academy, and a generation of ecstatic memories. After selling the club, Abramovich didn’t retreat to a yacht; he actively mediated between Russia and Ukraine — and for his trouble was poisoned alongside two Ukrainian negotiators in March 2022. I struggle to name many football owners who put in a comparable shift.

As much as the English game railed against Abramovich in 2003, his arrival marked the Premier League’s new financial epoch. First the Russians, then the Gulf states — and now? At Chelsea, the Americans. Across the league, wealth flows through sponsorships, media deals and image rights, much of it from across the Atlantic. If Trump were to invade Greenland — or plausibly Gibraltar, given the way his mind wander — would we expect a similar wave of Americaphobia, asset seizures and sanctions? I doubt it.

So, is it déjà vu? Chelsea is still owned by the rich, and football remains defined by money. We’ve swapped a Russian peacemaker for American accountants. Both throw money at the club; only one seemed to galvanise it towards sustained victory. Fourteen years ago, after that evening in Naples, glory felt impossibly distant — and yet it arrived. Today it feels distant again. And despite the apathy that has cooled my youthful religious fervour, I still whisper the same five-word prayer before every game, and I’ll whisper it again tomorrow:

God, I hope we win.