It was on this day 120 years ago that Chelsea Football and Athletic Club was founded in an upstairs room at the Rising Sun pub opposite Stamford Bridge. What a journey it has been since!
As the official Chelsea website and app continues to mark this landmark anniversary, we have picked out six firsts associated with the club that you might not know about. We begin in our foundation year…
First club to use ballboys – 1905
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Chelsea’s first goalkeeper, William Foulke, stood at 6ft 2in tall and weighed 22 stone. To opposition forwards, it felt like he took up the whole goal, and to help preserve his energy by saving him from collecting stray shots, football’s first ballboys were hired to do the work for him.
There was an added motive – the two boys would stand behind the goal to make Willie ‘Fatty’ Foulke look even more humungous. It worked! The goalkeeper, club captain in our first season, saved a remarkable ten penalties and conceded just 28 goals in 35 games in his solitary year as a Chelsea player.
First winners of a top-flight London derby - 1907
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When the game in this country was professionalised towards the end of the 19th century, clubs in the First Division hailed exclusively from either the Midlands or the north of England.
That changed in 1904 when Woolwich Arsenal were promoted, and it was with the team then hailing from south London that we contested the top-flight’s maiden London derby three years later after our own elevation from the Second Division.
On 9 November 1907, in front of a crowd of 55,000 at Stamford Bridge, a brace from the great ‘Gatling Gun’ George Hilsdon earned the Pensioners of Chelsea a 2-1 win against Woolwich Arsenal, and with it a significant slice of capital history.
First club to wear numbers on shirts – 1927/28
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On 25 August 1928, Chelsea stepped onto the Stamford Bridge pitch for the opening game of the new campaign. Something was a little different. For the first time, those in blue had white numbers on the back of their shirts, correlating to their position on the pitch.
Never before had a football team worn numbered shirts in a competitive game, but on that sunny August day, Chelsea and Arsenal did so. In fact, it was Chelsea who first donned numerals on their back the year before, in a trial game. Manager David Calderhead explained why: ‘We really did it to assist the spectators to follow some of the young and comparatively unknown players who took part in the trial yesterday.’
The numbers would tally with names on the matchday programme and teamsheet, a tradition that continues to this very day, and which Chelsea Football Club pioneered almost a century ago.
First black manager in the English top flight – 1996
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Ruud Gullit replaced Glenn Hoddle in charge of Chelsea in the summer of 1996, and in doing so the all-time great became this country’s first black top-flight manager.
He proved a huge hit in the role, guiding the Blues to an FA Cup triumph at the conclusion of the turbulent 1996/97 season. That was the first time a black manager had won a major trophy in England, too, further underlining his status as a trailblazing icon.
First foreign starting XI - 1999
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It was Gullit’s successor in the managerial role, Gianluca Vialli, that fielded a team consisting entirely of foreign players when Chelsea travelled to Southampton on Boxing Day in 1999. It was the first such occasion that had happened in England, and it didn’t come as a surprise. Then managing director Colin Hutchinson had famously described Chelsea as ‘a continental club playing football in England’.
Chelsea won 2-1 with both goals scored by our Norwegian striker Tore Andre Flo. We would finish the game with two Academy graduates, Englishmen Jody Morris and Jon Harley, on the pitch, and that blend of cosmopolitan and homegrown has been key to our identity ever since.
When Branislav Ivanovic towered above the Benfica defence in Amsterdam to snatch the Europa League trophy for us, he ensured Chelsea Football Club became the first in England to have won the Champions League, UEFA Cup/Europa League, Cup Winners’ Cup and Super Cup.
A few years later, with victory in Porto in 2021, we became the first team anywhere to win UEFA’s three foremost competitions – the Champions League, Europa League and Cup Winners’ Cup – twice.
We don’t need to tell you we are the first and to date only London club to have won the Champions League, while we should have been the maiden English club to play in the old European Cup in 1955, but were forced to withdraw by the FA.
This season we are trying to break new ground again, by winning the UEFA Conference League and becoming the first club to complete the full European set.