Ain't got no history, huh? Well, 120 years of Stamford Bridge, and the club created to fill it, say otherwise.
No other football club is so inextricably linked to its home ground, for better or for worse, as Chelsea. Stamford Bridge had been a garden market until 1876, whereupon it was taken over by the London Athletic Association as their headquarters. The Mears brothers, H.A. or Gus and J.T., first tried to buy the leasehold to it in 1896, but were delayed from doing so until 1904, after the death of its owner.
The appeal to the brothers was obvious. In comparison with other parts of the country, football grounds in London and the South of England were still extremely basic. Crystal Palace was the main football venue in the capital, but even this was unsuitable as a large stadium by the Edwardian age.
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But the fact that the game still needed to grow in London was clear, and this gave the Mears brothers several options over what to do with their new modern stadium next. They received an offer from Great Western Railway, who wanted to turn the site into a coal yard, but an acquaintance of Gus Mears stopped him from chasing the quick profit. The brothers then offered the ground to nearby Fulham, but they turned down the offer, having already decided to redevelop Craven Cottage themselves.
So instead, the Mears brothers decided to form their own club. Chelsea FC were formed in April 1905. The new club applied at first to the Southern League and was rejected. With impressive chutzpah, the type that only comes when you've got a pile of money in the bank and a brand new 95,000 capacity stadium burning a hole in your pocket, the club immediately applied to join the Football League and were immediately admitted.
Promoted to the First Division after a couple of years, Chelsea did not take very long to establish themselves as a Football League club. Stamford Bridge had a chance to establish itself further in the years shortly after the end of the First World War, when it was chosen to hold three successive FA Cup finals.
However, the stadium didn't sell out for any of them, and two of them attracted disappointing crowds of only just over 50,000 people. Wembley Stadium took the FA Cup Final away for good in 1923. With the club in debt by the early 1930s, a lack of investment meant that it was only picked four times in total for England matches in the years before Wembley became the only home of the national team.
The only development at Stamford Bridge since its construction was putting a cover at one end, which would of course become known as The Shed, in 1931, and construction eight years later of a curious little stand, The North Stand, in one corner of the ground, and which seated just a couple of thousand people.
A new stand was built on the west side of the ground in the middle of the 1960s, but it was the success of the club throughout the mid to late 1960s that persuaded the directors that a bold new statement of Chelsea's position in professional football's rapidly evolving world was necessary.
The decision to rebuild Stamford Bridge was taken in 1970, and two proposals were heard for what to do next. The first idea, put forward by a consortium of businessmen, was that, against a background of falling attendances and revenues, the club would be best advised to greatly expand the use of Stamford Bridge in order to increase revenue, and then expand the whole area, including bars and restaurants, shopping and a sports centre.
The second, put forward by an architect called Darbourne & Darke, who had no prior experience of building a stadium, was to build a 60,000 capacity fully enclosed stadium, piece by piece. Heads were turned by the shiny thing.
With a total cost of £6.25 million, work would start immediately on the East Stand, which would cost £1.6 million alone. In June 1972, the original main stand at Stamford Bridge, designed by the influential civil engineer Archibald Leach, was torn down to make way for its behemoth of a replacement.
One side of Stamford Bridge remained a building site for the next two years, And this was a side opposite the television cameras, so the glacially slow progress of construction of the stand could be witnessed during Chelsea's increasingly sparse appearances onMatch of the Day orThe Big Matchas the team atrophied on the pitch as money waned and the team weakened.
Whether this was a cause or a reflection of the club's decline has been the subject of animated conversation for years. On the one hand, Chelsea had built a reputation on its association with Kings Road and swinging London during the late 1960s. On the other though, there was plenty more at play than just this.
The previous team had won trophies, but without a league title they were perceived not quite to have reached their potential. In addition to this, costs were mounting. The global financial recession of the early 1970s led to a spike in costs and delays in construction. Attendances were also falling as the team declined.
Since returning to the First Division after a year away in 1963, Chelsea hadn't finished below 9th place in the table, but at the end of 1972-73 season they finished 12th, and at the end of the following season they could only manage to finish in 17th place.
The new stand finally opened for the start of the 1974-75 season, and the television cameras of the BBC were present, along with commentator Barry Davis, for the visit of newly promoted Carlisle United, who were playing their first ever match in the First Division. But any optimism that the opening of the new stand could symbolise the start of a new era for Stamford Bridge was gone by the time the full-time whistle blew.
Carlisle United beat Chelsea 2-0 at Stamford Bridge, that day. It was Carlisle's first ever First Division match, and it set the tone for the rest of Chelsea's season. Just about the only positive that could be taken from it was that they exacted revenge for that opening day defeat by finishing one place and four points above Carlisle at the end of the season.
Carlisle, however, had finished bottom of the table. Chelsea, for the first time since 1962, were relegated from the First Division. The company accounts for the year to 1976 made for grim reading. By this point, they were £3.5m in debt, an astronomical sum for the time, and they couldn't get out of the Second Division at the first attempt, either.
They made it back in 1977, but were relegated again two years later. Crowds tumbled, hooliganism was on the rise, and the club sank deeper into the red. The remainder of the redevelopment of Stamford Bridge was already a half-forgotten memory, but the East Stand stood as a portent of doom, a symbol of decay.
In April 1982, the directors sold the club for £1 to Ken Bates. Crucially, though, they didn't sell Stamford Bridge to him. The directors had already siphoned off ownership into a company by the name of SB Property, and for reasons unknown, Bates didn't really seem to consider trying to buy the stadium when biuying the club.
Several months later though, Brian Mears and Charles Gerard John Cadogan, the 8th Earl Cadogan, who also went by the title of Lord Chelsea, sold their combined 70% shareholding in SB Properties to a small property company called Marler Estates, who quickly installed one David Bulstrode as their chairman.
Chelsea, meanwhile, retained a minority shareholding in SB Properties, but Bulstrode would be making the decisions regarding the future of Stamford Bridge from now on. On the pitch, meanwhile, Chelsea plumbed any depths during the 1982-83 season. With home crowds dipping below the 7,000 mark, the team just won four of their last 24 matches of the season.
With two games to play, and having failed to win any of their previous nine matches, they travelled to Burnden Park to play fellow strugglers Bolton Wanderers. In pouring rain, a Clive Walker goal 20 minutes from time won the game for Chelsea and spared them the further relegation that might well have killed the club altogether.
Instead, some money was put into the team, and with David Speedie and Kerry Dixon leading the attack, Chelsea ended the 1983-84 season as champions of the Second Division. They've only spent one season away from the top flight since, and that was more than three decades ago.
While the team's fortunes took an upswing on the pitch, away from it the situation regarding Stamford Bridge didn't show many signs of improving throughout the middle of the 1980s. The site of the ground could have been purchased by Bates in 1982 for around half a million pounds, but his offer was rejected and he didn't seem particularly motivated to push in order to reunite the club with their stadium.
Mahler obtained outline planning permission for 99 houses, 128 flats and 16,000 square feet of industrial office space for the site, which meant that Chelsea, upon completing their lease, would have to pay a vastly, vastly inflated sum to buy the stadium on account of this value, which would have to be given by an independent surveyor on market terms.
Some estimated this revised value as at least £15 million. This was the pre-Sky era. If Mahler saw this development through, then Chelsea would definitely have to leave Stamford Bridge. In 1987, Marler Estates, who'd also already bought Fulham's Craven Cottage, bought Queen's Park Rangers and installed David Bulstrode as chairman.
Bulstrode's idea was to merge Fulham and Queen's Park Rangers as Fulham Park Rangers and it was only derailed by fan protests, local councillors and eventually the Football League. Fulham were eventually rescued by a consortium led by Jimmy Hill.
But with that off the table, Chelsea having to ground share at Fulham after their lease expired in 1989 started to look increasingly like a possibility. If they couldn't agree terms when the lease expired, Marler had to find them a new home. Craven Cottage would count as a new home though, whether Chelsea liked it or not.
But then, on the 1st September 1988, Bulstrode suffered a suspected heart attack and died. The death of David Bulstrode at the age of just 51 was, of course, a tragedy on a human level. But it did also probably save Chelsea, Fulham and quite possibly Queen's Park Rangers as we know them today. And those who worked with him were clearly and evidently shocked.
Still though, the legal battles rumbled on. Chelsea's plans for the stadium, named the Chelsea Village, were far from perfect. The Stamford Bridge pitch would have to be shrunk to almost the minimum size allowed in order to accommodate it, which would limit its use for major international matches or other sporting events.
A public inquiry was set up and, despite the fact that the plans exceeded density limits for residential property in the area, it was approved by the local council in March 1989. A month after this, the club faced a new foe. After Bulstrode's death, Marler had sold out to a company called Cabra Estates, owned by John Duggan.
When the lease on Stamford Bridge expired in 1989, Bates kept the legal wheels turning in order to continually frustrate Duggan's attempt to revict the club. In June 1991, the High Court ordered that if Chelsea were to buy Stamford Bridge, the costs should be set according to its value in August 1988.
Bates estimated this at £6-10 million, Cabra at £40m. The independent valuation of the land eventually valued it at £22.85m. After issues relating to the different shareholdings were taken into account, The club would have to find around £14m in order to purchase the freehold.
Cabra, however, were already in financial trouble themselves, having seen their share value drop by 90% and with debts of over £50m. The company also owned Craven Cottage, so they promised Fulham £5m to vacate it and move to Stamford Bridge, despite the fact that the council had already repeatedly warned that planning permission for the site would specifically preclude ground-sharing.
Bates' prevarication eventually paid off. The 1992 property crash wiped out the value of the remainder of Cabra's assets and in turn Cabra itself. The club's new landlord would be Royal Bank of Scotland, who proved to be considerably less avaricious landlords than Cabra had been. They offered Chelsea a 20-year lease with an annual rent of £1.5m but also the option to purchase the site at any point for £16.5m.
A new stand was announced in 1992, but the club had difficulty raising the money to build it, even through the Chelsea Pitch Owners, the group set up to ensure that Stamford Bridge could never fall into the hands of property developers again. In 1993, Bates placed an advertisement in the Financial Times seeking investment and was contacted by Matthew Harding.
“Ken Bates here. I understand you're considerably richer than I am.” So began the telephone call that would alter the future direction of both Chelsea FC and Stamford Bridge yet again. This next development of Stamford Bridge would be just another phase in the development of a stadium which had not changed very much from its previous incarnations. When the Premier League kicked off in August 1992, Stamford Bridge was still bowl-shaped.
The West Stand was clearly not long for the world. Even in the couple of years prior to the start of the whole new board game, it had already started to look considerably older than it should have done, considering that it was barely more than 25 years old, all wooden bench seats and concrete.
Behind the goals were vast tracks of emptiness, occasionally covered in parked cars on matchdays, with the terraces bowl-shaped and a long way from the pitch. From the West Stand, to the left there was an open terrace for away supporters which was basically a giant C-shaped cage.
At the opposite remained the Shed End, covered at the back, open at the front and slightly off-centre, giving that part of the ground a somewhat lopsided feel. And opposite than West End was, of course, the financially ruinous East End. Although ten years younger, comparing these two is a little like comparing a family saloon car with a space station.
The East End looked as though it comes from a different century, never mind less than a decade later. Had it been built on time, perhaps even on budget, it could have been the start of the construction of a spectacular new home for the club. It soars into the air.
It used to have the North Stand next to it to give it even more scale, but that was demolished, probably thirty years overdue, in 1979. The East Stand also made the West Stand look even more dated, but with one obvious catch. The East Stand at Stamford Bridge cost more than £3 million in 1974. The West Stand cost £150,000 in 1965. Even allowing for nine years of inflation, this was better value. For a long time, the East Stand represented those lost years. The West Stand may have been cheap and dated, but at least it didn't ruin the club.
With Marler and Cabra having been primarily interested in evicting the club, and Chelsea themselves having spent half of the previous two decades teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, little had been done to Stamford Bridge since the demolition of the North Stand in 1979, with the possible exception of the brief time of Ken Bates' ill-advised and short-lived electric fence.
The council refused him permission to plug it in and it was subsequently dismantled. But it did make its brief appearance at the height of the hooliganism crisis in 1985. Consequently, the capacity of the stadium had dropped as stadium regulations became increasingly stringent.
The original capacity of Stamford Bridge had been estimated between 95,000 and 125,000 people, but by the time of construction of the West End in 1965 it had dropped to 52,500 and by the start of the Premier League it was down to 31,670.
The government stipulated that all clubs had to have all-seater stadia by August 1994 and Chelsea's application along with that of five other clubs to extend this was rejected. The Shed Terrace was demolished in the summer of 1994, but no official confirmation of this was made prior to the last match of the 1993-94 season against Sheffield United, and no special send-off was put in place for it.
Harding, by this time a director, bought the freehold from the bank in 1995, and this set in motion an inevitable personality clash with Ken Bates, a man not used to sharing control of anything. The two traded insults through the media, but it ultimately all boiled down to one fundamental difference in perspective; Bates wanted to get on with redeveloping the site, while Harding believed that other developments apart from the stadium itself should wait until financial investment in the team had reaped its own rewards.
A 2-1 defeat to Bolton at Burnden Park was the last Chelsea match that Harding ever saw. Matthew Harding's death in 1996 in a helicopter crash at the age of just 42 was a shock to almost everyone at the club and the new stand opposite the Shed End was named for him. Well, it was a shock for everyone bar one; a year after his death, Bates called Harding ‘evil’, because of course he did.
During the middle of the decade, both ends of Stamford Bridge were either briefly buildings sites, or open temporary stands, and the final piece of the puzzle fell into place in 2001 with the completion of a new West Stand. The stand had been started in 1998, but almost comically predictable hold-ups in getting planning permission meant that it wasn't completed until three years later.
In 1997 the Chelsea Pitch Owners purchased the Stamford Bridge freehold, the turnstiles, the pitch and the Chelsea FC name with the aid of a non-recourse loan of £10 million from Chelsea Village plc, the parent company of the club. In return, they granted the club a 199-year lease on Stamford Bridge at a peppercorn rent. The Bridge, at least for now, was safe.
Stamford Bridge by this point had been completely regenerated, with hotels, shopping and three new stands alongside the East Stand. Yet again though, stadium redevelopment had thrown the club into financial crisis. An £18m loan owed to a consortium headed by Barclays and £5m owed to Harding’s estate in relation to a guarantee given to the Royal Bank of Canada were at the centre of a total of £96m owed by Chelsea Village PLC, the company of which the football club was a subsidiary. With the group teetering on the brink of insolvency, Roman Abramovich swooped, offering £140m for the entire group. Ken Bates, who'd purchased the club for £1 in 1982, walked away with £17m.
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Aspiring superclubs, however, can't remain in 41,000 capacity stadia. Financial fair play rules require clubs to squeeze tighter on every form of incoming revenue stream that they can, and bigger, shinier stadia not only increase revenues, but they're a status symbol too. They make a statement. Manchester City and Liverpool have both made theirs, increasing the capacity of their stadiums. Spurs, West Ham and Arsenal have already moved to bigger new homes as of West Ham United. 60,000 is the new 40,000, and Chelsea need to be in that club.
The quest for something bigger has been going on for some time. Despite not being awarded preferred bidder status for the site, Cheslea issued ambitious looking plans for a new stadium at Battersea Power Station in 2012 Supporters groups were furious, but it didn't end up making any difference because the sellers ended up going with their preferred bidder, a Malaysian consortium, regardless.
The next plans for the stadium came in 2017, with a plan that supporters seemed more inclined to support. This involved the complete demolition of the stadium and building a new 60,000 capacity replacement in a strikingly gothic looking style reminiscent of the futurist styling seen in cities like Rotterdam.
It didn't take long, however, before further problems started to raise their head. Chelsea would have to play away from Stamford Bridge and wanted to use Wembley exclusively, but the only way in which they could do this was by limiting the capacity to below 50,000. They also enquired about the use of Twickenham.
Meanwhile, a family who lived close to the stadium applied for an injunction against the project on the basis that it blocked sunlight into their house. The Crosthwaite family, a retired banker, his interior designing wife and their two adult children, eventually found their injunction overturned.
But in January 2018 the council sided with the club by planning to use its powers under planning law to buy the air rights over part of Stamford Bridge and the railway line which sits between the stadium and the two affected homes. It would then lease the land back to Chelsea and railway operators Network Rail, meaning that the Crosthwaites would be entitled to compensation but would not be able to prevent the redevelopment.
The victory, however, was a somewhat pyrrhic one for the club. In May of the same year, and with the cost of development understood to have spiralled towards a billion pounds, Chelsea formally announced that, on account of an unfavourable investment climate, the plans had been put on hold, though it was widely believed that it was at least in part a reaction to Abramovich's ongoing visa issues.
It was also was reported that the club may have to look again at the possibility of moving elsewhere if they are to force the costs of their development down to a level that they can afford. This, in turn, of course, would lead to even greater delays.
Abramovich has gone now, of course, and Clearlake, the new owners, are making noises about wanting a new stadium. But despite links having been made with Earls Court, White City, Chelsea Barracks and the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, It's looking increasingly unlikely that any plans will come to anything for a while.
Such is the nature of the modern football supporter that we're almost hardwired not to allow people to enjoy things these days, but the most heard accusation thrown at Chelsea since the arrival of Roman Abramovich has been somewhat wide of the mark.
Fans of rival clubs, long focused on sneering, you've got no history at a club that, some might argue, has got rather too much history, if anything. Chelsea's history might not have been as spectacularly loaded with silverware as some other clubs, but if that's the bar used to define whether a club has a history or not, then all bar about five or six clubs in the entire history of English football have one either.
They’ve been have been the champions of England, both during the Premier League era and as a part of the Football League. They've completed a full sweep of domestic trophies, having won the FA Cup, the League Cup, the Charity Shield and even the full Members' Cup, the Football League's ill-advised replacement for regular European football when English clubs were banned from Europe in 1985.
Add to that a clean sweep of European competitions, the Champions League, the Europa League, the Cup Winners' Cup and the European Super Cup. and this idea starts to look even more absurd.
Stamford Bridge has been central to the very fabric of Chelsea Football Club throughout the entirety of its 114 year history. Arsenal have left Highbury, Manchester City have left Maine Road, and Everton have left Goodison Park. But Chelsea, the club created to justify the existence of a stadium, have never left Stamford Bridge.
There have definitely been times when this has been a curse as well as a blessing. The location of the stadium has ensured that property developers with pound signs in their eyes have never been far away. And a degree of bloody-mindedness has long been a required character trait for a senior position within a club for whom having a stadium to play at has not always been a certainty for much of the last half-century. And in a sense, Stamford Bridge has mirrored the contradictory nature of the club itself.
Accompanying image byAndreas H. fromPixabay
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