What do Chelsea's problems mean for their rivals?

In his book Lomdon Fields Charlie Connelly ‘set to find out whether there was a football spirit unique to the metropolis … Pretty early I concluded there isn’t such a thing… There are a number of intra-city rivalries but no sense of London pride as such.’   Many of the fans live outside London, not to mention the global following.

Chelsea, it does not even need to be said, have been London’s most successful team during Abramovich’s tenure: 19 trophies, including five Premier Leagues and two Champions Leagues, tells its own story. Arsenal won the title in Abramovich’s first year, and have won five FA Cups since but nothing else. Tottenham have just one League Cup during the Abramovich era, and no other London club anything of note.

Has Abramovich spent Chelsea into permanent dominance? Or will they soon be caught up again once his cash injections are taken away?  The real underpinning of this model has been the quality of players that Abramovich has been able to buy.

Tottenham’s problem is that they look like they are trying to do the same thing on a much smaller budget. Owner Joe Lewis is himself a billionaire but does not have Abramovich’s appetite for spending his billions on footballers.

And so while Tottenham do have a strong core of senior players — Harry Kane, Son Heung-min, Hugo Lloris, Eric Dier, etc — they have not been able to supplement them over the years with the quality that Chelsea have.   My sense of the Tottenham squad is that falls away after a few world class players.  And so their experiment with this model, which needs a high-quality squad more than anything else, has not delivered any results yet.

Why stadiums matter

Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham all have new stadiums.  So far, these new stadiums have not exactly transformed the fortunes of their owners (although, it has to be acknowledged, this is Spurs’ first full season in the new ground at full capacity given the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020). But if the new Chelsea owners are unwilling to make the same investments as Abramovich was, then, in theory at least, the advantage of all that extra matchday revenue could start to tell.

Stamford Bridge will start to look comparatively smaller under a different ownership model. Tottenham are estimated to make £5 million profit from every home game at the new stadium, and will host money-spinning concerts and other sporting events too. Lady Gaga is playing twice there this July. Chelsea cannot compete with that.

The fragility of Chelsea’s situation, even post-Abramovich, should not be overestimated, though. They still have a squad of top players — even if they may not be able to keep all of them — and a global fanbase incomparable in size to what the Russian inherited in 2003. Stamford Bridge is not suddenly going to go empty.

But the Premier League is a global league and clubs work hard to market themselves to casual and foreign fans. Chelsea, like any winning team, have picked up plenty of those fans over the years. And if they are heading for a spell out of the Champions League, or with fewer stars in their team, their rivals might sense a chance to win some of those fans over.

The importance of academies

As much as Chelsea have dominated the London football landscape at a senior level, that is built in part on their dominance of greater London in academy football. Chelsea arguably have the best academy in English football.   Clearly, Chelsea are very good at what they do, both in terms of identifying talent but also in developing it.

Now suppose the post-Abramovich Chelsea was less willing to spend quite so much money on its academy. And imagine if they were not able to be quite so generous with supporting the academy players, or in offering those lucrative first professional contracts, or even with the size of their year-groups. (Chelsea tend to have between 20-25 players in each year, a larger group size than many academies.)

In this scenario, then, there might be an opportunity for Chelsea’s rivals to compete with them for more of the best young players in greater London.

We have to wait and see who the new owners are and how much money they have to spend.