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.
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