Stamford Bridge is ill-equipped for a Premier League club looking to remain competitive in the modern era. Photo: Darren Walsh/Getty Images
The seven hired actors in green velvet jackets who put on such a spectacle in the seats behind the home bench in the Stamford Bridge East Stand last Saturday were a small reminder of the huge problem at the heart of Chelsea.
They were involved in a paid promotion for a new film during that matchday, another business deal the club decided was too good to pass up. The seats they occupied are part of the Dugout Club, which the new consortium that owns Chelsea is selling for £3,000 each, per game, on the basis that you could be in the same TV frame as Mauricio Pochettino.
These seven actors were part of an elaborate marketing campaign for the film Argyle. Photo: Paul Childs/Reuters
Across the pitch, on the top tier of the West Stand, the club launched Westview; revamped hospitality offer, with the most expensive season tickets for all home league and domestic cup matches costing £3,685. If this all sounds a little exciting, perhaps it's because the opportunities for change are so limited. Faced with the enormous challenge of fitting Stamford Bridge into the modern era, trying to do something – anything – to increase matchday revenue will always seem less than adequate.
The Behdad Eghbali-Todd Boeli consortium faces many challenges on the field and three upcoming games of huge importance. Middlesbrough in the League Cup semi-final, second leg on Tuesday, Aston Villa in the FA Cup and then Liverpool at Anfield in the Premier League on the last day of the month. Nothing will be stable until Pochettino's team looks consistently competitive. But even the winning team will not be able to escape the shadow of the stadium from which the club grew many years ago.
Building a new stadium on the same Stamford Bridge site – or a new stadium elsewhere – was a task that even Roman Abramovich's oligarchic fortune could not solve. More than 20 years after he acquired the club, the stadium mystery has become increasingly important and complex. Baffled by everything from local council planning to the dark heart of Londongrad, Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine and the state of the Victorian catacombs at nearby West Brompton Cemetery.
In the tradition of private equity bros who like to believe that the world is theirs, Chelsea's owners will undoubtedly believe that they are the ones who can complete this quest. However, at Friday's annual meeting of Chelsea's ground owners, the fan-run company that has owned the ground since 1993 and is a key player in any redevelopment, it was clear that the club was back to square one again.
< p>By far the club's most experienced British property expert is director Jonathan Goldstein, who was one of the original members of the Boehli consortium. The latest man to take on the tensions of the West London basement excavation – which is one way of describing Abramovich's mega-project to build a new stadium, abandoned in 2018 – is Jason Gannon, the new chief operating officer. He was managing director of SoFi Stadium, built by the Kroenke family for the Los Angeles Rams NFL franchise and opened in 2020.
Kasper Stilsvig, Chelsea's chief revenue officer, who joined from Milan, will also play a role, but will these two bright-eyed executives still be here on that supposed day at some point in the future when the new stadium opens? a very controversial issue.
In the case of Stamford Bridge, co-owners Todd Boeli (left) and Behdad Eghbali took on the task that defeated their predecessor Roman Abramovich. Photo: Darren Walsh/Getty Images
The estimated cost of the new stadium is unusual. The timing is wonderful. More than £2 billion and perhaps six years from the start of the planning process to something close to completion, with the team having to play elsewhere for as many as three seasons and possibly more. Some fans would prefer Craven Cottage as a temporary site due to proximity. The club will be eyeing Wembley for its size and hospitality.
What happens to Chelsea fans in the meantime? CPO surveys have shown that Chelsea have the oldest group of season ticket holders in the Premier League, with an average age of 58. years away from home.
Stamford Bridge, which has a capacity of 40,341, is shrinking in size due to the growing demands of broadcasters on match days. Chelsea's annual matchday income was £82 million, according to Deloitte's latest audit of club finances. Tottenham Hotspur cost £125 million. Liverpool had £112 million. The increasingly outdated Old Trafford earned Manchester United £126 million. To close the gap, Chelsea will have to build the most expensive stadium Europe has ever seen.
The club bought most of the Oswald Stoll veterans' housing complex adjacent to the stadium for £80 million. The options for moving elsewhere are now vanishingly small, although not impossible. The Earls Court development, north of Stamford Bridge, has a well-thought-out masterplan which does not include a stadium. Changing this course and the views of London's two respective city councils will require a huge amount of money and political will.
Not rebuilding Stamford Bridge was also not an option, as Abramovich knew. The plan he commissioned was to excavate the ground to accommodate a stadium bowl large enough and build it across two railway lines to the north and east. The vision was undoubtedly great, but given what has happened since then, these old predictions of the future can be looked at like a 1950s sci-fi epic.
Chelsea's Stamford Bridge redevelopment plan for 2018 has proven too ambitious. Photo: Herzog & De Meuron
The club at least knows it got planning from Hammersmith and Fulham council once and can do it again. Local opposition to living next to such a huge construction site is likely to be even more vehement the second time around. The potential damage to the catacombs from the reverberation of construction activity was mentioned in the planning last time.
Stadiums, as impressive as they are, are not trophies – they are a means to winning trophies and all the other parts that come with existence. successful club. However, if Chelsea's new owners do build a new Bridge in the next two decades, they may well feel they deserve some sort of shiny cup. This is the only task that, despite all the successes, modern Chelsea is no closer to solving.
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