'Cause Chelsea

So here’s my dark soccer secret. As deep as my passion for the game runs, I don’t actually watch all that much of it. Sure, I go for wild for the World Cup, and I’ll tune in to a Champions League Final. But my knowledge of, say, EPL player rankings or the rivalry between Boca Juniors and River Plate is pretty thin, and forget about keeping up with the latest transfer talks.

It also means I don’t have a team, which makes for awkward moments when new ballers I meet ask who I support, as they inevitably do during the pre-game banter. “All of them,” I might joke, since telling the truth is too much of a conversation stopper, especially if I go all in and admit that I’m more of a baseball guy. Gasp!

What can I say? Outside of Telemundo, there wasn’t a lot of soccer on TV in the 80s during my formative fandom years. But baseball, specifically Yankee baseball, was everywhere. Phil Rizzuto’s meandering WPIX commentary is part of the soundtrack of my youth. Yankee fever got into my blood young and quickly transfused. Remember the “Hit Man” poster of Don Mattingly (aka “Donnie Baseball”), the one where he’s dressed in a pinstripe suit, holding his bat like a Tommy gun? That thing hung over my bed.

That’s what being a fan is all about, a dyed-in-the-wool compulsion that’s as much an identity marker as your home town or family name. Which means it’s hard to manufacturer late in life. But is it impossible? About a year ago, I decided to try to answer that question. 

The first step was finding a club to support. Given my Yankees allegiance, NYC FC, with its home field shoehorned into the House That Ruth Built, might have been an obvious choice. But I just can’t muster much enthusiasm for the MLS, as much as I’d like to see the league achieve world-class status.

A bunch of Brooklyn guys I play with are hardcore Kopites, so I had a passing fling with Liverpool. The club is fun to watch, no doubt, and it’s always nice rooting for a winner, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the relationship wasn’t quite right. 

It did, however, help me settle on the Premiere League as the best grounds for finding my match. I spent five superb years in London in my twenties, working and going to grad school, so the country holds second-home status in my heart. Plus, there’s a strong case that the EPL serves up the best soccer in the world.

But which of the 20 clubs? (Or 19 since the Reds had been ruled out by lack of chemistry). As a kid in New Jersey, my longtime travel team was the Westfield Hotspurs. Might Tottenham pluck on those heartstrings? Not feeling it. Drank a lot of Newcastle in college. Maybe the Magpies? Still nothing. What about Leicester City, source of the greatest sports shocker of all time with its 2015-2016 title run? Helluva story, but no thanks.

The more I mulled over the EPL table, the more I kept coming back to a certain lion-crested insignia colored gold and royal blue. Chelsea. Of course, it had to be Chelsea.

For starters, there are the aforementioned London years. That could’ve led me down the high street to Arsenal or West Ham or Crystal Palace. But I was always a west end boy during my time there, making Stamford Bridge the geographical favorite.    

Up next: the Pulisic factor. The jury is still out on whether the American wunderkind will achieve true international stardom. But the fact that he’s even in the conversation is enough for me. I admire his skill and ingenuity—and his passion! In the USMNT’s monumental collapse against Trinidad and Tobago in the 2018 World Cup qualifiers, he was the only one who seemed to give a shit. When he brought us within one in the 46th minute, I thought the Captain America moment was on. It wasn’t, of course. But I appreciated the effort. And I like that Lampard and company seem to feel similarly, even awarding him the coveted number 10 jersey. 

One other point about Pulisic: he hails from Hershey, Pennsylvania, best known for its chocolate, but also a well-respected eastern soccer hub where I played a ton of tourneys as a kid, always capped by a visit to the water park. Those are some of the best memories of my life. Somehow that factors into the synchronicity of Christian, Chelsea, and me.

Finally, there’s the Chelsea supporters I’ve met over the years on the field of play. It’s not that they’ve always been the best, though some are definitely top-tier. But the overall caliber is consistently high. In short, I’ve come to view Chelsea as the playing man’s club.

With Tetsu, fellow Blues supporter and fan-club mentor, after a recent morning match in Brooklyn. If memory serves, our side took the contest 10-4, channeling Chelsea all the way, a hopeful harbinger of the massive season in store for 2020-2021.

I floated this theory by a few royal-blue ballers from my orbit. None of them would go all in on it—too many players, too many games, etc. But it wasn’t rejected outright, either. Says Marc, a Brit expat banger who I used to ball with in Fort Greene Park: “Every pitch you have some guys who just dribble, don't defend, and they tend to be the Man U/ Barca/ Real fans. I guess it’s true that the leagues I’ve played in, the few Chelsea fans tend to have a good tactical knowledge of the game.”

Adds Tetsu, a regular at my morning game in Brooklyn, known for dropping dimes out of the backfield: “A lot of Millennial players out here came of age in the 2000s, when EPL was becoming widely available on cable TV. Chelsea was an emerging powerhouse at the time, so a lot of the guys were drawn to its ruthless counter-attack and dynamic 4-3-3 style of play under Mourinho, as opposed to the traditional long-ball. It was also a system with a strong defensive core, where the club could be built around a guy like Makélélé.”

I can’t claim Millennial status, and I obviously wasn’t glued to the tube during any of those epic seasons from the 2000s. But I like aspiring to the box-to-box brilliance of Chelsea’s golden era, especially now that club seems to be on the cusp of a whole new one, thanks to Abramovich’s billions—first Chilwell and Ziyech, now Havertz and Thiago (see that, I’m keeping up!).

So there you have it. Still a lot of work to do before I can claim true Blue status. And I’ll always belong to the new breed of global Chelsea supporters. But as far as I can tell, even the most ardent fans don’t take themselves too seriously, as evidenced by the running joke among them (and fan site of the same name), “We ain’t got no history.”

Sounds about right for me.

That said, I fully intend to make the pilgrimage to the Bridge. It’s fifteen years since I set foot on London soil, so that part of the indoctrination can’t come soon enough. Like the song goes, “Blue is the color, football is the game.”