Come on you blues: Chelsea football stadium
‘You’ve got no history!’ is a jibe regularly aimed at Chelsea fans, a reference to the fact that until Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich bought the London club in 2003, it had never exactly been overburdened with trophies. But who needs silverware when your club museum boasts a 1960s photograph of Raquel Welch in a Chelsea kit, taken when Chelsea were the most fashionably unsuccessful club in the country? This could be the most delightfully unlikely artefact to be found in any London museum, let alone one devoted to a football club.
The chance to nose inside Chelsea’s museum comes at the end of the official tour of the Stamford Bridge stadium, where Chelsea have played since they were formed in 1905. Tour guides are all long-standing Chelsea fans, well versed in the club’s eccentric history and encumbered with bucketloads of anecdotes about players and managers, the best of which tend to be about former manager José Mourinho, who brought an unmatchable combination of professionalism, glamour and pot-boiled lunacy to the club.
One such tale is relayed in the home dressing room, out of which Mourinho was once wheeled hidden inside a laundry basket, having been banned from talking to his team after he made intemperate remarks about the referee. Mourinho was famed for such monkey business, and the away dressing room was the scene of more of his dirty tricks — don’t worry, we won’t spoil the story by telling you what they were.
As well as visiting the two dressing rooms, the tour takes you inside the press room, where new signings are unveiled, down the tunnel and into the dugout, where you get a flavour of what it must be like to watch the game from the viewpoint of the manager. The tour concludes at the museum, where that extraordinary picture of Raquel Welch — plus one or two more recently acquired trophies — awaits.
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