Morning:
9°c
All of London's football supporters will be glued to the first all-English Champions League Final tonight. Like most of them, I'm desperate for Manchester United to win. Watching a team you hate win trophies is as agonising for a fan as seeing your own team defeated.
As a Spurs supporter, I begrudge Chelsea's recent success far more than that of our historic rivals, Arsenal. The Gunners are, at least, a football club while Chelsea have become a rich man's trophy. If it were at all possible, Roman Abramovich would probably have had Stamford Bridge uprooted and moored off the coast of Cannes this week, where he could invite P Diddy and assorted Eurotrash freeloaders on board to watch the final via satellite surrounded by scantily-clad Clicquot-serving East European models.
Many Russians will also find the thought of Chelsea winning tonight in Moscow distasteful, given that its owner mysteriously accumulated a titanic gas and oil fortune during a time when their living standards and life expectancies were crashing through the floor.
Chelsea fans won't mind, though. Given that a section of them will probably chant anti-Semitic abuse at their own manager simply for not winning them the league, they wouldn't care if Chelsea were owned by the Burmese government and funded by stolen international aid as long as they won some baubles.
Chelsea are the most loathed team in London. Google "I hate Chelsea" and no fewer than 18,000 results appear. And they've managed to arrive here, as Abramovich did with his billions, out of apparently-nowhere. A once middling west London club that few cared about has now become a symbol of the shameless aggrandising and ostentatious flaunting of not just football but capitalism itself.
Just as the club has alienated itself from the rest of the game, the neighbourhood it resides in has less and less to do with the rest of London. Few ordinary Londoners can afford to live there; too many of its residents are part of a global taxavoiding super-class that identifies itself with labels and wealth rather than any community. London means no more to most of the people the Chelsea players rub shoulders with than Monaco, New York or Dubai.
Tonight, most football-lovers in the capital will be de-facto Mancunians. Only a win for United could do justice to what was once the people's game.
Reader views (4)
Your comments and opinions have a touch of jealously to them and your narrow mindness about the all the fans of Chelsea and people who live there shows how much you don't know.
Not everyone is a millionaire in Chelsea, there is a community feel to the area you've just never bothered to look for it. You just go off the house prices and stereotypes, Chelsea was traditionally a working class area if you check your history books. Why don't you try watching a game in one of the local pubs try the Rileys on the King's Road for example or the sporting page in Camera Place.
And not everyone shares the bigoted views of the idiots who chanted the anti Semitic rubbish. Comments like yours drive me crazy as you're just slagging all the fans off - yeah slag off the new glory hunters who will disappear as soon as Russian boy sells us. But some of us have waiting for this success for generations and those fans deserve to enjoy it without stupid comments like yours tarring them all with the same brush.
- Kerry, Chelsea, London, 23/05/2008 14:31
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Couldn't agree more with the article. Chelsea has become graceless, churlish, arrogant (without due cause to be other than their belief that money can buy anything they want). They've become the playground bully on steroids from the rich family with an over-indulgent father. They've ruined the Premiership and the knock-on influence on other country leagues is almost as ruinous. To see them lose in Moscow was wonderful, especially after seeing them lose at Wembley. Proof that money can't buy success or class.
Avram Grant is about the only person at the club who is worthy of any respect, for his quite dignity in the face of appalling treatment by his chairman and board and their increasingly anti-semetic fans. I hope he goes to a club more deserving of his abilities. And I hope Abramovich grows tired of his toy and calls in the £700m loans. Then we'll see how good a businessman Kenyon is...
- Greg, Pinner, UK, 23/05/2008 10:14
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Nirpal Dhaliwal are you a premiership boy; Only watched football since SKY?
Chelsea have always been hated. Even more so now but it isn't new.
Around Chelsea stadium there are quite a lot of low income families in council and housing association property along with the super rich.
Man Utd were bought with borrowed money and I was hoping for their loss as it would force their own credit crunch. I find them and their franchise set up far more onerous than Chelsea's. After all the difference is Chelsea's owner is foreign and v.rich compared to traditional football. Man Utd and LFC are totally different.
- Terry, London, 22/05/2008 13:38
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I don't normally watch football but was willing Manchester United to win with every ounce of my being today just so that Chelsea wouldn't. I couldn't be more happy at the outcome. How sublime to see Roman Abramovich lose in his own country! What poetic justice.
- Catherine, Toronto, Canada, 22/05/2008 02:30
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