downthefront

brilliant mate. And those scarves are no match for our plastic flags,,,,fact

yeah, I'm Chelsea mate, since the early sixties. I also like to wind up people, especially our new breed of fans !!People need to relax a bit on here, although I love our club I suppose I'm old enough to see the absurdities associated with our game.
And our owner could well have bought Tottenham, only they were daft enough not to meet him .How does Roman derive enjoyment from buying trophies?...It goes against all what a fan should be.
Call me a cynic, but years ago when we had nothing, merely beating United or Liverpool was as good as winning a trophy.
Today's fans don't know how lucky they are, yet all they seem to do is moan about everything from the atmosphere to individual players and everything else under the sun.

Think the subject of 'random' rumours has been taken too literally...talk about going off on a tangent

BREAKING: Water found to be wet, hailed as potential cure for dryness

Great pic, spelling mistake aside...

Stallone's best film ?.....is that praise ??

gotta say that was a tremendous effort by our fans up at Anfield, When you are outnumbered 15-1 and the home support is so up for it its easy to give up as you can be totally drowned out.The sad thing is liverpool fans buy into the media bollocks about them being "the best fans in the world"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SItko13shM

Brilliant sustain chanting. Probably censored by the TV crews present as it might detract from the world's most tuneless karaoke singers.

its always Chelsea that get slated for low gates when bigger clubs were just as bad at times considering their size & statue at the time, dont get me wrong & ive said it on here before(recently i think) our gates in the early 90s were embarrassing at times & there's no excuses unlike the early 80s when we were crap, skint, & just avoided going down to div 3, a crumbling ground, violence was rife ect
 
Look at these gates from so called big clubs, Everton got a few gates under 20k. 12k v cov yet 2 years later 50k when they won the lge. Spurs got gates under 20k and liverpool got 20k v watford 82/83 when the best team on the planet. 86/87 Spurs 19k v villa 16k v leic and 20k 21k for other games even tho they came 3rd. Got 28k v cfc who filled away end. Average gates 86/87 29k up from 23k 85/86. villa 18k up from 15k 85/86. cfc 17k down from 22k 85/86. everton 32k won the lge thats why. Spurs 25k up from 20k 85/86. whu 20k down from 21k 85/86. qpr 11k down from 12k 85/86. man u 40k down from 46k 85/86. lpool 36k up from 35k 85/86.
82/83 season everton v BHA 17k, wba 16k, bham 13k, luton 14k, watford 19k, notts co 14k, swansea 17k, southamton 15k, arsenal 16k. stoke 15k, man u 21k poor, whu 16k, cov 12k, ipswich 17k yet 52k v lpool. av gate was 20k cfc 12k in div 2. I know Spurs got at least 3 gates under 20k 85/86.
 
Arsenal overall had some much bigger gates than us in the 80s but not every  home game, as this stat shows,
 
Arsenal v Oxford United, 20 September 1986
Score 0-0
Competition League Division One
Venue Highbury
Attendance 20,676

Chelsea v Nottingham Forest, 20 September 1986
Score 6-2 to Nottingham Forest
Competition League Division One
Venue Stamford Bridge
Attendance 20,171 
  Liverpool fans for example have made excuses about their low gates on various forums in the past, unemployment ect which is a fair point but the same unemployed still managed to travel across europe with them didnt they, i think there was a number of obvious reasons, but dont then slate other clubs gates who's team were terrible on the pitch while the fans were just as skint ect, 
 
 

Just found an Arsenal v QPR attendance of 17,000 plus, from the 80's. !!

Togba

Don't know how many season ticket holders we had back then, but it can't have anywhere near what we have now. I feel I have to keep renewing otherwise I will never get it back. Whereas back then I could turn up and pay on the day. Virtually the whole of the 13000 were die hards, no tourists, corperates or jcl/glory hunters. Let's face it if we were relegated that fan base has probably grown to 25000-30000????

The figure I used to hear bandied about in the 80s was that we had 4,000 or just under and the Goons and 4x2s had around 10,000. 
 
As for the low attendences that downthefront brings up, I can see your point, but I am talking about the entire 125 year span of professional football or however long.  I was in two crowds of 6,000 in the same season once, and I know our home attendances dropped off at times, but we used to get massive corwds after the war when we had won nothing in our history.  London is a competitive market, and football crowds reached a low in the 80s, so you can see how our crowds were pitiful at times given that we went down to Div 2 on 3 ocasions. Anyway, I remember the Spuds having a 16,000 crowd in the old Div 1, and one opening day, in the early 90s we got 28,000 and the Gooners got 24,000. You need to look at the whole picture then judge us IMO. 

I think the attendances 'issue' is really interesting. I've wasted some time (too much time!) arguing with a Gooner and  Scouser on YouTube over our attendances versus theirs. Probably some truth in what both MB and Downthefront say. It's a complicated issue. I'm going to start a thread on it some time. Maybe not today but soon(ish).

View the video of David Lacey of the Guardian saying we had the 3rd biggest away support in the country behind the two red giants....that was when we were in Div 2!  Also if anyone with any sort of statistical skill could look at that home crowds per season data, and combine that with trophies won up to 1955, up to 1970 etc. we would turn out to have statistically the loyalest fans ever of all the medium and big clubs in the country.  Our home crowds are the 5th biggest in the history of the English game, not far behind the two North London teams who for much of their historys have won far more than us.  But we have history too, the first English club to qualify for Europe, completing the set of domestic trophies well before Liverpool, winning a European trophy before them too, winning the full set of European trophies before any English club.....in fact being the only one to do so ever. The facts show that we have a right to claim to be the greatest club in England. Not that I give a stuff about all the trophies,

We're goin' up, we're goin up...
Promotion '77
Chelsea - Hull
 
 

Everton at Chelsea 1st game of the 78/79 season

Clifford Webb wrote to the club in 1966 asking that the covered end be renamed the shed.
The website "Plains of Almeria" has a good piece on the early rise of the Shed.

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/0jBR9PUEhiw/hqdefault.jpg

Chelsea 2 Liverpool 0 1982

Our supportters club had a fuction with Osgood and chopper a good few years back now and chopper went up and sang you'll never walk alone we all thought is he taken the piss lol. But like chopper said all clubs sang it. All Liverpool done was Rob it and put it on their crest and gates. I thought f**k this so I went up and sang blue is the colour, ossie came up and joined me. I was only 16 and full of cider ha ha.

Shed v Ipswich 1974