Anyone involved with Chelsea right now who may want to know what the biggest problems are at our club, might just need to read this Joe Cole quote.
It’s literally as simple as this. Fans have lost connection with the club, and it’s down to the culture being gutted, and watching players just not fighting for the badge. Not all the time, granted, but a lot of the time. As fans, all we want to see is players give their all for the club and for the fans. That’s it.
Joe Cole:
“I was talking to a Chelsea fan the other day who loves the club. It felt more like a therapy session.
“He said to me, ‘It was different in your day, we felt connected.’
“I asked him why he felt like that, and what we did differently apart from winning matches?
“He said there was a response to the losing games, and more engagement with the fans.
“He used Shevchenko as an example; he came in and had a terrible time, but the fans could see he was trying.
“He was humble, and every time they sang Shevchenko’s name, he acknowledged them. For a Ballon d’Or winner who’s having a difficult time, they still remembered that more than 15 years later.
“It’s the little things that I think the group need to take charge of, but no senior players are leading that at the club.
“They don’t realise how important it is, and what he said was that, he says, at Chelsea, success is not judged on how many trophies you won, but on how much money you’re in the red at the end of the season or how much profit you’ve made.
“That summed it up.
“That seems to be where our Chelsea Football Club is now, not judged on performance on the pitch, but on the finances.
“And you can’t tell me anything other than that. It’s the truth.”
Perfectly said by Joe and this fan. This is nail on the head stuff.
Gut a club of the culture, anyone who was part of the old regime, and then put together a bunch of young players without leadership and an experienced manager, and you lose all of what Chelsea Football Club stands for.
This is it, in a nutshell.
These words should be put on the walls of the offices in Cobham. If you want the fans FULLY back onside, then you need to bring the Chelsea culture back. You need to get the players playing for the badge again and putting it all in for the fans.
I keep saying it, but football can be such a simple game when you look at it like this and stop trying to over complicate it.
