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The Chelsea Football Club is on of the oldest and most successful in all of England. They were formed in 1905 and call West London their home. The club has spent almost their entire history in the top league in English football and last season finished second in the English Premier League. Their current success does not mirror that of the team from 100 years ago.
The early origins of the team were in a pub called The Butcher’s Hook. There the founders of Chelsea got together to outline a plan to form an association football team in London that would play at the athletics ground at Stamford Bridge. This open piece of land in West London would need to be developed in order to be a proper field for their football club. In addition to that at this time association football was not very popular in London, but was exploding around the rest of the country. The founders knew it would only be a matter of time until a Football League club was placed in London and they wanted to be that team.
On May 29th 1905 Chelsea was elected to play in the Second Division of the Football League. This was a landmark occasion because Chelsea was the first team voted in that had not ever played a match. The club got this out of the way fairly quickly and won their first match that year. The early years for the team from Stamford would prove to be rocky ones. While they had the support of London the product on the field left little that was desired. In the first decade the team managed to make it into the top tier, but was quickly relegated. In their first ten years the best they could muster was an 8th place finish in Division One.
The 1920s started off with a third place finish in Division One. This was the team’s best finish to this point, and unfortunately would prove to the best for this decade. The team was relegated to the Second Division in 1924 and only managed to get back into the top division at the end of the decade. The thirties were much of the same; continued fan support with mixed results. In 1935 a match Stamford set a record for attendance with 82,905 packed into the terraces for a league game versus Arsenal. This still is the largest attendance to ever witness a match at Stamford. Most of the fans there however were supporting cross town rival Arsenal’s powerhouse of a club.
The 1940s saw serious interruption in play due to World War II. The team did manage to make it to their first cup final in 1944, but were unable to come out with a victory. They were able to capture the trophy twelve months later. In the next decade Chelsea would find its first true success. The beginning did not go well and the team barely avoided relegation, but in stepped Ted Drake and with him came real changes. The team became hungrier and lost a lot of the amateurish elements that they had clung to in previous years. In 1955 the club finally won their first FA First Division Championship. This would prove to be a shooting star however and the following seasons did not see a repeat of this success.
It would not be until the 1970s that the team would at last lift the FA Cup. That season they also finished third in the league for the second time. This victory brought with it qualification in the European Cup Winners’ Cup which miraculously Chelsea won for their first international trophy. This success from the seventies would not carry over into the next ten years as the team spent much of their time in the Second Division. They barely managed to make it through this period intact, but steadily improved throughout the nineties. In 1996 they managed to capture the FA Cup for the first time in 26 years.
The next century has seen some of the best football in the history of Chelsea. They have played in and been successful on both the national and international levels and continue to build off of this success.