Chelsea F.C.
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Chelsea Football Club is an English football club.
The club plays in the FA Barclaycard Premiership. They were started in 1905. In 2005 they won the top league in English football for the second time in their history. They play at Stamford Bridge Stadium in London. Their current manager is José Mourinho.
Chelsea Football Club (also known as The Blues or previously as The Pensioners), founded in 1905, are an English Premier League football team. The club's home ground is the 42,360 capacity Stamford Bridge football ground in Fulham, south-west London. Despite their name, the club is based just outside the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. It is on the Fulham Road, which runs between Fulham and Chelsea. The club have won three league titles, three FA Cups, three League Cups and two UEFA Cup Winners' Cups. They are the reigning league champions for the second year in a row (2005 and 2006).
[edit] Stamford Bridge
Chelsea play home matches at Stamford Bridge, London. Unusually for a football club, Chelsea have played at Stamford Bridge since they were founded. It was officially opened on 28 April 1877. For the first 28 years of its existence it was used almost exclusively by the London Athletic Club as an arena for athletics meetings and not at all for football. In 1904 the ground was acquired by H A (Gus) Mears and his brother, J T Mears, who had previously acquired additional land (formerly a large market garden) with the aim of staging football matches on the now 12.5 acre (51,000 m²) site. The Mears family remained the owners of the ground (and subsequently the Club) until the 1970s.Chelsea's star striker is Drogba. He scored a hat trick on Saturday. He is their team right now
Stamford Bridge was designed for the Mears family by the noted football architect Archibald Leitch. They offered the stadium to Fulham Football Club, but the offer was turned down. As a consequence, the owners decided to form their own football club to occupy their new ground. Most football clubs were founded first, and then sought grounds in which to play, but Chelsea were founded for Stamford Bridge. Since there was already a football club named Fulham in the borough, the founders chose to use the name of the adjacent borough of Chelsea for the new club, having rejected names such as Kensington FC, Stamford Bridge FC and London FC.
Starting with an open bowl-like design and one covered terrace, Stamford Bridge had an original capacity of around 100,000. The early 1930s saw the construction of a terrace on the southern part of the ground with a roof that covered around 1/5th of the stand. It eventually became known as the "Shed end", the home of Chelsea's most loyal and vocal supporters, and particularly came into its own during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The exact origins of the name are unclear, but the fact that the roof looked like a corrugated iron shed roof played a part.
During the 1960s, the club's owners embarked on a modernisation of Stamford Bridge with plans for a 60,000 all-seater stadium. Work was begun on the East Stand in the early 1970s but the cost almost brought the club to its knees, which led to the sale of the freehold to property developers. Following a long legal battle, it was not until the mid-1990s that Chelsea's future at the stadium was secured and renovation work resumed. The north, west and southern parts of the ground were made into all-seater stands and moved closer to the pitch, and the current legal capacity of Stamford Bridge is 42,360. Due to its location in a built-up part of London on a main road and next to a railway line, there are obvious constraints on further expansion, something deemed as necessary for Chelsea to compete with their rivals. As a result the club have been linked with a move away from Stamford Bridge.
The pitch is now owned by Chelsea Pitch Owners, an organisation that took out a loan to buy the stadium and also the rights to the Chelsea FC name. This was done to make sure that the stadium could never again be sold to developers. It also means that if someone tries to move the football club to a new stadium they could not use the name.
Chelsea is known to be the richest club in the world, funded by billionaire Roman Ambramrovich.
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