I can't believe people actually are pleased that Chelsea became a worldwide phenomenon while we languished in the relative obscurity of upper mid-table. They won trophies and league titles galore, became the first London club to win the CL, and are now recognised as the biggest club in London by a huge number of overseas football supporters.....while we plodded along consolidating our position and winning one League Cup, trying painfully to get a stadium built without the owner spending anything, laughing in glee as we registered net profit after net profit in transfer windows, as our best players left us citing our lack of ambition and their desires to play for 'bigger' clubs, and as manager after manager kept climbing hopefully up to Levy's office and emerging ashen-faced shortly afterwards, their 'transfer shortlists' crumpled up in their fists. And yet, people think this austerity is good and wholesome, like the Byzantine stylites from the days of old who tortured themselves by sitting mostly unclothed on top of windy, often scorching pillars in the desert because they thought it would bring them closer to GHod.
We had a chance to end Chelsea forever: they'd have gone into administration if RA hadn't bought them. We would have become the London club everyone had heard about (well, apart from those clams down the road, anyway). We'd have become the first London club to win the CL, and to win all those PL titles and FA Cups. And if the reply should arise 'well, all those trophies don't count because they weren't won fairly'......in ten, twenty, thirty years, do you really think people would give a damn about how Chelsea won their trophies? Those trophies are etched into their (and football's) history: the circumstances behind those trophies are rarely remembered down the line, and football history has proven this time and again. All people will remember thirty years from now is that Chelsea were the first London club to win the CL. Same logic goes for City, to be honest. And that could have been us.
Like Shelfie says, fair play to those that disagree with this view, but history won't give a damn about us when they portray this period in our history as being the most barren and lifeless one for many, many years: I'm just surprised that so many people are completely accepting and even delighted at that fact.
