Chelsea: More to love than Louis Vuitton
Liverpool supporters turn to London's shopping scene and a dollop of sexism to explain Chelsea's transfer success.
I like Moises Caicedo. He made a promise to Chelsea and was good to his word. Better still, his fidelity to doing the right thing came with a snub to Liverpool FC.
Caicedo hadn’t completed a medical on Merseyside as Willian had with Tottenham in the summer of 2013, but he still chose Chelsea over Liverpool. Nevertheless, the Reds’ unofficial media machine were yards offsides Photoshopping the Ecuadorian into a Liverpool shirt ahead of last Sunday’s season opener at the Bridge. Their joy at gazumping the Blues for Caicedo a few days after Chelsea’s transfer team had spent laborious weeks trying to thrash out a deal with their Brighton & Hove Albion counterparts gave way to a crash that was too much for the Liverpudlians to bear. A small amount of wee may have come out.
The subsequent furore over a player wanting to go to Chelsea over Liverpool has sparked quite a debate on the social media channel formally known as Twitter. How dare they, right? Indeed, a club with a history as rich as Liverpool’s is much better than anything those free loading Londoners can offer.
Former Liverpool striker John Aldridge said as much in his column in the Liverpool Echo.
As soon as the player made it clear he wanted to go to Chelsea over Liverpool, I didn’t want him at all. We are bigger than Chelsea will ever be. If Caicedo wants to go to Chelsea, good riddance.
There they go living off their history rather than creating some new. Aldridge clearly cannot believe anyone would choose CFC over LFC. It has to be something else.
They are a London club and some players see that as a big pull. Their wives, with the Louis Vuitton shop on Oxford Street and the London way of life, will view that as a huge attraction.
The London way of life. What the f**k is that? I’ve been to Liverpool. If shops are your angle, it does have shops. Okay, they don’t have a Louis Vuitton, but they do have shops and bright lights that I’m sure would attract that type of person. Call it the Liverpool way of life, if you will.
The rest of the article reveals more than just sour grapes over the Caicedo deal from the former Liverpool player.
Aldridge has a clear hatred of Chelsea. He mentions how Chelsea’s Champions League winning striker Fernando Torres's move was awful and hard to stomach. Aldridge took pleasure from being in an Oxford side that beat the Blues three times in four months. The real giveaway, though, is when he talks of Jude Bellingham, who, like Caicedo, snubbed his beloved Reds for Real Madrid. There was no “good riddance” for Bellingham.
With Bellingham, he must have just wanted to go to Madrid. If Liverpool was his primary choice, it would have been done. He must have been seeking the sun in Spain and playing for a massive club in La Liga. Good luck to him.
Good luck on your move to Real, but good riddance on your way to west London. To be fair to Aldridge, though, he does stay on point by claiming Bellingham chose the Spanish sunshine over his football team. I would say he missed a massive trick, though: there are three Louis Vuitton shops in the Spanish capital.
Brighton CEO Paul Barber was hardly singing Chelsea’s praises when he spoke of Caicedo choosing Chelsea, but he touched on a familiar theme.
Liverpool’s a fantastic football club. For any footballer to have the chance to play at Liverpool, you’d imagine that they’d be running up the M6 but it wasn’t to be. Moisés and his advisors decided for whatever reason that London was their preferred destination, and ultimately Chelsea.
Obviously, that puts us in a slightly difficult position because we’ve negotiated a deal, and we’d spent many days working with Liverpool. They couldn’t have done any more, they were superb and professional throughout. But then it comes down to the player. At the point that it was clear he wasn’t going to Liverpool we have to go into a different mode - having negotiated a British record transfer, we have to do it again three days later.
Reading between the lines, Barber clearly dislikes Chelsea FC.
“Liverpool’s a fantastic football club” (Chelsea are shit, then).
“Moises preferred destination was London” (no, it wasn’t, it was more specifically Fulham Road, London SW6, Chelsea Football Club).
“We’d spent many days working with Liverpool, superb, professional throughout” (they’d spent many weeks working with Chelsea, and we can only assume this was less joyous).
Despite Barber’s best efforts, he simply couldn’t get the deal he wanted over the line. Player power won the day, and for once it worked in Chelsea’s favour.
Again, like Aldridge, Barber believes it’s London over Liverpool. City versus city rather than club versus club.
Honestly, Liverpool, the place, is not that bad. The city gave us The Beatles, for goodness sake. The Cavern Club offers a great night out. It’s like these people have to come up with misogynistic tales of wives' and girlfriends’ desires to shop ‘til they drop in order to make a move to Chelsea more attractive. Elvis Costello “didn’t want to go to Chelsea,” but a lot of people do.
Fast forward one week, and Chelsea unveiled Liverpool target Romeo Lavia as their latest signing. I like Lavia, too, another Liverpool snubber. Sky Sports reports that Southampton and Liverpool had agreed to a deal, but the player - shock & horror! - wanted Chelsea.
I'm really happy to join Chelsea and be a part of this exciting project. It's an amazing football club with a great history and I'm really excited to get started.
It’s an amazing football club with a great history. Yes, it is, and I like to think that’s a sly dig at Aldridge’s crass comments. As far as Caicedo and Lavia are concerned, Liverpool's great history is exactly that: something from the distant past. Something that happened before they were even born. Why would they care about Liverpool’s history? It has no meaning or relevance to them.
Lavia would have been better to adopt the Aldridge line. “I’m really happy to join Chelsea. There is a Louis Vuitton store a short distance away from Stamford Bridge for my future wife or girlfriend. She will love it.”
The hate Chelsea attract is, as we know, very real. So far this season, Liverpool and Brighton have been at the heart of it.
It’s no surprise coming from Liverpool. The two clubs have history after all, although Liverpool’s is further in the past.
Brighton, however, would do better to keep it quiet. Over the long term, they are in a different league. However, that may change if Chelsea keep on pumping cash their way. During the last two transfer windows, Chelsea have lined Brighton’s pockets very well. Paul Barber may well sing the praises of Liverpool, but it’s Chelsea that have bankrolled his club for a few years to come. Graham Potter and his cohort's compensation, and the signings of Marc Cucurella, Caicedo and Robert Sanchez have all added to the pot. A total of £197 million plus another £27 million in add-ons has been drafted from west London to the south coast.
It’s not just about Liverpool and Brighton, 2023-24, though. The resentment goes back much further. In 2003, Jesper Gronkjaer scored the goal that saw Chelsea pip Liverpool for a Champions League spot the following season. A few weeks later, a certain Russian threw his rubles into SW6 and ruined football for everyone but Chelsea. So much water has passed under Stamford Bridge in the subsequent years; and although Roman Abramovich set the ball rolling, plenty of others have dipped their toes in the water.
Notably, Manchester City, who you would have to say have spent a fair whack of dough during their rise to the top. The mud that gets thrown their way appears less sticky, although Pep Guardiola would probably disagree as he laments Chelsea’s recent transfer windows.
What I'm saying is that if we did it we're dead. For Chelsea, it's easier than for us. I have no criticism, they can do what they want. But we would be under scrutiny like you cannot imagine. I wouldn't be sitting here if we spent what Chelsea have spent in two transfer windows - you [the media] would kill me.
Chelsea have taken a shed load of criticism for their spending, thanks very much. They were the nouveau riche. They may have started the fire, but plenty of others were willing to stoke it (weirdly, not Stoke City, though).
All the big teams - Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool - have spent big at different times over the last 20 years. Be it a state-run club or a rich man’s or woman’s plaything, today’s owners have niched off any thoughts of successful, organic growth. The money that teams need to keep up comes from the top, not the sponsors, and definitely not the fans and supporters. Ask Jurgen Klopp, after his club's unsuccessful attempt at buying our hero Caicedo right from the start. Klopp surely would never want to be spending £100 million on a footballer.
Whilst the likes of Brighton are overvaluing players and Saudi Arabia, following in China’s footsteps, is paying exorbitant wages, football finances will continue to be in freefall.
Chelsea are not responsible for that, yet the hate continues. Abramovich, for all his alleged badness, was still happy to subsidise the NHS and its staff with the free use of his hotels during the recent pandemic. Plenty more beneficicaries exist for the exiled philanthropist.
To hate on Chelsea is too easy. At best it’s lazy, at worst it’s pure ignorance. But maybe Aldridge was right all along. Perhaps it’s simply that Chelsea Football Club are located in the richest part of the greatest city in the world, as evidenced by those five Louis Vuitton shops.
Photo credit: It’s No Game / Flickr, under CC BY-2.0.
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