Chelsea and the Media: Debunking Some Myths

It is fair to say that Chelsea are not a very popular team. Whether it is because of certain players, local rivalries, or our owner, the club are not very endearing to the general footballing public.

This hatred has spilled into the media, who often don’t need much of an opportunity to have a pop at us. This opening paragraph from article in the Daily Mail on July 16, 2008 is a good example:

“New boss Luiz Felipe Scolari has been giving his players a hard time in their first week back, boosting their fitness before even thinking of tactics (goal celebrations, penalties, arguing with the ref, penalties, falling over, pouting at the ref, penalties).”

The media propagate a number of things about Chelsea that I consider to be myths. They have been repeated enough and eventually people start to believe them.

In this article I examine and discuss some that crop up in the media’s coverage of the club and set about debunking them.

Style of football

The myth I take the most issue with is that Chelsea play ‘boring’ football. I find this argument to be too simplistic. Jose Mourinho got a lot of criticism in this respect.  But with Robben and Duff down the wings in the 2004/05 season, Chelsea played some lovely stuff, scoring four or more goals on eight occasions.

Unfortunately, we found out that Robben has the pain threshold of a fly and that his ankles are made out of glass. Had he managed to stay fit I’ve no doubt he’d still be at the club and would be one of the best players in the Premiership alongside Ronaldo. His dribbling skills were phenomenal, he could go past players like they weren’t even there. I really thought he was the new Zola.

This meant that new wingers had to be brought in, and Shaun Wright-Phillips and Florent Malouda are not in the same class as Robben. As a result Chelsea’s style of play suffered.

Admittedly it wasn’t all pretty under Jose - the 2007 Champions League semi-final second leg against Liverpool being one such case.

But the notion that Chelsea always played boring football is just incorrect. Chelsea haven’t played Arsenal-like football over the past couple of years, I grant you that, but it hasn’t all been boring. Robben’s goal away at Newcastle in the Carling Cup, Tiago’s back-heeled flick to set up Robben’s volley against Norwich, the 4-2 against Barcelona were hardly sleep inducing moments.

Mourinho also disagrees with this. In an interview with the Sunday Times a couple of weeks ago, he rejected the notion that Chelsea played boring football under him.

“At Chelsea we set records: most away wins in the three years I was there, best winning run, most goals. We played with three strikers and were aggressive going forward. We won a lot of games in the last quarter of an hour, quite often playing with three at the back.”

Under Avram Grant it was much the same. Initially he promised to change Chelsea’s style of play into a more attacking brand of football, and at times he delivered. I remember singing his praises after that 6-0 win over Man City, and I did notice that our full-backs were being given more freedom to roam.

However, come the turn of the year, we seemed to go backwards. Our football seemed no different to the majority of Jose’s reign. Grant’s promise to play more attacking football looked very hollow indeed.

Luiz Felipe Scolari has seemed to promise more of the same, with winning being placed above open, expansive football. As the season unfolds we will have to see if, at all, our style of play changes and how the media react to Chelsea under ‘Big Phil’ as they call him.

Conclusion: While Chelsea don’t play Arsenal-esque, open, expansive football, they have at times played attacking football and the idea that Chelsea simply just play boring football is too simplistic.

‘Buying’ success

An accusation regularly laid at Chelsea’s doorstep is that we ‘bought’ our success.

Of course, large sums of money have been spent in the past few years, but other clubs have done so as well. Manchester United have splashed out in recent years on players such as Rio Ferdinand (£30 million), Wayne Rooney (around £25 million), Cristiano Ronaldo (£12 million), Owen Hargreaves (£18 million), Michael Carrick (£16 million), and Juan Sebastian Veron (£28.1 million).

There is also talk in recent days of United purchasing Carlos Tevez for £32 million, which would beat the record fee we paid AC Milan for Andrei Shevchenko.

Real Madrid did it for years with their now defunct ‘Galacticos’ policy, but it brought them few trophies. Leeds United threw a bit of money around as well, but it didn’t yield a league title. Now they are preparing for a second season in the third tier of English football.

The failure of Leeds and Real Madrid to achieve significant success shows that it is not just a case of spending to money to achieve success. If that was true, then Claudio Ranieri would have won silverware in the 2003/2004 season, but he didn’t. There was always the sense that a new manager was needed to take Chelsea to the next level.

Jose was that man, and he was pivotal in the club’s glorious period of success under his stewardship. True, he did inherit a good squad, but it needed motivating and sound tactical guidance to deliver trophies.

Sometimes, the impression is given that Chelsea came from nowhere to gatecrash Arsenal and Manchester United’s dominance of the English game. However, Chelsea experienced success before Abramovich came along. Between 1997 and 2000, the team won two FA Cups, a League Cup, a Cup Winners Cup, and a Super Cup (beating Real Madrid in the final).

Chelsea have finished in the top six every season since 1997, and in 1999 finished just four points behind league title winners Manchester United.

Conclusion: It takes more than just simply money to win things, as Real Madrid and Leeds United have shown. Yes, the club has spent money. But look at Manchester United, they don’t have a team full of academy products do they? Also, what have Liverpool been buying with the money they’ve been spending under Rafael Benitez since his arrival at the club? Fourth place?

Sir Alex Ferguson aptly summed it up when he said in 2007: “It’s been proved time and again that spending big is no guarantee of success.”

Diving

Didier Drogba’s histrionics are well documented, and I hate it when he throws himself to the floor. Joe Cole is prone to it as well, giving out a shriek of pain before falling to the floor. I don’t dispute the fact that some Chelsea players dive, but the amount of focus on it by the press makes it seem like Chelsea are the only club that has players that like the occasional tumble.

This is of course not true. Steven Gerrard is one of the worst culprits but it is never highlighted by the media. In a pre-2006 World Cup warm-up game, Ian Wright even defended Gerrard for diving in the box to win a penalty during the BBC‘s coverage of the game. As is typical of the English press, foreigners receive nearly all of the flak for a problem that is definitely prevalent amongst English players.

The Sun produced a pullout highlighting which of our players dive. I have yet to see similar ones for Gerrard, Rooney, Eboue, etc...

Conclusion: Diving is a Premiership-wide problem, it’s not just confined to Chelsea. The media should recognise this and scrutinise other club’s players and England Internationals who do it, instead of just blaming foreigners.

Whilst not everything that is printed in the media is garbage (Kevin McCarra and Martin Samuel are two journalists I have a lot of respect for) I think they are guilty at times of presenting simplistic views that ignore certain bits of evidence.

This is more true of the tabloid newspapers, but sometimes even the ’quality’ newspapers are guilty of it. I’m not blind enough to not face up to the club’s faults, such as Peter Kenyon, our conduct with referees, diving, and transfer policy (as I hope I have shown in what I’ve written), but I do fell the coverage the club gets at times is unfair.

It comes with the territory I guess. Over the last 10 years the club has moved from being a top six side into an established top four side. Chelsea upset Manchester United and Arsenal’s duopoly. We were the new kids on the block, flashing our new found wealth around. This bound to have upset some people.

In the end, the media will probably still go on printing the content that they do, knowing that if challenged they can simply print a small retraction a few months later, which won't gain as much coverage as the original article did in the first place. This malaise affects journalism as a whole (for anyone interested in this I recommend you read Nick Davies’ excellent book Flat Earth News) and is not just confined to football.

Lies and distortion in the media has always been a problem, and it seems they always will be. In respects to Chelsea, their coverage has often been based on a black and white mindset, when, in my opinion, the truth is much more complex.