Now, that’s what I call Proper Chels!
Chelsea Football Club are delighted to explain what Lucy Bronze dressed as a babushka has to do with your wallet.
How is a raven like a writing desk? Lewis Caroll once asked.
More than 100 years later, Chelsea Football Club are unable to supply an answer (and why should they?), though they are delighted to explain what Lucy Bronze dressed as a babushka — complete with neckerchief and big gypsy earrings, plastered all over your social media feed this week — has to do with your wallet.
And why shouldn’t they?
“If punk belonged to anywhere, it belonged most to west London,” the club asserts in its latest press release, explaining why the Blues’ third kit for the 2024/2025 season is not just a football shirt with day-glo pink accents that you could wear over jeans or chinos.
Yes, Chelsea fans, you can part with your money for a sweet nostalgia hit, a subscription to that anarchic identity which only Chelsea fans can really claim, through their connection to this unique hub of individuality.
The lion’s share of Chelsea’s global fanbase won’t ever step foot on King’s Road — the so-called epicentre of “a creative and cultural earthquake”, will never learn that the fuck-you-DIY-non-conformity subculture born in the 1970s manifests today in an unbroken series of interior design boutiques and high-end glasses outlets.
Football always yearns for the past. Over their 119-year history, Chelsea has earned a heritage so rich and universally understood that its character can be masterfully observed by any person who has been touched by the Blues with the succinct proclamation: ‘that’s proper Chels’.
Recently, Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca indulged in his own nostalgia trip, a touching tribute to the curb-stomping racism of the 1970s by giving the captain’s armband to Enzo Fernández just weeks after the young midfielder was filmed using slurs to refer to French players of colour while celebrating Argentina’s Copa América win.
Because nothing says ‘I’m happy to have won a trophy’ like racist jokes, and there’s few more effective ways to address your players’ misconduct than by disregarding it in the course of appointing your squad’s senior leaders.
Yes, this season’s third kit harks back to better times, when managers' technical choices weren’t subject to woke scrutiny, when you bought a shirt because it looked nice, when women’s rights meant slags necking contraceptive pills.
This is 2024, though, and it was Chelsea’s women’s side who got to wear the pink kit before anyone else. What’s more, in a remarkable show of generosity, Nike have let the girlies muss up their world-famous logo!
“Worn by both the men's and women's squads, it points upward to celebrate the rise of women's football,” the press release proudly explains, as though Joan of Arc’s singed lips formed the words ‘rotate the swoosh’ moments before her trachea collapsed into a pile of ashes.
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