Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood, who announced yesterday their staggeringly large turnover, has turned his attentions to Chelsea – deriding their plans for world domination as ‘fantasy’.
Chelsea chief exec Peter Kenyon, who targets 2014 as the year that his club will be the biggest in the world has hit a bit of a problem; Jose Mourinho has left, and they only got a pitiful 25,000 fans at the Rosenborg game in the Champions League.
And Hill-Wood, who has seen , has shattered Chelsea’s vision for the future.
Hill-Wood, like some kind of super-powered fairweather supporter, was freshly buoyed by the fact that the Gunners have become the second biggest club in Europe in terms of turnover and started taking swipes at his upstart Chelsea rivals. Hill-Wood said:
“I found it very surprising Chelsea only had 25,000 for a Champions League game…Our fan-base probably started in the thirties and it’s been handed down from father to son and so forth…It takes 100 years to build and about 100 minutes to destroy. You’ve got to be careful you don’t destroy it. Money is irrelevant to history and how big your club is. Maybe not irrelevant, but it’s better not to have too much money because you then don’t go and squander it.”
So, the long and the short of it is that Chelsea are an upstart club with an inferior fan base, and they need more than just money to be successful… Hill-Wood then dropped a minor swear-word just to seem street and down with the kids. Hill-Wood said:
“It’s bull****. I don’t want to run Chelsea down, but one has to concede Manchester United and Liverpool are probably the biggest names in UK football and probably throughout the world. For Chelsea to think they are suddenly going to dominate Manchester United and Liverpool is fantasy. It’s not going to happen.”
Is Hill-Wood right, do Chelsea really have any hope of achieving those lofty goals, especially as Ambramvovich is showing more and more desire to become personally involved with his Chelsea toy train set. All of a sudden the jump from Roman to Romanov doesn’t seem so great.