The Blues Through The Ages - A Brief History of Chelsea F.C.

Most football clubs are founded by people who want to play football. Chelsea Football Club was founded by a man who wanted somewhere to put a stadium.

In 1904, Gus Mears — businessman, entrepreneur, West London millionaire — acquired the Stamford Bridge athletics ground in Fulham with a simple ambition: to turn it into a football ground and lease it to an existing club. The existing club he had in mind was Fulham FC, already established just a short walk away at Craven Cottage. Fulham said no. And so, in March 1905, in an upstairs room of The Rising Sun pub on the Fulham Road, Mears and his associates did something extraordinary: they created a football club from scratch — and then spent the next 118 years turning it into something far more complicated and interesting than anyone that evening could possibly have imagined. Chelsea exists because Fulham said no. That founding fact — that this club was born out of a rebuffed offer to a neighbour — sets the tone for a rivalry that