Chelsea FC

How the reigning champs are adjusting to

the era of social and digital change

1 Club History
Chelsea Football Club is an English soccer team
based out of Fulham, West London and has been
one of the most successful clubs of all time in the
English Premier league. Chelsea was founded in
1905 when Gus Mears acquired the Stamford
Bridge athletics stadium and was looking for a club
that could use the pitch. Initially, Mears was
attempting to get the nearby club Fulham F.C, but
they turned down the offer, thus Mears had to turn
to a new club to occupy the stadium, and thus
began Chelsea F.C. Chelsea was relatively
successful in their early years, earning a promotion
to the first division after only two seasons and
finishing relatively high on the table over the next
20 years. However, Chelsea didn’t win their first
premier league title until 1954.
It wasn’t until 2003 where the club started to really
dominate the scene, this was also the beginning of the
Abromovich era, where Russian oligarch, Roman
Abramovich, took ownership of the club for £140
million. Since Abramovich’s takeover, the club has won
five Premier League titles and two Champions Leagues,
the most recent of which being in May of 2021. The
success over the last 20 years as well as Chelsea’s
historical presence in the Premier League has led to
Chelsea being the 7th richest football team in the world
and the 4th wealthiest Premier League team. Because
of this immense wealth, Chelsea is able to invest a
significant amount of money into their social media as
well as digital and technological ventures. The
following essay analyses Chelsea’s progress into the
world of social media as well as how they will adapt in
order to remain successful in the age of digital
transformation.

2 Chelsea and Social Media

Being one of the more successful clubs in Europe, Chelsea has one of the
largest social media presences in all of football. The club itself boasts 31
million Instagram followers, 18.5 million Twitter followers and 51 million
31.1 M Facebook followers. With almost 100 million people across the world
following Chelsea on social media, the club has successfully been able to
increase their fan interaction off the pitch by an unprecedented amount. While
this may seem an insignificant statistic in the grand scheme of things, research
has proven that an increased social media presence directly leads to a club’s
success in some capacities. Because more fans are interacting with Chelsea,
18.5 M the club’s stakeholders and potential stakeholders, like sponsors, are more
willing to invest more money into the club as their social media power grows.
This in turn leads to increased investment in players, resulting in more wins for
the club.

51 M
 Thiago Silva Ngolo Kante Hakim Ziyech Mateo Kovačić Christian Pulisic
18.1 M 8M 4.3 M 4.3 M 4.4 M

This factor is only increased by Chelsea’s individual star players that help to elevate the club’s
presence on social media. Chelsea’s top five most followed squad members possess a combined 39
million followers across Twitter and Instagram. While these players are not contractually bound to stay
with Chelsea their entire career, these figures still help to boost Chelsea’s social media presence
significantly, inevitably improving the entire well being of their club.

Comparing Chelsea to Other Clubs' Socials

When compared to other clubs,
Chelsea isn’t doing as strong as
many of the clubs that share the
leaderboard of wealthiest football
teams. With a combined total of 93
million followers across all
platforms, Chelsea pales in
comparison to clubs like FC
Barcelona and Real Madrid, who
both boast an impressive 270
million followers. With such large
fan bases, these two clubs have
consistently remained atop the
Champions League leaderboards
for the past few decades -- with the
exception of Barcelona’s recent
failures.

Even clubs in the Premier League like

Manchester United have nearly
double Chelsea’s follower count, and
this only serves to hurt Chelsea in the
VS. long run. In order to combat this,
Chelsea must adapt to improve the
loyalty of their fans as well as create
new services to attract newer
international fans to their club.

3 Chelsea in the Digital Age

Beyond just social media, the world of

sports is also shifting towards a world of
technological advancement where teams
must adjust early in order to become
frontrunners. Chelsea is one of the first
football clubs to differentiate themselves
as an early adopter of the digital age.

In 2015, Chelsea FC partnered with

Wipro Digital, a leading global
information technology, consulting, and
business process services company as
their official digital and IT partner. The
goal of this partnership was for Wipro to
help Chelsea re-imagine the digital and
technology experience for fans,
creating long lasting value off the pitch.

In order to add value, Chelsea must be able to sustain their relationship with fans in a world with 24/7
access to the internet and a wide variety of fans in varying continents. Considering this, Chelsea must
approach and treat each fan in a different way. In order to accomplish this, Wipro approaches each
customer with a process called Customer Journey Engineering which provides each customer with a
consistent and relevant experience every time they interact with the brand. It is this kind of fan interaction
that will push Chelsea forward as a leading club in Europe.

 Another more recent way Chelsea is moving forward in the digital age is through the creation of
Chelsea Digital Ventures, a digital-first, consumer-focused business that spun out of Chelsea FC in
2018. The central idea of the business is to create products that appeal to both fans and those
outside the team’s fanbase. Currently, Chelsea Digital Ventures has launched three products: Blue
Fuel, an energy drink tied directly to Chelsea, C-Score, an app that measures general health, and
Perfect Play which offers personalized football coaching tips. All three products leverage Chelsea’s
extensive resources and intellectual property to help increase appeal to even those outside the fan
base. With the creation of this company, Chelsea is able to create even more digital football
experiences, further pushing their emphasis on technological innovation.

One of Chelsea’s most successful digital ventures came in the

form of mobile app, The Fifth Stand. The idea of The Fifth Stand
was to improve match day experience for users as well as
4.8
create a deeper level of engagement for users that relied less
on actual performance on the pitch. The major goals Chelsea set
for itself prior to the launch of the app was for it to become the Most downloaded
fourth most downloaded football app in the world and to 29th sports app in the App
maintain a monthly active user count of 1 million people. In order Store
to achieve this, The Fifth Stand had to set itself apart from
standard sports and football apps. By providing free streaming
of Premier League 2 and Women’s Super League matches,
commentary of major matches, and franchised evergreen box #1 Football club app
sets of historical matches, Chelsea successfully reached both of
their goals. Within 6 months of its launch, the app became the
most downloaded football club app in the world. In addition, 92%
of the app’s users agree with the statement “as a Chelsea fan,
1 Million+ downloads
you have to have The Fifth Stand.”

4 The Future of Chelsea

As reigning champions, Chelsea has
an incredibly difficult path ahead of
them if they want to maintain their
status and the only way to do so is to
continue investing considerable
resources into social media and
digital advancements. Although they
have done well thus far at being an
early adopter of information
technologies and improving fan
experience, the world is starting to
change even more rapidly.

As new technologies like VR and Facebook’s Metaverse are being explored, fans are set to
enter a whole new world of interaction with sport. If Chelsea does well to adapt to these
innovations, as they consistently have in the past, they will continue to see large growth of
their fan base and inevitably, results on and off the pitch.
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