Let us delight in Chelsea’s despair

There is nothing more enjoyable in world football right now then the suffering and seemingly endless descent of a club that has come to represent everything that is wrong with the modern game, from top to bottom.

The cracks are starting to show in a Chelsea club that stands for everything that is wrong with the modern game. Source: Getty Images

The first time I heard of ‘Schadenfreude’ was in The Simpsons, when Lisa defined it for Homer as a German term for “shameful joy”. But there is nothing shameful about this joy.

The only thing that is shameful is the trend that Chelsea represents. A trend where money and results allow you to dispense with any collective moral code.

At the top you have an owner in Roman Abramovich who allegedly amassed his billions through dubious means. The man who smiles and claps politely every time a goal is scored at Stamford Bridge has a Wikipedia controversies list that reads like a Bond villain.

He’s not the only owner of a football club that questionably accumulated his wealth, after all 'behind every great fortune lies a great crime' as the saying goes, but he was one of the first to enter the game and so aggressively change the balance with billions.

It was in 2003 that he supposedly fell in love with the game after watching Brazil great Ronaldo score a mesmerizing hat-trick at Old Trafford for Real Madrid. And like a spoilt child in a toy store he decided he must have a football club - and bought Chelsea two months later.

Ever since then he’s bought player after player like a man playing Football Manager with a cheat code, decimating any pathway for young local talent to come through a now non-existent system.  

One of his most successful acquisitions was manager Jose Mourinho from FC Porto, a kind of ‘evil genius’ in world football who lately seems to have dropped the genius part.

His supporters always attempted to defend his actions by pointing to his success.

It was seemingly okay to yell at team doctors, berate referees and fellow managers and, in one case, sneak up behind Barcelona’s Tito Vilanova and poke him in the eye. All because he was a winner.

It was all part of some brilliant mind games, they would say, that took pressure of his players. Well this season the ‘mind games’ continued even when the success did not. Revealing that maybe the mind games are just continued expressions of a narcissist.

Now the world anticipates every post-match press conference where he attempts to defend another loss by dreaming up some ludicrous conspiracy. It’s certainly more enjoyable for the masses than any style of football his sides have played.

Mourinho and Chelsea’s leader on the pitch for the Abramovich era has been John Terry. Who else to represent your club than a guy who admitted in 2012 to calling fellow professional Anton Ferdinand a ‘black c**t’ and showed loyalty by allegedly having an affair with the girlfriend of his team-mate Wayne Bridge in 2009.

It’s not just Terry having his impact on millions of impressionable children who watch the Premier League each week but Diego Costa who even when in form combines deadly finishing with outrageous violent aggression and pathetic diving.

Then we have the fans. It’s hard to paint them all with the same brush. I myself know many Chelsea fans who are good people.

However, every time a goal is scored against them, every time they drop points or are knocked out of a competition I picture Souleymane Sylla, the Parisian man who was pushed off his local train by invading thugs in Chelsea shirts because he was black, smiling to himself – as a little bit of justice is served in an unjust world.

And I picture those Chelsea fans who were on that train moping as they drag their knuckles along the floor of their cave.

And with Mr Sylla we should all smile because it won’t last forever. They’ll find a way back to the top. Mourinho is too smart a manager and Abramovich is too rich an owner for this to continue longer than a season. And we’ll have to begrudgingly admit they’re a successful team.

For now let us rejoice. So often we’re divided into our separate clubs but we can all unite and support whoever this shameful club play next.