If you wondered why Chelsea flew to the USA for a (world!) series of friendlies, Blue Winner has the answers. No, the answer is not that they can party in the hollywood with Paris Hilton and other babes. Blue Winner makes end to end review of Chelsea’s US tour without talking too much what we already discussed here, here and here. He says that, while a tour of USA would help the team in the short run, it surely would help the club in the long run. Read on.


Well Chelsea is making the usual pre-season tour and this year they have returned to the football hotbed of… the United States. I am sure that you, as well as I, spent some time pondering why the Blues did not host a set of games, or perhaps tour the continent, rather than trekking to California to participate in all things Beckham. Well, it actually makes sense when explained the way the club did. Just prepare for some more riders to the bandwagon.

Publicity

To begin with, Chelsea signed a contract with Disney that will ensure that Chelsea is the main football sponsor of the Disney Wide World of Sports and will be the presenting sponsor of the Disney Soccer Showcase Series. In short, this means the club will be out front for everything that Disney, perhaps the largest purveyor of media in the world, will do that involves football. This will make Chelsea, for better or worse, the face of football in the United States.

More than the contract with Disney, the publicity from Beckhammania is a huge boon to the Chelsea Football Club. 86% of fans of the Northern California club listed Chelsea as the game they most anticipated this summer. The first nationally televised game of Beckham’s stint in America will be the feature against Chelsea. ESPN, the major sports carrier in the United States, has requested cameras for pregame coverage and is devoting no fewer than four separate television channels to the event. Coverage for the meaningless game will begin three hours before kickoff. In the midst of this media frenzy will be Chelsea, reaping a huge publicity harvest for little more than the normal pregame stretching. This kind of exposure simply cannot be bought. It required no stretch of the imagination to see Jose Mourinho creating some sort of spectacle to capture the attention of the cameras. You could have almost counted on it. Sadly, none of them seem to have been on hand for his hamstring tearing save in the Backroom Staff’s match against the British Press XI.

Money

Roman Abramovich did not make it to this point in his life by not wringing every possible credit out of every moment. This American tour, really just a one city stop, is no exception. It can be readily assumed that Chelsea will be receiving part of the gate from the games played in the States. Attendance has been running near 18,000 but the game between Chelsea and the LA Galaxy (don’t ask me, I didn’t name them) is a sellout, promising nearly 30,000 supporters in the seats. While it is something short of the crowds that accompany a European match, there will be no shortage of money spent or added to the Chelsea coffers.

Another major cash influx will come from Chelsea fans who want to see the games. The only method of viewing the games will come from the Chelsea owned Chelsea TV. Even supporters with Sky Sports must already own the channel or purchase it to watch the Blues in action. Even online radio coverage will cost loyal followers a few hard earned pounds before they get to hear the match. All of this will also bring in money that Chelsea would otherwise miss. The Disney deal will also bring in a good deal of money. Chelsea will certainly make some bank from a trip that will be a tune up for the season. Is the money a major reason? Probably not, but it won’t hurt.

Competition

Yes, you read that correctly, Chelsea is traveling to the USA to play good competition. Club America lost to FC Barcelona in the 2005 Club World Cup and features a lineup that is not worthy of being scoffed. As seen in the match, Club America was hardly a simple win for the Blues. To be sure, a consistent XI could probably have handled the match with some more ease but the dispatching of Club America was surely more difficult than the average fixture against Nottingham Forest.

Next came the Suwon Bluewings, wearing a kit that caused more than a bit of confusion upon first coming across the game. Suwon, or Samsung, packed in the defence and forced Chelsea to play an attacking style of football that some had clamored for all last year. Playing down to a team that lacked quality would not have forced CFC to come out of the back third of the field and attack with some vigor. It was something special to see and definitely and encouragement to most supporters. Such are the benefits of playing the occasionally difficult pre-season match. Suwon was something less than a force going forward but the Brazilian Eduardo provided a few efforts that at least gave Petr Cech something to deflect.

LA Galaxy is something of an enigma. The addition of David Beckham will not hurt the team but one must wonder about the quality of the players around him. Continental washout Landon Donovan recently became the all time point scorer in USA history but failed to show much in his time in the leagues of Europe. The blonde mane of Abel Xavier was also be on display as the Boro reject has landed nearly 5000 miles away and on an MLS team. Despite the lack of top flight competition (even Beckham can no longer be considered one of the top 50 footballers in the world) the attention will be something like the scrutiny that Chelsea will face all season long.

Another reason that the difficulty of competition is important to Chelsea is that it enables Mourinho to see what his options were in the attack. A calendar that included games against truly miserable sides would have turned every Chelsea player into Zola. The respectable level of talent gave JM the chance to see how Malouda is drifting in off the wing, how Malouda and Robben mesh, if Sheva and Drogba were more inclined to work together and if Kalou would ever show that some of that fantastic potential that has made him so attractive to everyone.

And so, despite the fact that the USA seems like the most unlikely of places for a “soccer” tour, it will actually pan out well in the end for Chelsea.

This article was contributed by Blue Winner