An interesting piece of reporting on Chelsea crowds from David Hillier.
David is a financial journalist who works for Bloomberg.
Chelsea are at home today, playing Bournemouth at Stamford Bridge in the Premier League.
The Bloomberg journalist revealing the following.
David Hillier writing: ‘With less than 24 hours to go, there seem to be plenty of tickets left for Chelsea’s game tomorrow v Bournemouth from the official website. Trouble is the cheapest tickets are £330, with the most expensive at £3,000. The last sell-out 40,000 crowd at the Bridge was August 2023.’
Looking back at the Chelsea crowds, the Bloomberg journalist appears to be referring to their first match of the 2023/24 season when Chelsea v Liverpool had an official attendance of 40,096.
Chelsea have a very high proportion of corporate seats and semi-corporate, so they aren’t that bothered when they don’t fill Stamford Bridge.
Looking at their crowds this current 2026/27 season, Chelsea’s highest has been 39,494 against Brighton in the Premier League, whilst the lowest so far has been 32,210 against Luton in the Carabao Cup.
Last (2025/26) season saw the highest official crowd of 39,820 when Chelsea played Arsenal, though the lowest was in the Champions League when only 30,774 bothered turning up when they played Pafos.
It has always made me laugh when the media talk about Chelsea as though they are a huge club.
Until 1997 Chelsea had only won the top tier once and only won the FA Cup once.
Indeed, until Roman Abramovich came along in 2003 and started buying them trophies with no limits on what an owner spent, Chelsea had still only won the league once.
As for their crowds, Chelsea have never been seen as a big club in my lifetime.
It is only these current laughable American owners that are perpetuating this myth of Chelsea a ‘big’ club by pumping ridiculous amounts of money into the club and using every accountancy trick in the book to do so.