The Dugout Club is a new business plan for Chelsea. The club will sell a certain number of seats for each home match for £3,000/seat. Those who hire this service will be able to appear regularly on television because it is very close to the position of captain Mauricio Pochettino on the coaching bench.
In the opposite stands, Chelsea surrounded an area called Westview. This area has been renovated to serve fans who want more luxury. The season ticket price for a seat in this area is up to 3,685 pounds.
Services like this are appearing more and more at Chelsea, showing that billionaire Todd Boehly's team is taking advantage of all forms to make up for the huge costs spent in the past on player purchases. However, these forms are only short-term and do not have a major impact on financial scale.
To capitalise on a large source of revenue from the stadium, including accompanying entertainment services, not simply selling tickets to the stadium, Chelsea need to rebuild Stamford Bridge or build a new home stadium. In 20 years in charge of Chelsea, Roman Abramovich has not had enough strength to carry out this plan. In 2018, before the conflict between Russia and Ukraine broke out, the billionaire considered the option of building a new home stadium for Chelsea, but before he could do so, he was forced to leave the team.
Jason Gannon is Chelsea's CEO and Casper Stylsvig is the director of revenue and finance. The duo were both caught up in implementing the idea of a new stadium, but so far, they are still struggling. The biggest and almost the only reason is finance. A new stadium of sufficient scale will cost about 2 billion pounds and the planning, construction and completion time can take up to 6 years. At that time, Chelsea could have to borrow the field for at least 3 seasons. Wembley can be counted but the cost is not small.
Chelsea is the team that has the best ability to attract loyal fans to the Premier League. The average age of The Blues fans at Stamford Bridge is 58. With a capacity of 40,341 seats, each season, this team earns about 82 million pounds from ticket sales. This figure is nothing compared to Man United's £126 million, Tottenham's £125 million or Liverpool's £112 million. To narrow the gap in revenue with arch-rivals, Chelsea's new home stadium may have to be among the most classy in Europe.
New home stadium or Stamford Bridge reconstruction are both a difficult problem for Chelsea as locals are unhappy with living near a noisy area. The people who benefit from building a new stadium are only fans who come to the stadium about twice a week, not those who often live around. Traffic situation, noise and waste are certainly problems that cannot be solved in the near future.
In addition, building a new stadium also needs to go hand in hand with the club's achievements. A grand and classy football field must be a place for a top team to perform, not to witness continuous failures like Chelsea.
