By Tony Attwood
As a supporter, what do you do if you don’t like the way your club is being run? Obviously not a question for most Arsenal supporters at the moment (I would say “all Arsenal supporters” but I am not sure about the feelings of those who called for Arteta to be sacked at the end of last season for coming second three times in a row, and as they said “clearly lacking the ability to win”.)
I don’t think I’ve come across demands for sacking a manager who has taken a club up from eighth to second but still, each to his own.
Although at RC Strasbourg Alsace, they have made an even greater leap. In 2016, they won Division 3 in France. In 2017, they won Division 2. In 2019, they won the League Cup.
Since then, they have stayed in Ligue 1 (as it is properly known) and have meandered between 6th and 15th in subsequent seasons. Last season it was 7th and the ground has been improved quite a bit. New owners took over in 2023, and they are currently third in the league, one point off the top.
And the response of the militant supporters is to hold a 15 minute silence at the start of each game, denouncing the operation of the club; a club that has risen from the third division to being one point off the top of the top division.
But it seems it is not just the current owners who are disliked. Previously, the club’s ex-player Marc Keller rescued the club from bankruptcy, but he is now the subject of some fans’ ire because he sold the club to the present owners.
Now this might remain a story about just some seemingly strange behaviour by supporters of a French team, maybe you don’t know too much about. But the owners of Strasbourg are also the owners of Chelsea. And as we recognise that BlueCo is the owner, the annoyance of the Strasbourg supporters becomes a bit more understandable.
They moved into Chelsea in 2022 and took over RC Strasbourg Alsace in 2023. And it is not too difficult to see the sort of issues that fans of both clubs get a bit uppity about.
We might consider the case of Ben Whilwell. Chelsea, owned by BlueC,o picked him up from Leicester in 2020, loaned him to Crystal Palace. He played 13 games for Palace in 2023/24 and then moved to Strasbourg, where he has played three times this season. To say he doesn’t seem to fit there seems to be stating the obvious.
But there is a deeper problem here for what it shows is players being bought by companies that own a group of clubs so they can be shifted around. As the Guardian pointed out, Chilwell hardly fitted Chelsea’s requirements, “so Chelsea sent him to Strasbourg to join Mathis Amougou and Diego Moreira, who have also made the same move in recent seasons.”
In short, Strasbourg supporters are protesting against the notion of rich people buying clubs and then moving players back and forth for the benefit of the biggest club in the group. Like Ishé Samuels-Smith, who also went to Strasbourg from Chelsea on a permanent deal, only to return to Chelsea, and then went to Swansea City when it seems he wasn’t everything Chelsea wanted. And maybe that doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that it was all in the same transfer window.
Or consider Emanuel Emegha, another Strasbourg player who is going to Chelsea next summer. How would you feel if the club you loyally supported was just a testing ground for players who, if any good, would move up to the top club in the group?
Strasbourg brought in 18 players in this summer’s window, and as I say, they are third, just one point behind PSG, which is obviously pleasing, but being a Chelsea feeder club does not sit well with the fans.
Of course, I must also mention that the owners of Arsenal also own multiple other sports clubs, although as far as I know, only one of these is a football club: Columbia Rapids. They are tenth out of 15 in the Western Conference.
The one player who moved from the Colorado Rapids to Arsenal is defender Auston Trusty. He signed with Arsenal in January 2022 but remained with the Rapids on loan for the rest of the season and was then loaned to Birmingham City for the 2022/23 season. He was also loaned to the Rapids before being sold to Sunderland, who in 2024 sold him to Celtic, for whom he has played 24 games this season
This, it seems, is modern football, and the Chelsea model shows the dangers it holds.
