Welcome to We Ain't Got No History, SBN's new Chelsea blog. When it becomes an old Chelsea blog, I suppose I'll have to change the name, but we'll burn that bridge when we come to it. For those of you not in the know, Chelsea Football Club (often just Chelsea, The Blues, Chelski, Chel$ki, or CFC) are the reigning champions of the English Premier League and currently one of the dominant forces in club football. The current squad ranks amongst the greatest collection of talent ever assembled, which means they're a lot of fun to watch, even though fans might sometimes pine for the good old days when we were mediocre and not everyone hated us. Of course, go a bit further than that and the team was even worse and pretty racist, so truncating Chelsea's past to the mid-90s is completely fine with me.
Some of you may know me from my work as a baseball blogger, typically focusing on the Mariners and statistical analysis. What's a baseball writer doing running a soccer blog? Well, Chelsea are my first love, having picked them up at the tender age of four years old. My hometown didn't have a team, so kids just picked whichever Premier League side they felt like. I like blue, so Chelsea it was. The blog will give SBN a Chelsea community and me a chance to follow the side in greater depth, which is nice. The second reason is that I'm slowly working on a reasonable theory of statistical analysis in football, and this place will be as good as any for that. For those of you familiar with SBN's baseball offerings, think Lookout Landing, except for soccer.
Well, it'll be run slightly differently too. I'm not going to get my panties in a twist over grammar, capitalisation, etc. What I will get annoyed by is the usual stuff - let's avoid the racism, homophobia, disturbing .gifs and all of that garbage. The rules are pretty easy and pretty relaxed. Don't say anything that you'd get hit for if you said it to someone's face. Don't violate copyright laws. Don't do anything particularly annoying, like posting gigantic pictures or trolling other sites. No talking about politics, religions, or things that spiral out of control - there are plenty of places to do that if that's your cup of tea. If you're a fan of another team/sport, welcome, but remember that you're a guest and try to avoid making a mess in our house. And if you can't write intelligibly, you're not going to get in trouble, but you're probably also not going to be taken seriously either; I strongly encourage putting some effort into your posts and comments. Additional authors will be taken from the community, so please feel free to make liberal use of the FanPost section and the comments.
I think that's enough for now. The Charity Shield will be contested on Sunday against Manchester United, and I'm not sure the site will be live in time to cover that, but fortunately nobody cares about the Charity Shield so we should be fine turns out we will be live for tomorrows game, but I still haven't found anyone who cares (about tomorrow's game. Not the site going live. I care about the site). I have no clue what's going on. We're actually live now yay!
Again, welcome to We Ain't Got No History. I hope you stay a while.