2014 WORLECUP SHIRT NEWS

football FACup Chelsea

Well, many of the Chelsea fans are wearing blue shirts, but only Everton were playing in blue today. So from TV camera distances it may look like there are more Everton fans just because that's "their" colour today.

The commentary I heard said there was an allocation of 25,000 tickets to each club. After that it is a mix.

Everton's supporters are generally more enthusiastic and vocal than Chelsea's. Everton haven't won anything in a long time, so their fans are passionate diehards who haven't been this close to glory in a long, long time. This is the biggest game in years for them, and they are (were) EXCITED.

Chelsea's recent successes have attracted legions of casual supporters, who are typically not going to be as vocal, or know all the songs. Chelsea have recently won the English league a couple of times, and reached the final and semi-final of the European Champion's League in the last two seasons. The FA cup is almost a consolation prize to a team with higher ambition who will regard this season as a failure despite this trophy.

posted by nowonmai at 9:43 AM on May 30, 2009

The commentary I heard said there was an allocation of 25,000 tickets to each club. After that it is a mix.

The FA allocates about a third of the tickets to member organisations, meaning that a club in the Unibond League Division One will get a few tickets: that's often been controversial, especially when tickets get passed on or re-sold on the black market.

For Chelsea fans who live near Stamford Bridge, the trip to Wembley involves changing at Westminster for the Jubilee line. For Everton fans, it's a long trip down to London, often en masse, which builds up the "away day" camaraderie. I'll put it as green-friendly as possible, but nowonmai's right that Chelsea also has a reputation for having a small core of loyalists, and a larger penumbra of hangers-on. (From personal recollection, they were just as quiet at the old Wembley a decade ago.)

posted by holgate at 10:02 AM on May 30, 2009

The Everton fans don't have to come so far and they can all come in a group. Getting all the Chelsea fans in from Inverness, Los Angeles, Krakow, Shanghai, Cape Town, and Riyadh is a lot harder.

posted by wackybrit at 10:16 AM on May 30, 2009 [7 favorites]

Whilst I definitely agree with the above points:

Chelsea fans are generally on the quiet side

More of the neutral tickets would have been wanting Everton to win

Everton fan's being more up for the occasion as Chelsea see this as a small consolation

The positioning for the TV microphones and the mixing makes a massive difference, I've been at games where I thought one side was alot louder than another, only to watch the game recorded and hear the exact opposite.

posted by chrispy108 at 4:42 PM on May 30, 2009

I'm not sure if this applies to the FA Cup final, but it's worth mentioning anyway:

Fairly recently, there was a story knocking around the press here in the UK that TV coverage of football was being dubbed with prerecorded crowd noise - the football equivalent of canned laughter on sitcoms. It was apparently common practice, but recently it was noticed on games where the crowd attendance at a lower league game of one man and his dog, so to speak, sounded like a capacity crowd at the World Cup final.

However, I wouldn't imagine that live audio dubbing for something as unpredictable as football could be practical, so chrispy108's point about microphone positioning is likely to be the deciding factor.

   |   © All right reserved