Beyond the Champions League: Chelsea was also champion on social media

The community manager of Chelsea he was not subtle the day after the victory. The club’s Twitter account published this Sunday different images of the celebrations after beating him la Champions League al Manchester City; several of those posts contained fragments of songs from Oasis, the band of brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher, famous City fans. “I don’t believe that anybody / Feels the way I do about you now”, says a part of the classic “Wonderwall” and in the tweet it is observed Thomas Tuchel with the orejona raised. As the lyrics say, surely no one now feels the way Tuchel feels about having Guardiola’s game deprogrammed. Chelsea, for their part, feels they have returned to a place they missed: being the best team in Europe.

There was another championship won by Chelsea before winning the sports championship: the one on social media. In a season in which football clubs had lost a good part of their social media audience due to the effects of the pandemic (UEFA calculated a 50 percent drop in followers when football was canceled since March 2020), Chelsea achieved a remarkable recovery with data that make those who manage strategies in social networks happy: without depending on sports results. The success of Chelsea in regard to social media, in any case, accompanied the sports performance.

Chelsea was the club with the most interactions on Twitter of all Premier League teams: 56 million on an account of 17 million followers and with 5 thousand posts made during the last championship. The survey is from Mediacell, a London agency that is dedicated to analyzing metrics on social networks. The study also considers what type of message the clubs published on 12 categories such as announcements, celebrations, empathy, results, commemorations, among others. Along these lines, one of Chelsea’s most engaging tweets was when he congratulated Manchester City on winning the Premier League.

Another very successful action on platforms occurred when Chelsea unveiled their new kit for the 2021/22 season with a campaign called “It´sa Chelsea Thing”. The launch was made on May 13, a few days before the FA Cup final that Chelsea lost to Leicester City at Wembley. It is a video with a retro aesthetic that mixes the atmosphere of 1960s London with the participation of figures from the club’s men’s and women’s teams such as Mason Mount, Hakim Ziyech, Timo Werner, Sam Kerr, and Pernille Harder.

Music and Chelsea intersect in this campaign: the video uses a remix of the song Time of the Season (1968) by the band The Zombies whose singer was Colin Blunstone; his uncle, Frank Blunstone, was a club player from 1953-1964. The fans already gave their verdict: the video is on its way to 2 million views on YouTube.

But not everything is psychedelic in the life of Chelsea’s social networks. There is also chemically pure football: one of the contents that works the most is the tactical analysis of the team’s matches. The saga is called The Debrief and had an extra edition with the video where they show how Tuchel’s plan was superior to Guardiola’s in Portugal. Something that not even the daring personality of any of the Gallagher brothers would dare to discuss.

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