On 10 March 1905, in the Rising Sun pub across the road from Stamford Bridge (now named the Butcher’s Hook), the decision was taken to form a new club to play in the freshly built stadium. Now, for the first time in our 117 years of existence, we can claim to be the world champions and not only that, we are able to say our men’s first team has won every major competition they have been able to enter.

To celebrate both that achievement and our Founders’ Day today, we look here at how the accumulation of trophies has occurred over the decades, with some new competitions along the way, and with our Women’s team and the Academy also part of the focus, aspirations Chelsea FC has to extend the list…

Making history

Shortly before Chelsea came into existence in 1905, Fulham Football Club were angling to occupy the new Stamford Bridge stadium for an annual leasehold fee way below the proposed £1,500. As he set off for the meeting, landowner Gus Mears was sagely advised by his friend Fred Parker: ‘They have the club, you have the finest ground in the kingdom. If they won’t come to terms tell them we will start a new club that is bound to become one of the best in the country.’ Fulham did not take up the offer and the rest is history. Our history.

The new club would soon attract record crowds to English football and enjoy some of the greatest names in the game. But if ‘best’ was to be measured by weight of silverware alone, Chelsea’s early teams were a disappointment, gaining the first major honour, the Football League Division One title, in our 50th jubilee year 1954/55. The League Cup came a decade later, the FA Cup in 1969/70 and the European Cup Winners’ Cup the following year.

An acceleration in trophy gathering started in the 1990s, and it has taken 117 years to complete the set by claiming the Club World Cup in February. Chelsea have now won every men’s major competition ever entered. We have genuinely ‘won it all’ – as our fans love to remind opponents.

Leagues

The club’s golden jubilee 1954/55, when Chelsea won the Football League title for the first time, was a bumper season throughout the club. The reserves won the Football Combination a second time and the Metropolitan League for the first of three occasions in four years, while the youth team claimed the inaugural South East Counties League crown, a title won in seven of the eight years to come.

The Blues’ first Premier League success came 50 years after the first league title, clinched by Frank Lampard’s two goals in a 2-0 win at Bolton on 30 April 2005.

1955-mastermind Ted Drake was spot on with his prediction it would take three years of his management to win the championship. Likewise, 2005 manager Jose Mourinho had told his players months earlier that Bolton’s stadium would be the scene of their title celebrations.

That was the first of five league titles in 13 years for the men’s team, while Chelsea’s women side also claimed their maiden silverware in 2015 as part of a famous Double, becoming champions of the FA Women’s Super League for the first time.

League titles:Division One 1954/55Premier League 2004/05, 2005/06, 2009/10, 2014/15, 2016/17Women’s Super League 2015, 2017/18, 2019/20, 2020/21Women’s Spring Series 2017

Cups

Ten years after the club won that first league title, a new younger side managed by Tommy Docherty had taken shape and their finest hour came in a two-legged League Cup final victory over holders Leicester City, in just the fifth season since the competition’s formation.

Our first ever FA Cup triumph soon followed in 1970 and holds a special place in the heart of Chelsea supporters for obvious reasons. The magnitude of such an achievement cannot be understated, while the fact it was our bitter rivals, Leeds United, that we overcame to win the trophy made it all the memorable.

That was the first of our eight FA Cup triumphs, though it surely remains the most hard-fought and bruising!

Begin it to win it

One of Chelsea’s occasional specialities has been to win a competition actually created by an official of the Stamford Bridge club. As early as 1915/16, the Pensioners’ long-serving first chair, Claude Kirby, co-founded the London Combination as a regional league to fill the gap left by the Football League’s suspension during World War One.

In his blond-locked youth, excelling at virtually every sport and athletic endeavour, Kirby was nicknamed by one reporter ‘Golden Sunshine’ and his creation was a ray of light for Chelsea’s trophy-free first team (plus ‘guests’). The west Londoners won the London Combination by seven points, a supplementary competition played in the spring by one, as well as lifting a spin-off National War Fund Cup. Chelsea remain holders of another Kirby invention, the London Victory Cup, from 1918/19.

AV Alexander MP, First Lord of the Admiralty, ‘Churchill’s favourite socialist’, and most importantly Chelsea’s vice-president, helped establish the Football League South Cup, the FA Cup’s replacement during World War Two. The Pensioners were runners-up in the second final in 1944 and the following season Alexander was able to present the trophy to Johnny Harris, skipper of the club he had long supported.

In 1985, the Football League management committee – led by Chelsea chair Ken Bates – created the Football League Super Cup, a midweek competition designed to mitigate the loss of revenue created by England’s ban from all UEFA competitions. Entry was only for the teams that would have qualified for Europe, but in addition a second competition was started – the Full Members’ Cup, open to the remaining clubs in the top two divisions.

It was little regarded until the remarkable final between success-starved Chelsea and Manchester City, which lured a crowd of just under 70,000 to Wembley. With six minutes remaining the Blues led 5-1, then three City replies (including an own goal and a penalty) threw the match into the balance. All the same, it was Chelsea skipper Colin Pates who gratefully raised the trophy aloft minutes later.

The Chelsea-midwifed competition that proved most elusive is now our most coveted prize: the Champions League. Club secretary John Battersby attended every European Cup set-up meeting in 1955 and handed an administrative role on the committee until the Football League twisted chairman Joe Mears’ arm to pull out. It would be 44 years before the club were invited again, and a further 13 before Didier Drogba’s penalty sealed our maiden triumph in Europe’s elite competition. How Battersby, who died in 2010, would have savoured our success then and last season’s repeat.

Doubling up

While Jose Mourinho’s team were disappointed not to claim a third successive Premier League title in 2006/07, they still became the first Chelsea squad to triumph in the League Cup and FA Cup finals in the same season. Only Arsenal and Liverpool had previously managed that feat. The one and only time we have secured the league and FA Cup Double was under Carlo Ancelotti three years later.

Emma Hayes claimed a Double for Chelsea Ladies, as they were then known, in 2015 by winning our maiden titles in the league and FA Women’s Cup, with Ji So-Yun claiming the decisive goal against Notts County in front of 30,000 supporters.

However, that was not the first silverware won by a Chelsea Ladies side. In 1973/74, manager John Martin guided a Blues team to success in both league and cup in back-to-back seasons, the knockout victory coming against Millwall Lionesses in the London Women’s Football Challenge Cup.

Five years later at the City Ground in Nottingham, the Blues became only the third club to win the FA Women’s League Cup (or Conti Cup) with victory over Arsenal, one of the other winning trio along with Manchester City, courtesy of a Bethany England brace.

Domestic cups:League Cup 1964/65, 1997/98, 2004/05, 2006/07, 2014/15FA Cup 1969/70, 1996/97, 1999/00, 2006/07, 2008/09, 2009/10, 2011/12, 2017/18Full Members’ Cup 1985/86, 1989/90Women’s FA Cup 2014/15, 2017/18, 2019/20, 2020/21Women’s League Cup 2019/20, 2020/21

International cups

While four other clubs (Ajax, Bayern, Juventus and, most recently, Manchester United) have completed the ‘UEFA treble’ (Champions League, Europa League and Cup Winners’ Cup), Chelsea are the only one to do so twice over.

All the elite UEFA five have also carried off the FIFA Club World Cup or one of its predecessors, which we finally got our hands on this year in Abu Dhabi, having lost the final against Corinthians back in 2012.

With our first FA Cup win safely secured, Chelsea earned entry into the European Cup Winners’ Cup and this new competition for the club would prove to be the centrepiece of the 1970/71 season. Greek, Bulgarian, Belgian and English opponents were beaten before the mighty Real Madrid were left standing as our only remaining foes.

A replay was needed, this time in Athens just days after the original game. Many Chelsea fans even stayed on in the Greek capital, some sleeping on the beach, and their patience was rewarded as we won 2-1 with John Dempsey and Peter Osgood the heroes.

There was a 27-year wait before our next European title with a very different Chelsea now in play, led by Gianluca Vialli and inspired by his fellow Italian Gianfranco Zola. Stuttgart were memorably defeated in Stockholm, handing the opportunity to have a go at the UEFA Super Cup, which we finally claimed in Monaco thanks to Gustavo Poyet’s strike.

No trophy proved as painfully elusive though as the Champions League, with several semi-final heartbreaks, plus penalty pain in the Moscow rain, exacerbating our need to finally, truly claim the title of European champions. It all fell into place in May 2012 on an electric night in Munich, Bayern beaten in their own stadium and Didier Drogba cementing his place in club folklore with the crucial equaliser and the all-important spot-kick winner.

While our defence of that European crown did not go to plan, dropping into the Europa League did present us with the chance of winning a trophy we had yet to get our hands on: the Europa League, formally the UEFA Cup. A superb Branislav Ivanovic header right at the death saw the Blues overcome Benfica in Amsterdam.

International titles:Cup Winners’ Cup 1970/71, 1997/98Super Cup 1998, 2021Champions League 2011/12, 2020/21Europa League 2012/13, 2018/19FIFA Club World Cup 2021

Academy honours

A Chelsea youth squad that included future legendary names such as Peter Bonetti and Bobby Tambling put together an incredible cup run in which they won eight of their 10 games in 1959/60, scoring an incredible 46 goals and conceding just four to win the prestigious FA Youth Cup for the first time.

We followed that by retaining the trophy the following season, a theme that would be picked up over half a century later as our Under-18s matched Manchester United’s ‘Busby Babes’ side by winning the competition five years in a row.

In one of those campaigns, 2014/15, our youngsters married domestic dominance with European glory, triumphing in the Under-19 UEFA Youth League in Switzerland. Andreas Christensen and Ruben Loftus-Cheek were among the starters for our first continental success, a 3-2 victory over Shakhtar Donetsk, which was followed a year later with a 2-1 win against Paris Saint-Germain.

In fact, 2015 marked an extraordinary achievement for Chelsea as we simultaneously became holders of the FA Cup, Women’s FA Cup and FA Youth Cup, the first to achieve such a feat and indicative of the insatiable appetite for winning throughout the club.

Major Academy titles:FA Youth Cup 1959/60, 1960/61, 2009/10, 2011/12, 2013/14, 2014/15, 2015/16, 2016/17, 2017/18UEFA Youth League 2014/15, 2015/16

Silverware still searching for

While the men’s team can officially now claim to have won the lot, there are still competitions to conquer for our women’s and Academy teams, most notably the Women’s Champions League. Emma Hayes’s side came as close as you can to lifting that trophy last term, reaching the final for the first time but ultimately going down 4-0 to Barcelona.

The Chelsea Academy have fielded a side in the EFL Trophy since 2016, competing alongside the senior teams of League One and League Two clubs. Our best showing was the following campaign under the management of Joe Edwards when a side featuring Reece James, Ethan Ampadu and Callum Hudson-Odoi beat the likes of MK Dons and Portsmouth before losing a semi-final shoot-out away at Lincoln City, missing out on a memorable trip to Wembley.

Unfortunately, our quests in both competitions are already over this term, meaning the search for elusive silverware rolls over into a new campaign. Yet Chelsea Women are still fighting on two fronts in 2021/22, while our youngsters are into the FA Youth Cup semi-finals once again. Thomas Tuchel's side, of course, are still defending their Champions League title and pursuing glory in the FA Cup.

There is no doubt the trophy-collecting hobby burns brighter than ever at Stamford Bridge as we prepare to begin our 118th year.