Descendants of the Niditch family are one such longstanding Chelsea collective. Three generations are still regulars to the Bridge, season ticket holders in the East Upper, and they all owe their love for the club to Alf Niditch.

Fittingly, Alf was born in 1905, the year Chelsea were founded. He grew up in the East End of London but chose the Pensioners and not West Ham as his team to go to watch. He was ten years old when he first made the journey across the capital, given a penny by his mother for the bus trip. He would often walk a lot of the way.

Football continued being played in wartime, with matchday crowds in SW6 often topping 30,000. After the war, Alf and his family moved to west London because of bomb damage to their house. It was in Ladbroke Grove, North Kensington, that his daughters Hellie and Astrid grew up, much closer to Stamford Bridge than he had. Their connection to Chelsea was sealed.

Astrid turns 86 next week. She was born a few months before the Second World War began, and started going to games in the 1950s, aged 13. To this day she is a regular at the Bridge, and for Wembley finals. Speaking over the phone, accompanied by her granddaughter Emily, it is clear Astrid’s passion for Chelsea burns as bright as ever.

‘Even now when I go to the stadium and walk in, I still get that feeling across my chest, those goosebumps,’ she says. ‘I’m sitting in my kitchen now and thinking of it I’m getting a bit emotional!’

Emily interjects.

‘You said to me before my first game, when you walk up the stairs, you get that feeling. And now I think about it every time. It's quite a feeling.’

Astrid continues: ‘My father went to every home game, and I remember my mother used to make lunch for all the family, including Lauren and Lloydie, on a Saturday. We would eat it very quickly because he had to go to the game, often with my cousin Stephen.

‘My sister Hellie is a few years older than me, and she remembers the time when they used to pass the kids down to the front. You couldn't do it today!'

Astrid passed on her love of Chelsea to her daughter Lauren, who in turn ingrained it in Emily. They are pictured top at a recent game at Stamford Bridge. It is not lost on the three generations that it is the women on their side of the family who picked up the baton from Alf.

Lauren’s brother Lloydie and his sons Daniel and Alexander are also season ticket holders, while Emily and her brother Ollie have shared some of their happiest times watching Chelsea together. Hellie’s descendants, among them her son Stephen and his three daughters Elizabeth, Catherine and Florence, are also Blues supporters.

Cup finals have provided a linear narrative to the family's fandom. Of course, 1915, the year of Alf’s first game, was the year we reached the FA Cup final for the first time. In 1970, when we finally got our hands on the famous silverware, Astrid and her father joined the many millions viewing the game at Old Trafford on screen.

‘We went to the Muswell Hill Cinema to watch the replay because we didn’t have a television in those days,’ she recalls. ‘It was packed out full of Chelsea fans celebrating. I remember holding on to my father’s arm.’

It would be 27 years before Chelsea won the FA Cup again. Lauren went to Wembley to watch Dennis Wise lift the Cup, while her nine-year-old daughter Emily watched it at her great-grandfather’s house. By now, Alf was 91.

‘I remember getting in trouble because I was sitting on the floor watching it, and then I leant on his knee or something, and I got told off,’ Emily laughs. ‘I have always remembered that!

‘A family member managed to get a big television brought into the lounge. We don’t know to this day how much Papa [Alf] knew was going on. He died a few weeks later, and that Cup final would have been the last game he saw.’

Fast forward 15 years to another sunny Saturday in May, and a now grown-up Emily was setting off for Munich, several family members in tow.

‘We were flying to Stuttgart via Paris and then getting a train because it was so expensive to get a flight,’ she says. ‘Our flight to Paris got delayed, so we missed the connection to Stuttgart. There were so many Chelsea fans on it. They put us on another flight. We then missed the train from Stuttgart by two minutes. And it was another hour wait.

‘And then we finally got into Munich and it was chaos, absolute chaos. We got on the underground and that wasn't working, and it was maybe 45 minutes or an hour before kick-off and we were still in the centre of Munich. I just burst into tears! I had a ticket for the Champions League final and I was going to miss it.

‘My friend just saw this cab and I’ve never seen him move so fast. He managed to hail it. We got in it. We then pulled over to take some other stranded fans and we were all squished in. After leaving the house at 5am in London, I think I got to my seat maybe five minutes before kick-off.

‘The game hadn’t even started and my adrenaline was so intense! But that night is always going to be hard to beat. Going through the 2000s with so many near-misses in the Champions League, it was just joyful.’

Other family highlights that spring to mind include the Chelsea vs Arsenal games that used to be a common occurrence over the festive and new year period. Astrid’s first husband was an Arsenal fan – in fact, so was her second! – and she and Lauren used to accompany him to Highbury to watch Chelsea play, proudly wearing their blue and white scarves and hats. ‘Imagine if you did that now!’ Astrid laughs.

In 2006, Emily’s younger brother Ollie was a mascot for a game against Watford at Stamford Bridge, and a few years later, cousins Alexander and Daniel did likewise when Carlo Ancelotti’s Blues thrashed Aston Villa 7-1. Up in the stands that day Astrid, a very proud grandparent indeed, was able to meet one of her childhood heroes, Roy Bentley.

Astrid also had the pleasure of bumping into one of our modern greats, John Terry, on the ski slopes in France.

‘We were having a lovely lunch up there in the mountains with the blue sky, we looked over and blow me down, we saw John Terry!’ You can sense the excitement in Astrid’s voice.

‘My daughter was quite plucky. She went up and she said, excuse me interrupting, I just want to tell you that table over here with my family, we're all big Chelsea supporters. He came over and cuddled me!’

‘My grandma's very comfortable cuddling,’ laughs Emily.

Chelsea Football Club has offered the Niditch descendants - among them the Kraftmans, the Roses and the Simons - a warm embrace ever since the young Alf decided to venture across London to watch what was then one of the country’s most popular teams. That status has wavered at points in the century since, but all the while this Chelsea-obsessed family have been united by their mutual passion for the club.

‘We’ve really loved it,’ Lauren concludes.

‘From when I look back on my childhood to now, it has literally bonded us as an immediate family. We've had really good times together at Chelsea. I can see it going on for many more generations.’