Chelsea and Arsenal met in the Football League First Division at Stamford Bridge for the first time on November 9, 1907, 30 years after the stadium was first opened for the use of London Athletic Club. Chelsea won 2.1 with both goals scored by George Hilsdon. Arsenal’s response came from Charlie Satterthwaite.
George Hilsdon was the first player to score 100 goals for Chelsea and a weathervane inspired by him can still be seen at Stamford Bridge. Legend has it that Chelsea will suffer “great misfortune” if they ever fold, as happened during the groundwork in the late 1970s when Chelsea were in financial and footballing decline. Hilsdon was the victim of a gas attack on the Western Front in World War I and never played professional football again, dying in 1941. His grave is unmarked.
This first match was watched by a record crowd for England’s top division: 65,000. Arsenal was still known as Woolwich Arsenal and was based at the time, but had a large following for this match due to it also being King Edward VII’s 66th birthday. The munitions factory, where many of the workers who followed the club were based, was closed for the day, so they could travel freely to West London.
In fact, Arsenal could have been more of a local rival to Chelsea than Tottenham Hotspur. A local businessman, Henry Norris, had an important role in the development of both clubs. Amassing a fortune from the estate, Norris became a director and then chairman of Fulham. Another Edwardian businessman named Henry, Henry Augustus Mears, had acquired Stamford Bridge with a view to making it one of the best venues for association football in the capital, if not the country. He offered Norris the opportunity to move Fulham FC onto the land, but Norris refused to pay the annual rent of some £1,500, so Mears set up his own team, Chelsea FC, in 1905. If Norris had not been so careful with his money, he might not have been a Chelsea football club at all.
Five years later, Norris, still chairman of Fulham, became majority shareholder in Woolwich Arsenal, which had gone into voluntary liquidation. Also becoming chairman of that London club, Norris proposed merging them with Fulham to form a superclub. The move was blocked by the Football League, so Chelsea and Fulham remained local rivals rather than Chelsea and Arsenal.
This match between the two teams in 1907 was the first to be played by two London clubs in the First Division, and thus the first major “London derby”. All subsequent league meetings between the two teams to date have been at the highest level of English football (the old First Division and now the Premier League).
Woolwich Arsenal took revenge the following season with a 2.1 victory on 28 November 1908: Chelsea’s goal again came from George Hilsdon. The Gunners also won on Chelsea’s grass in the subsequent season, before the first draw, 1-1, in this league match on 15 February 1913. This was the last time the two teams met before Woolwich Arsenal met. move to Highbury and change its name. to Arsenal.
In fact, after that victory in their first meeting, Chelsea did not win the match again until December 13, 1919 when they won 3.1 with goals from Robert McNeil, John Cock and Henry Ford in front of a huge crowd of 60,000 at the postwar period.
The match on 12 October 1935 was played in front of another huge crowd: 82,905, which was the second highest recorded attendance for an English league match. It ended in a 1-1 draw. Joseph Bambrick scored for Chelsea and Jack Crayston for Arsenal.
Arsenal’s record league victory at Stamford Bridge came in front of 74,667 football fans on 29 November 1930: a 5.1 victory, with David Jack scoring a hat-trick as Arsenal closed in on their first win in the league championship and dominated English football in the 1930s. They scored five times again on 24 November 1934, in a 5.2 win this time, with legendary Arsenal centre-forward Ted Drake scoring four of Arsenal’s goals. Drake would go on to manage Chelsea in 1952 and was largely responsible for changing his nickname from pensioners a The Blues.
The Gunners also scored five goals in a 5.3 victory on 29 October 2011 with Robin Van Persie scoring a hat-trick for the victors.
Chelsea’s biggest match win came in a 6.0 win in the Premier League on 22 March 2014, which was also Arsenal manager, Arsène Wenger’s 1,000th match in charge. This is the most goals Chelsea have ever scored against Arsenal in a league game at Stamford Bridge and it also represented The Blues’ biggest margin of victory. Oscar scored two goals that day along with one from Samuel Eto’o, Andre Schurrle, Eden Hazard and Mohamed Salah in front of an attendance of 41,614.
The teams are head to head in terms of wins in this match. In the years that Chelsea won the league title, they never lost at home to north London rivals, drawing matches in the 1954/55 and 2004/05 seasons and winning each in 2005/06, 2009 ./10 and 2014/15.
Arsenal, in the 13 seasons in which they have finished as League Champions, have only lost to Chelsea twice (Chelsea were in the Second Division in the 1988/89 season so there was no game) – on 29 August 1970 when Paddy Mulligan and John Hollins scored for Chelsea and Eddie Kelly returned one for Arsenal, and on February 2, 1991. Kerry Dixon and Graham Stuart scored for Chelsea on that day with Alan Smith answering for Arsenal in front of a crowd of 29,094 . This was the only league defeat of the season for George Graham’s Arsenal and the first in 27 First Division games, dating back to a 2.0 loss at Luton Town on 21 April 1990.
