Getting into Stamford Bridge is never as simple as just turning up and paying at the gate. Chelsea are one of the best-supported clubs in the country, meaning that home games usually sell out and, for anything approaching a big fixture, you will almost certainly need to be a member to have a realistic chance of a ticket. It is not impossible for a non-member to get in, but it helps enormously to understand how the system works before you start. This page runs through the main routes in, with cup games always presenting the best opportunity of getting a ticket.
Do You Need to Be a Member?
For most games, the honest answer is yes. Short of a season ticket, an Official Chelsea Membership is the thing that gives you priority access to buy. Without one, you are left waiting to see whether anything trickles down to the general sale, which for the bigger matches it almost never does. Membership comes in tiers, with True Blue at the top, CFC Blue as the standard option and Junior Blue for younger supporters. Roughly speaking, you are looking at somewhere between about £30 for a junior and just over £100 for a top-tier adult membership per season, though the exact prices and tiers are refreshed each year.
The tier matters, because it decides when you can buy. Tickets for home league games are released in priority phases, with the higher tiers able to buy first and the standard tier coming in a phase later, before anything left over reaches general sale. Members also get other perks worth knowing about, including access to the official Ticket Exchange, where you can buy tickets that other members have returned, discounts on stadium tours and money off a stay at the on-site hotel, as well as a discount buying merchandise in the club’s official shop.
Season Tickets & the Waiting List
A season ticket is the gold standard, but it is not something that you can simply buy off the shelf. Demand far outstrips supply, so the club runs a waiting list. Your place on said waiting list is set by the loyalty points you have built up by actually attending games, calculated over a rolling three-season period. To be on the waiting list at all you need a True Blue or Junior Blue membership, which needs to be renewed every year to hold your position. As a sense of how high the bar sits, offers of new season tickets in recent seasons have gone to members who racked up well over a hundred loyalty points the previous campaign.
In other words, the season ticket waiting list is very much a long game rather than a quick win.
General Sale
For lower-profile fixtures, typically some of the earlier rounds of cup ties and the less glamorous league games, tickets do make it through the member phases and out to general sale, where anyone can buy one, subject to availability. This is the main route in for non-members, so it is worth keeping an eye on the club’s ticketing pages and being ready to move quickly when a game goes on open sale. For the marquee matches, though, general sale is rarely, if ever, reached.
The Ticket Exchange
When a season ticket holder or a member cannot make a game, they can put their seat back through the club’s official Ticket Exchange, where other members can buy it. It is the safe, legitimate way to pick up a returned seat for a game that is otherwise sold out, and it is only open to members. Worth noting is that tickets bought on the Exchange do not earn loyalty points, so it will not help you climb the waiting list, but it will get you into the ground. They are also sold at face value, which isn’t the case with any of the resale sites you might look towards.
Away Tickets
Away tickets are the hardest of the lot to come by. Allocations from the opposition are small and Chelsea distribute them strictly by loyalty points, with the highest-point members getting first refusal. For the biggest away days, like Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United, only supporters who go to games home and away, season after season, tend to build up enough to qualify, so a casual buyer is unlikely to get near them. You can look, of course, but unless there’s a blue moon in the sky and you’ve seen a pig flying underneath it, your chances are slim.
Buy Official & Avoid the Touts
Whatever route you take, buy through the club or its official channels and nothing else. Chelsea, like all Premier League clubs, can cancel tickets that are resold unofficially or above face value and a ticket bought from a tout or a dodgy website can be voided at the turnstile, leaving you locked out of the ground and out of pocket. The official Ticket Exchange aside, if a deal looks too easy for a sold-out game, treat it with suspicion because the chances are high that it is being sold by a tout and might not even be a genuine ticket in the first place.
Other Ways In
If the membership route feels like too much of a slog and you just want to guarantee a seat for a specific game, hospitality is the alternative. It costs a good deal more, but it does not depend on loyalty points or membership phases, which is why it is often the most reliable way for a one-off visitor to get to a sold-out match. What the various packages include is covered on the hospitality page, whilst the perks that come with membership, including the hotel discount, are touched on over on the Stamford Bridge Hotel page.