Chelsea’s new chief executive, Ron Gourlay, seems determined to enhance still further the club’s reputation for modesty and humility, qualities that have endeared the team to all neutral supporters. In his first interview since taking over from Peter Kenyon, he said Chelsea were expected to win the Champions League twice in the next five years and hoped that this didn’t sound too arrogant. No, no, Ron.

There will be a few Chelsea fans saying, “Well, once would be fine by me” but pay no attention to them. Kenyon expected them to win the trophy twice in 10 years but has left halfway through that period with the cabinet for the Champions League gathering dust; perhaps Ron could keep his hubris in it. Gourlay’s explanation for not having won the Champions League is that “we’ve been very unlucky”. Well, that’s the problem. Who is to say that those manifestations of bad luck — such as not being able to convert a penalty, or perpetually losing your temper, or not being able to defend from corners — may not crop up again over the next half-decade?

Gourlay also dealt with the controversial renaming of the stadium to extort money from corporate sponsors, which is now very much on the agenda. “Retaining the heritage of the stadium is paramount,” he said. I suppose that rules out Liverpool FC becoming Chelsea’s corporate sponsors and renaming Stamford Bridge “The Flash Arriviste Morons Without A Sense of History Stadium”, although I suppose Liverpool could bid. But what possible corporate deal could retain the heritage of the stadium? That’s not the sort of thing that happens. Talk to Leicester City, for example, who trousered the grand sum of £1.5m (about enough to cover Drogba’s wages over the summer break) for the benefit of having their ground — the Walkers stadium — named after a packet of crisps. At least people like crisps; Chelsea’s new backers will probably come from the financial sector, probably a bank the rest of us now part-own as a consequence of its stupidity and greed. Or possibly a Russkie oil concern operating in some disused freezing Gulag.

The Leicester deal suggests football is losing a little of its allure in the corporate world, although there are still decent sums of money for the so-called Big Four. Arsenal wrung more than £100m out of Emirates Airlines, for example, and Chelsea, after a loss of nearly £70m last year and with a wage bill of more than £150m, could do with that sort of cash now their owner has muttered that he’d quite like them to become self-sufficient, if at all possible, in the near future. A degree of self-sufficiency was imposed by the ban on them signing players for ludicrous amounts of money, but that ruling has been suspended pending an appeal and they will soon be scurrying around Europe wide-eyed and breathless, like Imelda Marcos in a shoe factory.

This may seem unfair but I don’t think the renaming of Stamford Bridge would produce quite so much animus among fans as the renaming of Anfield, say, or St James’ Park. Let’s be kind and call Chelsea fans more pragmatic than the norm and perhaps less concerned with intimations of history and community.

Chelsea have not been a community club for a very long time. They play in an ephemeral and transitory area of London and their support has come from beyond the perimeters of the city, particularly southwest and west, along the Thames and its tributaries.

The irony is that when Chelsea taunt Fulham fans by singing “There’s only one team in Fulham”, they are right — it’s Fulham. And there aren’t very many Fulham fans, either. The dispersal of the fan base of London’s teams has been most marked in the west of the capital (although it has also happened with my club, Millwall, who tend to draw their supporters from north Kent and Bromley). The changing demographics of the capital and, more importantly, the enormous change wreaked upon the game’s finances by the power of television and the egotism or generosity of owners has been more easily welcomed at Chelsea than at any of the northern clubs (with the possible exception, lately, of Manchester City).

Don’t forget that Chelsea are the only Big Four club who would not be in the Big Four were it not for their current owner. Liverpool are defiantly part of their local community, deeply connected to it and responsive to it, in a manner that is seen, these days, only in the north of England. And so you might hope that the Liverpool fans exert sufficient pressure to prevent their ground — wherever it might be, in the future, if the club finds a bit more money — being named after some corporate monolith. The same applies at Newcastle United, whose fans — deluded though they might be from time to time — have a connection to the club which is far stronger than simply a wish to acquire vicarious success through the performance of the players on the pitch.

Not least because their last vicarious success occurred in 1969, which is a long time to wait for vicarious success.

Home from home for Celtic

What a marvellous gesture from the supporters of Hamburg. When the Celtic fans arrived for their Europa Cup game last week they discovered that the Germans had gone to the most extraordinary lengths to make them feel at home. First, in a terrific feat of choreography, the supporters in one stand used coloured cards to depict a giant Union flag facing the travelling fans.

How reassuring it must have been to arrive in a strange, foreign land and then suddenly to see your beloved nation’s flag. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Germans had brought with them a huge banner with a stirring message written in perfect English: “No Surrender!” It would have been even better if several thousand of them had mastered a simple tune — perhaps one commemorating the followers of a former British monarch with Dutch connections — on the tin whistle in time for the game, but it seems churlish to complain when they went to so much effort. Even the local vandals got in on the act, spray painting a wall near the away end turnstiles with the legend: “Welcome to Protestant Hamburg!” I think that was a nice touch. Very thoughtful.

I have to say, Rangers must feel a bit worried this morning. You don’t expect them to actually win the Champions League, or even progress out of the group stage, but to be given a lesson in bigotry on the terraces by the real Huns, and with such style! Hamburg’s affection for sectarian hatred, incidentally, is largely a reaction to their city rivals, FC St Pauli, whose fans have been known to wave pro-IRA flags and a delegation of whom attended the previous fixture in Glasgow, which Celtic also failed to win.

Drogba suffers growing pains

A heartwarming story from Chelsea, where Didier Drogba has revealed he is a changed man after a conversation with his eight-year-old son, Isaac. No longer will he quibble with refereeing decisions, no matter how passionately he believes the ref to have been mistaken: he is reformed.

Apparently, Isaac had been watching dad’s behaviour at the end of last season’s Champions League semi-final against Barcelona and said: “Dad, you’ve got to stop being a six-foot streak of petulant, sulking misery and dumb insolence, prone to occasional bouts of psychotic fury. Grow up, get some therapy, do something, you waster. I didn’t behave like that, even when I was three. You’re even worse than Nicolas Anelka. Carry on like this, dad, and you’ll end up being sent off while playing for the Rampton Secure Unit First XI in the semi-finals of the European Mentalists’ Cup.”

Actually — as you may have already guessed — he didn’t quite say all that. His words, as reported by the striker, were the rather more measured: “It’s not right what you did, dad. You should have had more penalties, but it’s not right to do that to a ref.” This was a reference to dad snarling at the beleaguered referee Tom Henning Ovrebo.

Isaac had been watching the game with his friends, head held in his hands, one imagines. Drogba admits he was embarrassed and vowed to change his ways, smile at refs and suffer their manifest stupidities in genial silence, and maybe also take steps to reduce his carbon footprint and help out in soup kitchens, sponsor a polar bear etc.

Good for Isaac. Nothing quite shocks the system as much as being upbraided, justifiably, by your children, as all of us with children know full well. They see what we cannot see. Didier Drogba is quite possibly the best footballer in the world right now, as perfect a striker as it is possible to get. It would be fitting if that’s the way Isaac remembered him, in his pomp, rather than for all the other stuff.