Graeme Le Saux on bullying, Chelsea and nearly bottling it at Blackburn

Graeme Le Saux played at the top level for Chelsea, Blackburn Rovers and England, but wherever he went he had to earn the respect of his team-mates as he struggled to fit in with “the lads”.

Having been brought up on the Channel Island of Jersey, where he played youth football against Matt Le Tissier, Le Saux arrived at Chelsea as a teenager in 1987 and made his debut two years later.

The left-back was a member of the Chelsea squad that earned promotion to the top flight in 1989, and the Blues were a far cry from the global superclub of today.

“Looking back I can’t believe how unprofessional the club was at that time. I really can’t,” Le Saux told the Quickly Kevin, Will He Score? podcast.

“I signed for Chelsea thinking, ‘Hey I’m going to be a professional football player.’ And because I didn’t know any differently I thought it must be alright to turn up drunk or come straight from a night out.

“There was a bus near our training ground that was a permanent fixture and it was a cafe, a greasy spoon, and the lads used to meet there before training for a bacon sandwich and fry up and then come and train.

“Clearly nutrition and science and sports science has moved on a long way, but even then I knew that those sorts of things weren’t good for you.”



Le Saux struggled to fit in at Chelsea and had to prove himself to his peers at the club. Known as an intelligent character off the field with interests not always expected of a footballer, he found himself not always having a great deal in common with team-mates.

In an article for The Guardian in 2016, Le Saux depicted the “macho, masculine archetypes” which characterised the Chelsea dressing room when he first broke through at the club. The fact he read broadsheet