Most football clubs are founded by people who want to play football. Chelsea Football Club was founded by a man who wanted somewhere to put a stadium.

In 1904, Gus Mears — businessman, entrepreneur, West London millionaire — acquired the Stamford Bridge athletics ground in Fulham with a simple ambition: to turn it into a football ground and lease it to an existing club. The existing club he had in mind was Fulham FC, already established just a short walk away at Craven Cottage. Fulham said no. And so, in March 1905, in an upstairs room of The Rising Sun pub on the Fulham Road, Mears and his associates did something extraordinary: they created a football club from scratch — and then spent the next 118 years turning it into something far more complicated and interesting than anyone that evening could possibly have imagined. Chelsea exists because Fulham said no. That founding fact — that this club was born out of a rebuffed offer to a neighbour — sets the tone for a rivalry that has simmered, politely but persistently, for over a century.

The story of Chelsea is the story of English football's most paradoxical club. A club built on money that has spent most of its history almost going bankrupt. A club of glamour and star players that spent half a century winning almost nothing. A club whose identity was shaped not by any single defining vision but by the accretion of eras, personalities, and London rivalries: the early battles with Woolwich Arsenal for top-flight supremacy; the Swinging Sixties when Chelsea and Spurs contested the first all-London FA Cup final at Wembley; the hooligan decade when the Headhunters traded punches with West Ham's ICF and Millwall's Bushwackers; the Mourinho era when the Chelsea-Arsenal rivalry produced some of the most acrimonious, gloriously watchable football English football has ever seen.

Along the way there have been players who define an era: William "Fatty" Foulke, who made the early crowds laugh; Peter Osgood, the King of Stamford Bridge, who scored wonder goals and sipped champagne on the King's Road; Gianfranco Zola, the little Sardinian who arrived in the Premier League and promptly became everyone's favourite player; Didier Drogba, heading Chelsea level in the dying seconds of the Champions League final in Munich before slotting the winning penalty. And John Terry. And Frank Lampard. And Petr Cech.

This series covers all of it — the long, messy, magnificent, infuriating, enthralling history of a club that was never meant to exist, that has never quite been able to decide what it wants to be, and has somehow, in the process, become one of the most successful clubs in the world. And always, beneath the individual stories, London itself: the city whose rivalries, geography, and social history have shaped Chelsea as much as any manager or chairman or billionaire owner.

Ten episodes. One club. Forty-one thousand seats on the Fulham Road — and a story that keeps getting stranger.