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Moving away from the stories of financial disaster we encountered in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 examines what it means for fans when their club is suddenly awash with more financial muscle than some nation-states due to the generosity of a wealthy benefactor who is seemingly more interested in sporting glory than in financial gain. This chapter engages with the notion of the football club as a billionaire’s plaything. Roman Abramovich’s acquisition of Chelsea in 2003 saw the West London club embark on an eye-watering spending spree and a sustained period of on-field successes, one that was unknown in the club’s history to that point. As a result, we take Chelsea during the Abramovich era as a starting point for considering how this model of ownership affects the relationship between fans and the connection that they have with their club. The evident success that financial muscle can bring shows owners what a happy fanbase is capable of, what they are capable of doing, and what they are capable of ignoring. The success of the financially doped teams of the 2000s created a precedent for winning over a fanbase with a successful football club, but nevertheless sat awkwardly with the normative ideals of how a football club should exist in the world and relate to its supporters.

The purpose of this paper is to provide better understanding of potential foreign customers or satellite fans' perceptions of professional‐football brands, as this constitutes a necessary step toward setting up an internationalisation strategy to create a global professional‐sport brand.

Twelve semi‐directed individual interviews with French satellite fans about how they perceive the English Big Four brands of Arsenal Football Club (FC), Chelsea FC, Liverpool FC and Manchester United are conducted.

The paper found the common and specific features of each club's brand equity and the typical fans' perceptions of the clubs, which constitute major dimensions upon which the clubs are differentiated in the customers' minds. It also identified such key antecedents to building strong professional‐sport brand equity in the French market as the fit between the image, the values or both of the foreign club and the local club a fan supports.

The main limitation is the size of the sample, even if the saturation‐semantic criterion is applied.

This paper emphasises the need for professional‐sport clubs not to underestimate the need for strategic‐marketing steps different from those used at home before implementing foreign marketing operations and constitutes a first step toward future research into the analysis of the perceptions of potential foreign customers or satellite fans in broader contexts.

Although many studies have dealt with the perception of local professional‐sport brands, this paper represents one of the first empirical studies of the perceptions of professional‐football brands in a foreign market.

Details how the Lewis family took Lewis Separates (formed in 1954), repositioned it as the fashion store, Chelsea Girl, to meet the demands of a fashion‐conscious, more affluent, younger society in the 1960s and 1970s; and have repositioned it again since 1988 by replacing Chelsea Girl with River Island and thereby attracted a wide market incorporating A to E socio‐economic groups and an age range of 16‐64 (there are plans to introduce lines for the 9‐14 age market). River Island′s success lies in providing value for money with good quality merchandise; using branding (including designer labels) effectively; supplying accessories; and striking store designs which are Victorian period, but each store is unique. The success of such a transformation is unprecedented and it would appear that River Island will be able to withstand the effects of the present recession.

This case study describes the process of implementing assistive technology in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in the UK. The introduction of dedicated ICT facilities for users with disabilities is set within the context of the UK People’s Network programme, and the social inclusion and lifelong learning agendas. An outline of the decision‐making process is provided including: choosing appropriate software and hardware; staff training and user training; plans to roll out the service to all libraries within the borough and promoting the services to disabled groups.

THE continuance of war into the New Year proves again the fatuousness of prophecy which had assured us of peace, or at least the cessation of hostilities, by Christmas. We have to face now what must be another year of conflict, unless miracles occur as they sometimes do in war, and thus the postponement of many of the plans that the Library Association and a great many other bodies and persons have been making; but we must not offend by prophesying. At this time a glance back on the record of 1944 is justifiable and may be salutary.

Hazel Schofield explains how the Supported Needs Project at Kensington & Chelsea Volunteer Bureau is challenging traditional perceptions of voluntary work.

The Dynix Automated Library System was purchased by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's Libraries and Arts Service in 1987 to replace its existing Plessey circulation system. This paper briefly describes the implementation and the aspects of Dynix which made it particularly attractive to Kensington, as well as reviewing the project one year after circulation went live at the first branch. The system is now in use at all service points in the Borough, that is six fixed sites and one mobile library.

The report of the project sponsored by EITB and the Leverhulme Trust at Chelsea College into the relationship between school teaching methods and performance in engineering training has recently been published. The subject of the work is topical, but the background to the study goes back more than ten years.

A study into human resource management (HRM) at a UK National Health Service (NHS) Trust has revealed significant potential for fostering a strategic role for HR in the public sector. The study, which took place in the Chelsea and Westminster Healthcare Trust, showed that the role of the HR director, attitudes of senior management towards HRM and the ways in which HR policies were put into effect had a major impact on how far HRs could become more strategic.

The purpose of this study is to explore and theorize on the motivations of a new class of whistleblowers or leakers stemming from the “abusive” cybersecurity practices of Western governments. This research primarily focuses on such practices of the US Government.

This work is designed as a case study research of cybersecurity whistleblowers or leakers on Western governments, involving data collection from primary and secondary sources. The method is a content analysis to determine the presence of certain themes within this primary and secondary data which this research can then make inferences about the messages within the texts.

The findings show a formation of a recent class of power brokers, with its own collective ethos, who will be known by a new term: the “New Knowledge Cyberclass” (NKC). The development of the NKC was revealed through the shocking data revelations by Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. What separates the NKC from government “protectors” (i.e. President Obama, Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo), who argue that these leakers stole and leaked classified documents that endangered lives, is their definitions of what it means to be defenders of democracy, which here pertains to the rights to citizens’ online privacy and the degree of secrecy in US Government.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study directed toward connecting, Snowden, Assange and Manning, to the birth of a new class of power brokers designed to directly challenge Western government malpractices with citizens’ online privacy and secrecy in foreign operations. This research explores both the birth of this new class and a collective ethos that binds this group together despite the tensions and conflicts within this new class.