Chelsea must heed Greek warning from August as side 300 places below them come to town | OneFootball

From the moment Manchester United won the FA Cup final and condemned Chelsea to a season in the Conference League rather than the Europa League, we’ve been expecting some fun and freaky fixtures against some of the lesser (really, really lesser) lights of European football.

These aren’t just teams you’ve not heard of since the early 90s, there are some obscure sides from rare footballing nations who don’t get much attention at the best of times. In the end, most of Chelsea’s games ended up being against fairly well known sides – Gent, Panathinaikos and so on.

But tomorrow night we have the really curious one – against FC Noah of Armenia.

The Athletic today did a really fun piece where Simon Johnson dug up lots of details about our upcoming opposition to help Blues fans get an idea of what they’re up against. Unlike when we face our other more distant opposition Astana and have to fly to Kazakhstan, we have Noah coming to Stamford Bridge, which makes things a little easier.

Celebrations on the pitch after Noah’s win over AEK in August.

Chelsea’s opposition have had a similar story to Blues after rapid changes following takeover

The fastest way to understand the difference between the two clubs is in ranking – the Armenian side are 308th in UEFA’s rankings while Chelsea are 8th. They’re also only 7 years old.

Since being bought by a businessman last year, Noah went on a crazy spending spree and brought in 16 players in 3 weeks. Sound familiar?  They’re 7 points off the top in their domestic league, but with 3 games in hand caused by their European exploits so far.

The crowing glory of those European games was a home win in the qualifying rounds where they beat AEK Athens 3-1 at home. Let’s hope they’ve got all those heroics out of their system – we’re hoping for an easy ride tomorrow night.