Chelsea are in Hong Kong for the second leg of our preseason tour, and will be taking on Juventus in a showcase friendly tomorrow. This will be our third official preseason match, following a 6-4 win over Western Sydney Wanderers and a 2-1 defeat against Tottenham Hotspur, both in Sydney, Australia last week. (We also had a couple games behind closed doors at Cobham against lower-league teams, but those count even less.)
Results of course don’t matter in preseason, even against Spurs — “fake games”, as José Mourinho once famously put it (which reminds, the Netflix documentary with him comes out August 11!) — though obviously it’s nicer to win than to lose. Still, the most important part is working on our fitness, our tactics, and our chemistry. And that remains a work in progress, with Xabi Alonso specifically lamenting our inability to control parts of the match against Spurs (when it was still 11-v-11). So presumably that’s high on our list of things to work on next.
Date / Time: Wednesday, August 5, 2026, 19:30 (local time); 12:30 BST; 7;30am EDT
Venue: Kai Tak Stadium, Hong Kong — Kai Tak was once the site of a famous airport where airplanes had to dodge buildings on approach and often land sideways. Now the heart attacks are served up via a huge sports complex, including this new stadium, which opened last year. (Well, technically the stadium is where the car park used to be. The runway is now a modern promenade of high-rise apartments, hotels, shopping, and a cruise ship terminal.)
Forecast: From the Australian winter to a subtropical summer, it’s going to be very very hot and humid
On TV: none; elsewhere
Streaming: Paramount+ (USA), FanCode (India); StarTimes (NGA); CFC+ (UK/int’l) — CFC+ is Chelsea’s new-ish premium(?) streaming service so if your region does not have a rights-holder, you can watch there for £9.99 (or buy all six preseason games for just a little more at £14.99; or subscribe for the whole year for a little bit more at £19.99)
Chelsea team news: Numbers on tour have grown with the arrivals of Pedro Neto, Geovany Quenda, Mike Penders, Gaga Slonina, and new signing Danny Welbeck. And the big surprise is Mykhailo Mudryk’s sudden reinstatement to football; he’s immediately flown out to join the squad as well, at least for now, before we figure out how to best handle his immediate future (most likely a loan, one would imagine). Mudryk’s expected to feature in some capacity, though with over 30 players in camp now, minutes will have to be spread around quite a bit to make everyone’s time somewhat worthwhile.
The one concern from the Spurs game was the absence of Robert Sánchez, who appeared to pick up some sort of injury during the warm-up and would end up not playing at all. Thankfully, Xabi Alonso says that our number-one goalkeeper is “much better” now.
Juventus team news: Since winning the league in 2019-20, Juve have not finished higher than third and were down to a lowly sixth last season, despite Luciano Spalletti’s best efforts at recovering from the poor start under Igor Tudor (Tudor would later end up at Spurs to do even worse, which was amusing). But for Juve, they’re starting to approach an historic title drought in Serie A, and it’s not looking likely that they would immediately jump back to the top of the pile.
They have made a couple interesting moves this summer, including the signing of Chelsea-linked Kerim Alajbegović, who had impressed at the World Cup, and the permanent acquisition of former Chelsea prospect Jérémie Boga, who had spent the second half of last season there already on loan from Nice. Boga will turn 30 this season, if you want to feel old.
View from the enemy: Black & White & Read All Over
Previously: The last time we played Juventus was one of our greatest games of the last 5-6 years, the 4-0 win giving us real hope that Thomas Tuchel’s Blues, fresh off our Champions League triumph, would be the ones to break our own title drought. Alas, N’Golo Kanté would get injured, then Reece James and Ben Chilwell would also get injured soon after, and Romelu Lukaku would give an interview. And though we’d still win the Club World Cup to complete the set (old format), the team would become a pawn of global geopolitics by the end of the season, and … yeah. Here we are. Incidentally, now only James remains from that team, with Trevoh Chalobah, who scored the first goal that night, off to Como shortly (Chilly’s also still with BlueCo, I suppose, at RC Strasbourg).
