As you may know, we recently voted on a proposal to combine four of the regional U.S. supporters clubs -- Pacific Coast Blues, Texas Blues, Midwest Blues, and Southeast Blues -- into one large official supporters club. The advantage to combining our resources is that it would allow us to provide more services for our members under CFC's new overseas supporters club policy.

If you have not already registered at the Chelsea in America website <http://www.chelseainamerica.com/index.htm >, you may want to go ahead and do so. As the result of the vote is to combine the four clubs, the CIA site will be your best source of information as to what is going on at that level.

PCB's membership application form for the new season is now available for downloading. Just for your own planning, dues will be $20 if paying by check, same as last year. We are working on reactivating our Paypal shopping cart for those of you who might like to submit payment electronically. Once we have that back up, you can use Paypal to send $21 (the extra $1 is to cover the charge that we get from Paypal for each transaction).

If you think you will be needing tickets at any time during the coming season, please hustle over to the official Chelsea FC website (the UK version) and sign up for your True Blue membership. In order to get early access to tickets (one per member) you will need to be both a member of PCB and of True Blue. There is a new membership structure this year, and you can see all the options here: https://shop.chelseafc.co.uk/memberships_adult.htm

You can start the True Blue membership process here: https://shop.chelseafc.co.uk/memberships.htm 

A couple of pointers: This works much like Ticketmaster here in the States. You will only have about five minutes to fill out the electronic forms before it boots you off. Also, it is very picky about the credit cards used for payments, and several of us have had problems with the system refusing to authorize perfectly good cards. If you run into problems please contact me (you can find my addy elsewhere on this site) and I will do everything I can to help you.

Just a quick update on our Player of the Year trophy and gift for Joe Cole . . .

Our very cool blue surfboard trophy was delivered to CFC's offices in Stamford Bridge this spring. Many thanks to Andy Wray for performing the courier duties!

It took many weeks of international phone calls and emails, but thanks to Diane Broom (our CFC overseas  supporters club manager) persevering in working with Joe's agent, we found out that Joe's charity is Richard House, London's first children's hospice http://www.richardhouse.org.uk/ . They provide support for seriously ill children and their families, and it is easy to understand why Joe has chosen to support them in their vitally important work. Diane contacted the hospice on our behalf, and Teri Enomoto did the legwork in getting the donation to the hospice. Diane reports that the hospice is very grateful for the donation.

Thanks to all of you who supported our Player of the Year with your votes and your donations!