I started full-time on the Chelsea beat in December 2015 and in my second week, Jose Mourinho was sacked. The first game I attended at Stamford Bridge was two days later, when I saw thousands of grieving supporters abuse their own players and jeer every goal in a 3-1 victory over Sunderland.

Then, a little more than a month afterwards, I was one of a handful of journalists huddled in the bowels of Stadium MK when John Terry decided that a standard mixed zone after a 5-1 FA Cup win was the perfect moment to reveal that Chelsea had informed him they would not be renewing his contract.

Terry ultimately stayed for one more year, but those two experiences hammered home to me early on just how surreal and spectacular things could get reporting on what is, to my mind, the most consistently interesting club in England and the most successful basket case in European football.

In another sense, though, they were incomplete preparation. Those huge stories and thrilling moments punctuate a season, but they actually make up a relatively small part of a traditional beat reporter’s job.

Most weeks are structured around matches and press conferences, the latter of which can serve as valuable opportunities to move a story on or get a manager’s perspective on a topic people care about. Or they can be tedious for all involved. The demand for a quote, for a news line, simply for that dreaded word: ‘content’, remains just as insatiable regardless.

The internet has proved a gift and a curse for journalism. On one hand it presents an infinite canvas, free from the limitations of column inches or print deadlines. On the other, the ease and speed of communication via social media has conditioned many of our brains to process information in characters rather than sentences, in chunks that require seconds of our attention rather than minutes.

Before deciding to join The Athletic, I asked myself: “How often have you written something that would stay with a reader for longer than five minutes?” I’ve been in this industry for seven years, worked for a number of huge media companies and typed hundreds of thousands of words. Among them are pieces I still look back on with pride, but the vast majority of my time has been spent feeding the ceaseless churn.

I have nothing but gratitude towards everyone I’ve worked for and alongside in those seven years – they have all, in ways both big and small, helped me turn a passion into a career, and I’ve been very lucky every step of the way.

But I want readers, not page views, and I want minutes of your attention, not seconds. More importantly, I want to become the level of writer and journalist who earns those things. The Athletic has offered me the professional opportunity of a lifetime to work the way I have always wanted, collaborating with and learning from people I’ve always admired.

So I’ll still be covering Chelsea, confident that the Frank Lampard era will yield just as many dramatic moments and massive stories as we’ve become accustomed to. But around those I’ll be striving to find and tell you things that shed a slightly different light on this uniquely fascinating club.

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(Photo: Resul Rehimov/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)