OFFICIALLY becoming a Mickey Mouse team has furthered Chelsea’s ambition to be recognised as the world’s No 1 football club by the year 2014. They preceded last night’s opening preseason fixture, in the newly concocted Disney Friendship Cup against Club America, by announcing a four-year tie-up with the owners of the big-eared rodent and other cartoon chums.

Intent on expanding their fan base in North America, Chelsea now have a unique status as the “official professional soccer club” of the Walt Disney Company. The plan is for them to have a “significant presence” at both the entertainment conglomerate’s youth football programme and its Florida-based sports theme park, giving them access to a new generation of football fans on the continent while tapping into Disney’s immense marketing and distribution network.

“The partnership is ground breaking,” said Chelsea director Paul Smith. “Disney have penetration and a reach to a market that is really targeted at that young fan. A lot of people in our sector have eyed Disney as being in some way a target but we’ve been able to make that first step.”

As aware of the revenue-generating potential of football in the US as David Beckham in his switch to Major League Soccer, Chelsea intend to be seen as “propagators of the sport” in the country, hoping to expand their support base in the process. Already launched is a satellite radio programme, the Chelsea True Blue Show, which previews and presents the club’s fixtures to 6m subscribers. This week the club will present former US women’s international Lorrie Fair as the first of several international ambassadors and announce a paid-for membership programme tailored for America.

In Los Angeles for training and three friendlies against Mexican, Korean and US opposition, the club are committed to touring different regions of the US every second preseason. New York and Chicago are already lined up for 2009 and 2011. In alternate years the Blues’ training camp will move around Asia, starting with China, where another dedicated membership scheme will be launched.

“The intention is to broaden the appeal of Chelsea worldwide,” says Smith. “We have looked at targeting specific countries to maximise the visibility we get naturally from the Premier League and Champions League and have looked to focus on North America and China in particular. The essence of being in the US is to encourage followers of the sport in general to translate into Chelsea fans. We’re looking to engage those fans to a point which they start to follow and support the club and we start to interact with those individuals.”

The club’s decisions to dump Umbro as kit manufacturer, at a cost of £24.5m, and Emirates Airlines as shirt sponsor, were directly related to their expansion plans. Chelsea chose adidas and Samsung as replacements to piggyback on their marketing expertise. “With Samsung we were looking for a brand that had penetration worldwide and a consistency of contact with the consumer base which an airline can’t have,” says Smith.

Adidas sought a “lead Anglo brand” to place alongside Real Madrid and AC Milan. Chelsea were attracted to the sportswear company’s commitment to taking on Nike in the United States and cashing in on the middle-class consumer boom in China. “They are opening something like one new store a week in China,” says Smith. “It sounds ridiculous but the pace of expansion is quite remarkable. When we talk about a population of 1.3 billion and a middle class of 300m, that’s still the size of Europe. These are guys who a can afford to buy replica shirts but also have some view that they’re proud to be able to buy it - it’s a little bit of conspicuous consumption that demonstrates they’ve arrived.” The various commercial moves are simultaneously aimed at turning the heavy loss-making club into a “cash-neutral business”, ending its dependency on owner Roman Abramovich’s largesse, while achieving its ambitious aim of being regarded as world football’s biggest club inside seven years.

“It’s the 800lb gorilla sitting up there,” admits Smith when asked about the magnitude of a task, which he believes should be defined in both sporting, financial and less tangible terms. “It is sporting achievement in the context of the Premier League and more in the context of Europe. It is financial scale - we’ve been growing the revenues quite dramatically in the last four years, it’s our costs which have been the killer. I think it’s a fanbase question, which is probably going to be the hardest one to achieve bearing in my mind how slowly fanbases accumulate, and it’s going to be commentators on the business as well.” Tellingly, Smith argues that Champions League triumph will be the catalyst for meeting Chelsea’s targets. “It doesn’t have to be this year, it doesn’t have to be next year, but in the near future it has to be something the club can win because that is the way we propel ourselves from being where we are now to the next step.” The club with the big ears need the cup with the big ears.