Even Chelsea's website has got the blues

Kings Road crew clowning about online...

As if the ignominy of being knocked out of the UEFA Cup by a second-rate Israeli team wasn't enough to send Chelsea fans into a fit of depression, the club's website has also been doing its best to ruin their season. Between 8pm and 9pm on 24 October, the official Chelsea site took a pitiful 50.66 seconds to download. That might have been caused by thousands of the Stamford Bridge faithful logging on to keep abreast of the excitement caused by losing away to West Ham. However, during the last week of the month, Chelsea's site (www.chelseafc.co.uk/ ) didn't perform too badly if you discount that hora horribilis - the average download time was 3.68 seconds. The data, measured by Keynote Systems and made exclusively available to silicon.com at the end of every month, revealed some other interesting results. Sunderland's online performance continued to impress, beating all its rivals with a 1.04 second average download. It also notched up the quickest time for one single hour: in the unlikely event of you logging on between 5am and 6am on 22 October, you would have waited a mere 0.46 seconds for the content to appear. Southampton and Leeds also achieved an average of under two seconds, while Arsenal (3.48), Leicester (4.41), Newcastle (3.62) and Tottenham (3.14) could certainly do better. But Liverpool fans will be livid about their club's online showing: of the top finishers in last year's Premiership, the Scousers' site came bottom for the week. The average wait for frustrated fans was 4.60 seconds. From now on, silicon.com's exclusive coverage of the Premiership clubs' online performance will be going fortnightly. Thanks to Keynote, we will also bring you download details of every team in the Premiership, and examine various other angles such as the ecommerce offerings from the teams.