Chelsea bring The Famous CFC back to Kuala Lumpur, with Hasselbaink

Chelsea are taking their international supporters’ programme back to Kuala Lumpur, and the former striker Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink is going with it.

The club says The Famous CFC opens its 2026/27 run of events with a return to Malaysia in October, presented by Ascott, and that the centrepiece of the weekend is a watch party for its Premier League match against Manchester United.

What the club has said

Hasselbaink will be in Malaysia for the weekend, meeting supporters, and the live screening in Kuala Lumpur is run with The Ascott Limited, which the club calls its official hotels partner. Places at the watch party are allocated by ballot, through a form on the club’s own page.

Past that, the detail is thin. The announcement names no venue in the city, sets no ticket price, and says nothing about what happens either side of the screening.

Why Hasselbaink

He has done this before. The club says he greeted fans when The Famous CFC visited Vietnam and China, and that he was in the side that won the FA Premier League Asia Cup in Kuala Lumpur in the summer of 2003. It puts his record at 87 goals in 177 appearances, with a Golden Boot won along the way.

“What excites me most is meeting our fans in Kuala Lumpur”, he said of the trip.

The match, in Malaysian time

The fixture itself is at Stamford Bridge, Matchday 9, and it kicks off at 8.30pm Malaysian time on 31 October. That is a kind hour for watching English football from here, and not the one Malaysian supporters usually get.

Malaysia has seen Chelsea far more recently than that, in any case. The club’s page points back to its pre-season tour, when it faced Johor Darul Ta’zim in a match held in Iskandar Puteri. This time nobody plays: the football is on a screen, and the visiting party is one retired centre-forward and a fan programme.

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