Chelsea Bidder Nick Candy & Wife Holly Valance Meet Donald Trump & Nigel Farage In Florida

Less than a month after submitting a bid for buy Chelsea Football Club, businessman Nick Candy has been pictured with Donald Trump in Florida.

British luxury property developer Candy is a livelong Chelsea fan and was behind the Blue Football Consortium, which put together an offer in excess of £2 billion to buy the club.

However, it was recently reported by The Athletic that Candy's proposal had failed to make the shortlist of potential buyers.

Candy's meeting with Trump is not believed to have anything to do with Chelsea. But Blues fans were quick to pass comment after the photo, in which Candy's wife Holly Valance and former UK politician Nigel Farage were also seen posing, emerged.

Farage posted the snap to his 1.6 million Twitter followers along with the message: "Great dinner at Mar-a-Lago!"

Mar-a-Lago is a resort in Palm Beach, Florida that Trump bought in 1985.

"We dodged a massive bullet with Nick Candy," read a headline posted on a Chelsea fans' forum on Reddit, where Farage's pictured was re-shared.

Less than a week earlier between 50 and 100 Chelsea fans had staged a protest at Stamford Bridge to demonstrate against another bidder's intent to buy Chelsea.

Those fans made it known that they were against the Ricketts family's proposal to buy the club. This was in part because father Joe Ricketts, who had no role in the bid to buy Chelsea, had previously used Islamophobic language in leaked emails sent between 2009 and 2013.

Eighty-year-old Ricketts has since apologized for the content of those emails.

While Ricketts' Islamophobic comments were made in emails, Trump and Farage have been very public with their negative views about Islam.

Farage, who was a key campaigner behind Brexit, told the Los Angeles Times in 2018: "The worry about Islamism is that those who adhere to that in the UK don’t accept UK culture, don’t accept UK law. They want to impose their version of the world upon the host country. And that would lead us toward disaster."

Trump's comments on Islam are countless but his most famous statement on the subject came in 2015. At a rally in South Carolina, he said: "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."

Of course, the views that belong to Farage and Trump should not be automatically attributed to anyone who happens to pose for a photo, or have dinner, with them.

But the power of association can be strong and Chelsea's image is very delicate right now.

Therefore, it is not surprising that - especially after the non-soccer-related attention their club has received over the last two months - Chelsea fans may be relieved to be avoiding an individual who has any link whatsoever to the likes of Trump and Farage.

Nick Candy and wife Holly Valance pictured at the Royal World Premiere of Skyfall at London's Royal Albert Hall in 2012

IMAGO/ZUMA Wire