Gills chairman Paul Scally had mixed emotions after seeing former youth team player Ryan Bertrand win the Champions League with Chelsea.

Bertrand left Gillingham for Chelsea in the summer of 2005 at the age of just fifteen, with a tribunal setting a fee of £125,000 with £100,000 to be paid for every ten appearances he makes for the Blues up to 40.

However, Scally believes that his side were short changed when it came to the Bertrand deal, although he bears no grudge against the 22 year old:

“It’s sad to say it, but it’s symptomatic of the rape of smaller clubs’ youth systems by those in the Premier League,” said Scally to the Observer.

“Chelsea stole him from us, taking us to a tribunal, and we ended up getting peanuts in compensation. It’s the Premier League clubs riding roughshod over the Football League. Given the millions that club have, it wouldn’t have been a hardship for them to have paid a proper fee.”

“But I bear no grudge towards the player. It’s more the system that was wrong. Seeing him playing in a European Cup final makes us, as a club, very proud.”

“This is a kid who came through the Gillingham youth system, and his progress is testimony to the hard work put in by everyone at our club’s academy. From very early on, you could see he was a special talent.”

As for Bertrand, he was thrilled to have scooped a winner’s medal in only his first game for Chelsea in Europe:

“I have been out on loan to a lot of clubs and played a fair few games now, but obviously nothing compares to the scale of what happened here,” Bertrand said after emerging from the victorious Chelsea dressing room.

“When the manager told me I was playing, of course I could hardly believe it, but I knew what I had to do.

“I was getting all these flashbacks too of when I was a kid, growing up in South London, in Peckham, in Bermondsey, tough places, playing against the wall with my mates.

“And I spent time at so many clubs, I wondered at times where my career was going, but I never gave up.”

“Ashley Cole has been such a massive help to me too, all the way through. It was great being out there with him, he kept his eye on me,” Bertrand said.

“The atmosphere was amazing, Bayern fans outnumbered the Chelsea fans and it wasn’t 50-50 in there, there was more like 70 percent of them, against us, but we stuck in there together and won it. It is just incredible.”