The saveclaudio.co.uk website received 3,000 responses in its first week. Chelsea's immense wealth bemuses the public and the manager is the only person at Stamford Bridge to inspire unstinting affection. Claudio Ranieri is seen as the little guy pitted against a vindictive enemy of limitless power.
That is a distortion of the truth. His supposed foe is the Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich who, at worst, will do nothing more unpleasant to the Italian than write him a cheque for some £6m in severance terms. It would be a sacking to envy.
Nonetheless, people are indignant. At the Wolves match 10 days ago the Chelsea fans chanted their hostility towards Sven-Goran Eriksson when it seemed briefly that the Swede might be in charge next season. Should the threat to Ranieri continue, Abramovich might conceivably get his first taste of what it is to be unpopular with the crowd.
The billionaire should already regret the harm done to Chelsea's image. Senior figures made it abundantly clear that Ranieri would be ditched, but the cold-bloodedness was not married to efficiency. Eriksson declined to come and Ranieri has to keep on carrying out his duties after his employers stripped him of credibility.
Job security has gone, with only the regard of the football community to replace it. Everyone warms to a 52-year-old who keeps his dignity while transmitting his humanity in intentionally batty comments.
Despite all that, Chelsea's attitude is neither indefensible nor sadistic, even if their handling of the affair has been completely botched. Ranieri, accepting that, is calmer than his sympathisers. Eriksson predicted that the Chelsea manager would remain unflappable because of his years in Italy.
Ranieri once served Vittorio Cecchi Gori, the club president who took Fiorentina to bankruptcy and, as if to update his experience of despots, later had a typically brief spell of employment at Jesús Gil's Atlético Madrid. After that, Abramovich looks a soft touch.
It was a shock to Ranieri that he survived last summer's takeover at all. He had told the then chief executive Trevor Birch that they would both soon be gone, but was proved only half-right. Had the new season not been looming, however, Chelsea might have head-hunted a new manager then and there.
Unable to do so, they kept Ranieri on a trial basis. He has not scored well enough in their assessment scheme. The powers-that-be cannot see enough of a settled pattern in the team and they hold him accountable for the apparent unwieldiness of the squad, even if outsiders are unsure how many of the signings were chosen directly by Ranieri.
Sometimes, too, they are as bamboozled as the rest of us by the tactical quirks. Most of all, there is an unfulfilled desire to see Chelsea play with a swagger that will transfix television audiences throughout the world.
The fans, whose loyalty to him is on the rise, retort that Ranieri is a patient team-builder whose capacity to develop players is triumphantly illustrated in the career of Frank Lampard. These observers can also point to an unbeaten run of eight matches in all competitions to buttress their belief that everything is coming right for Chelsea.
It is Ranieri who doubts whether the figures will help. His side face Arsenal in the second leg of the Champions League quarter-final this evening, but the manager said last week, "I have a feeling the result won't affect things much."
Ranieri made his name in England, just as he had in Italy, by improving standards while budgets were waning. With that win over Liverpool on the closing day of last season, he secured the admiration of the supporters by taking Chelsea into the Champions League against all odds.
A knack of surviving on slender means, though, is not much required with Abramovich as paymaster and there is concern that Ranieri has never led a club to success at the highest level. Chelsea are doing very well at the moment, but sceptics will say that the pressure was lessened once the manager wrote off the side's hopes of the Premiership following defeat by Arsenal six weeks ago.
When Chelsea seemed sure to dominate, after a win over Manchester United in November, the strain told and they slipped back. Ranieri deserves respect, but Chelsea are likely to retain him only if they fail to land one of the more illustrious names.
The occupants of the Stamford Bridge stands would get used to any newcomer eventually. They love Ranieri now, but when he first arrived they were defiantly singing the name of his sacked predecessor Gianluca Vialli.
