West Ham united only in anger as fans feel fooled
THERE are three problems with Celebrity Fit Club, said Harry Hill. They’re not celebrities, they’re not fit, and there’s no club.
The problem for West Ham United is much the same. They are not West Ham, and nobody’s united. Well, only in anger.
About what, that depends. Some want to go home, to a ground that no longer exists, others wish to stay but with modifications that may be out of the club’s control.
Some want West Ham focused on its community roots, others want the dream of success and growth that was promised when the move to the London Stadium was first announced.
Some say it’s not about the football, or even winning, yet the ground is at its most furious when the opposition score.
Broken down to specifics, West Ham’s support has as many factions as any group of 57,000 individuals. Some hate the stadium and are contemplating never going back. One told me he was having his best time in some four decades of supporting West Ham. He had discovered a pub near the ground: good beer, good food, the early kick- off on big screen. He and his mates loved it.
Some haven’t made it feel like home yet, but understand the motivation for moving. Others go, but simmer with resentment throughout.
How to marry these divisions? That several who invaded the pitch against Burnley on Saturday ended up being assaulted by other spectators as they tried to make their escape, and that fighting broke out between fans at various points around the ground, shows this is not a wholly unified protest.
Would there be this level of unrest if West Ham were where Burnley are now? It is unlikely. The invasions and fury began when the first Burnley goal went in. While West Ham’s supporters might always prefer Upton Park — as many Arsenal fans will Highbury — they would certainly have tolerated the new place had the results been better and were there evidence of the promised leap forward.
It is not just about the new ground. If this fury was purely provoked by the loss of soul, or community, the result would actually be immaterial. Yet there were no pitch invasions at 0-0, none when the club achieved any of its seven home victories this season.
The fans who turned on the board also want more spent on the team, and better results. ‘Where’s the money gone?’ they chanted, because they think the board are motivated only by personal profit, and have starved the team of resources. That is as significant as the plaintiff, impotent cry of ‘We want to go home’.
For where, for most West Ham fans, is home? It isn’t the area where Upton Park used to stand. West Ham would be defined as a majority white working- class club, but the white working class have been deserting the East End for decades.
In 2001, 34 per cent of the London Borough of Newham identified as white British. By 2011 that was down to 16.7 per cent. A section in Saturday’s programme for the Burnley game celebrated special occasions for fans. Not one mentioned an East London location. Elliott, six, was from Upminster at the far end of the District Line. Liam, 11, was a goalkeeper for a team in South Woodham Ferrers, which has a Chelmsford postcode. They were joined by fans from Surrey, Romford, Welwyn Garden City, Waltham Abbey.
There is a reason why interviews with old West Ham heroes — like the one Julian Dicks gave to The Times at the weekend — often take place in Nathan’s Pies and Eels on Barking Road. It is one of the few white workingclass businesses that remain in the area.
Green Street, where the main entrance to Upton Park once was, has for many decades been renowned as an Asian shopping area. Its logo is now branded in a quasi-Asian writing style. It boasts the East Shopping Centre, ‘ Europe’s first South Asian shopping mall’.
So where was Dicks meant to meet The Times to recapture the good old days down West Ham way? Puja Silk House? Krishna Sarees? The Samosa Chaat Shop? Dicks didn’t even know the ground had been knocked down and work had begun on the flats that will form Upton Gardens. That’s how much time he has spent in the area since the move.
There is a lot of mythologising of West Ham’s manor. The soulless traipse through Stratford compared to, as one writer had it, ‘the edgy walk past the pie and mash shops on Green Street’. Shops, plural? There was Duncan’s Pie Mash and Eels on Green Street, near Plashet Grove, but you’d have to turn left out of
Upton Park station and walk away from the ground to get there. Anyway, it closed in 2012, four years before West Ham moved, so clearly business wasn’t great.
West Ham offer pie and mash at the new ground, too, but it is the poorest performing of all the catering outlets, so maybe the image of a claret-and-blue East End is more beloved than the reality; the memory of community stronger than what remained.
Long before the club migrated little more than three miles, West Ham’s fans began an even longer and equally permanent trek east. There have been documentaries about white flight from inner London and 30 years ago it was noticeable that club mascots and Junior Hammers featured in the programme — the next generation of fans — increasingly came from towns along the arterial roads to Southend and Colchester.
Maybe Upton Park means more because it was where West Ham fans reconvened. It was the last romantic attachment to a part of the world left behind. And that is the irony. East London’s population moved, yet expected its football club to stay still and preserve this illusion of community.
‘For a West Ham fan it’s not about how much, or what, you win,’ wrote a poster on the subject on Monday, ‘it’s about the passion, loyalty and history of our roots in the East End. The majority of us have staunch working class backgrounds and we’re proud of it.
‘ We’re not shiny Champions League contenders, we’re rough around the edges and lose on a regular basis but the real fans carry the spirit of a community that’s historically endured the poorest living conditions ever seen in London.
‘The Cockney fighting spirit is well documented around the Second World War and the people have passed that mentality down to most of their descendants.
‘We are different from the rest of London, and most just don’t get it. I’m not saying we’re better but we’re definitely different. That is why we’re proud and why me, and many others, are very protective of our East End-London heritage.’
And that was from Bob: in Luton.
Yet this does not mean that the disgruntled are without point or purpose. There is a significant distance between the vision sold to the supporters and the reality. In many ways, this is the only positive. If the sole aim of the protestors is to return to Upton Park, or to dramatically make over the new stadium, then that cannot be achieved — short-term, certainly.
If the main gripe is underinvestment or an under- performing team, then that can be corrected, provided West Ham stay up, if the owners are prepared to meet the investment levels promised. Even those who sympathise with the board’s aims when moving to a bigger ground will have reservations about the way the club has operated since. It is not the dream promised. It is not even maintenance level.
West Ham were a better side in their final year at Upton Park. Since trying to join the elite, the club has bought and sold cheap. A net investment of £29million in four transfer windows is far short of what was imagined — or promised.
AWorLd class stadium for a world class team was the sell, but an interview with co-owner david Gold recorded before the defeat by Burnley may have helped to crystallise some of the anger over broken vows.
Far from painting a picture of a club ready to challenge for Champions League qualification, he made West Ham sound debt-racked and impoverished. The club was in hock to its owners, who had taken over and were servicing the debt at four per cent interest. Profits from player sales were set against that debt, too.
There was a particularly convoluted exchange in which he discussed the failed bid for William Carvalho, first giving the impression that the £25m unspent could be added to the summer transfer budget, then saying, no, it would go towards the debt.
Andre Ayew, sold to a relegation rival, Swansea, on deadline day, was a fantastic offer to which they could not say no. Except they could. No. There, said it. Just as they could have said no to the late transfer-window sale of dimitri Payet in 2017 — the deal that removed the one world- class player from the promised world class team.
Payet was a pest and wanted to leave, yes — but West Ham never explored Plan B, which was to keep him as Leicester City did riyad Mahrez, and see if he could be rehabilitated at least until the end of the season.
Ayew, equally, was ordinary at West Ham — but selling him to Swansea was complacent, and to do so too late to find a replacement is not the strategy of a club with ambition. Gold made West Ham sound like the club is struggling financially, which does not sit with a £43m operating profit — or with the spun vision of a bounteous new world at a new stadium.
Failed ambition is what he called it but the fans feel misled, and understandably so. If debt affects transfer budgets, that fact was known when they were contemplating leaving Upton Park, so why promise world class when second class was the reality?
Club legend Sir Trevor Brooking said that those fans who came to engage in aggressive protest against Burnley should stay away next time because the toxic mood could see West Ham relegated. He has a point. But so do those who claim they were fooled.
The East End, as once was, may be long gone, but the idea that a club with 57,000 fans shouldn’t expect to be competitive is also fantasy.