Passion of Upton Park to a toxic, soulless bowl. The fans were sold a dream by Brady bunch but now it’s a NIGHTMARE
SOMETIMES protest banners are so honest that pain drips from every word.
These recent ones made by West Ham fans fall into that category: “Sold a Dream Given a Nightmare” is one, and: “LIES, LIES, LIES...You promised us false dreams – You have killed us” is another.
You can’t accuse the protesting fans of dishonesty, or even hyperbole, because they were constantly sold a dream by those owners and they are currently living a nightmare under them.
“We have a seven-year plan to get them into the Champions League and turn them into a big club and we do plan to spend a lot of money,” said David Gold and David Sullivan when they took over in 2010, already eyeing up a taxpayer funded move to the Olympic Stadium.
Ten years on, no Champions League nights have been witnessed.
As for big club status, they are in the relegation zone, relying on David Moyes, a manager they have already deemed not good enough, to rescue them.
To be fair, they’ve spent £214million on players in the past four years – but to be honest, spent it abysmally.
And fans want to know why Sullivan and Gold have taken £18.6m in interest payments on their £45m loan.
Why the 18th richest club in the world doesn’t have its own ground, and despite claims of spending £22m on infrastructure in the past four years, they see little evidence of it.
When West Ham moved to the London Stadium in
2016, vicechairman
Karren Brady bragged to businessmen they were moving to “the foothills of the financial sector” to “change the brand values,” and promised to “plug the debt, build the future and create the culture”. She’s personally climbing financial hills, with last year’s pay package rising from £898,000 to £1.136m, although the club losses jumped to £28.2m.
Yet the only culture created at the new stadium is a toxic one among fans who despair at the soulless bowl, borne of a soulless vision, which could not be further from the cauldron of passion that was their old Upton Park home.
Little thought was given to the disconnect between players and fans, the umbilical cord that holds a club together.
They went from having a crowd that seemed almost on the pitch to one which feels like it resides in a different borough.
Many rival fans were envious of their Olympic Stadium move because they got it for peanuts.
But that was before they visited it. And realised a trip to West Ham had gone from walking with trepidation towards a proper old school football ground to heading through an anonymous shopping mall to a muted athletics venue.
The club has announced it will put extra rows of seats behind the goals for next season but as cynics pointed out on social media, good luck filling them against Rotherham. When Brady’s pay rise was announced last month, fan group West Ham United For Change claimed she “spends more time working on her brand than she does for the club”.
And a quick glimpse at the slick, official website of “Baroness Brady of Knightsbridge CBE” shows she is so conscious of her brand she’s given herself a Ronaldo-esque logo.
And her mantra is written large: “You can’t determine where you start in life but you can determine where you end up.”
Which must seem bitterly ironic for fans born to love West Ham who were duped into ending up somewhere they never wanted to.
The message from their heartfelt protests being never let slick business people, who have seen the chance of an easy buck, determine where you end up.
Don’t let the dream-sellers promise Utopia only to land you in purgatory.