A campaign has begun amongst West Ham fans for a supporter-led ballot of members and season ticket holders on whether the club should move to the Olympic Stadium.
The protest group, called WHU’s View, sent an open letter to chairmen David Gold and David Sullivan requesting the pair honour their commitment when they acquired the club to consult supporters more closely.
A statement on their website reads: “A group of West Ham United football fans, both for and against the move away from Upton Park, have made a formal written request to the owners of
the club for a full independently audited ballot of season ticket holders and members before putting forward a new bid to move from their current home in Upton Park to the Olympic Stadium in Stratford. We ask that the pledge to consult is honoured by way of polling before bidding. We await a positive response from the club.”
The campaigners recognise that Gold and Sullivan have invested a large amount of their own money into the club to keep it afloat and that the finances are still well into the red. But they believe the fans voice needs to be heard on such an important issue, and they may be right, but when has a club ever consulted their fans in this manner? There may have been a fan’s vote on something like the naming of a stand but never on a crucial decision such as this.
Ask any Manchester City or Arsenal fan and they will tell you that the day their club left its spiritual home it changed forever, they may appreciate the bigger, more modern new stadium, but it still feels as if something is missing, like the club’s soul has been removed. But that’s the price of progress.
That’s the problem with moving from a packed and compact ground to bigger one, but both sets of fans would surely accept that in order to progress, or to even keep their heads above water they need a larger stadium to maximise revenue.
Arsenal had to move, there was no way Highbury was a sustainable ground for a top –four team, but the City example is much more relevant when looking at West Ham’s proposed move.
The main difference is that they didn’t have to contend with, for example, Stockport County and Blackburn also bidding to move into the old Commonwealth Games stadium and then throwing their toys out of the pram and trying to hold the governmentor council to ransom with protracted legal disputes, but they were in a similar situation in financial and footballing terms.
When City moved into their new Eastland’s home they had only been in the Premiership for one year and were by no means an established team in that league.
They were more concerned with relegation battles then title challenges and, like the Hammers, were saddled with debt and desperately trying to keep their heads above water in an era of lavish spending…sound familiar?
The City of Manchester Stadium was also funded by the taxpayer money as well as Sport England (a government Quango that contributed £70m of the total £110m it cost to build) and the rest was Lottery cash.
City had planned to redevelop Maine Road to a similar capacity to that of their current ground, but Manchester council wanted to avoid a white elephant so they own the stadium and lease it back to the club at a newly agreed price of £3m a year and it only cost them £30m to adapt it to a football
stadium.
The problem with West Ham’s proposed move to the Olympic Stadium is that the economic climate has changed vastly in the last eight years, football attendances are down across the board as even top clubs are beginning to suffer from the effects of the recession.
Upton Park’s full capacity is around 35,000 and despite relegation, crowds still hit the low 30,000 mark depending on the opposition.
This is helped by a promising start to the Championship campaign, but also relies on constant offers such as ‘kids for fiver’ or three match bundles at a one-off price and sometimes half price offers for members especially for games against uninspiring opponents.
So what are the chances of filling a 60,000 seater stadium? Well that also depends on how the team are doing and where they are in the league.
West Ham have always had a strong and loyal fan-base but times are changing, people are becoming ever more disenfranchised with the modern game.
From the constant diving, badge kissing, money-grabbing players to the under-hand and corrupt dealings of chairman and administrators of the game, leaves the average man on the street wondering why he should part with his hard earned cash only to fund such over-paid child-like millionaires’ excessive lifestyles who are totally out of touch with reality.
Would the original plan to redevelop the East Stand, brining capacity to 45,000 be a more viable option?
It probably would, but ironically the main stumbling block to that initial proposal was the Hammers Olympic bid partners, Newham Council, as residents at the back of the stand objected to a further redevelopment.
Eggert Magnusson looked at the possibility of a completely new stadium at the Parcel Force Depo site only a mile down the road, an option the club could no longer afford.
The problem is that if the club does not move to the Olympic Stadium in 2013 (or 2014 as it is now being suggested without anyone noticing) then they never will and could face the prospect of being stuck in an out-of-date ground.
The sale of Upton Park would raise enough to clear most of the club’s debt, freeing up more money to invest in players and if the club has any ambition this seems like the only long term solution.
The fact that they would be renting the ground from the government (not the council as City currently do) is a new development due to the authorities’ obsession with getting the 2017 World Athletics Championships and showing some sort of athletics legacy.
It means the club has much less security and the possibility of their home being reliant on the whim of whichever government is around at the time.
The main problem most West Ham fans have with the Olympic Stadium is the running track, forced to retain it by a government pledge of a legacy to a sport very few people in this country watch or participate in.
The developers of the City of Manchester, Arup Sport, said that football was the only ‘viable option’ after an athletics event and that a running track was also untenable as they wanted to turn the stadium into a ‘gladiatorial arena’.
They cited the examples of the Stadio Delle Alpi and the Olympic Stadium in Munich, both had running tracks and both Bayern and Juventus have since changed their stadiums.
Bayern now ground-share with TSV 1860 Munich at the Allianz Arena and Juve completely knocked down the Delle Alpi and rebuilt it on the same site, as a smaller, more intimate stadium. Only Roma and Lazio still have a running track at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome.
Sullivan and Gold have stated that once in the Olympic Stadium the club would slash tickets making live football accessible to a wider demographic of people.
This would be a great for the local community and for the club in general, but they are already slashing prices just to fill the Boleyn Ground.
So the club could have to move again once the finances are sorted out by a rental period and then they discovered that a rarely full stadium with fans miles from the pitch does little for the atmosphere.
Perhaps it would have been simpler to have kept a running track at the new Wembley (as the old one had) and not have bothered with any of this.
