West Ham’s future has never felt bleaker

LONDON STADIUM — An emotional chorus of “Forever Blowing Bubbles” met the end of West Ham United’s 14-year stay in the Premier League. It was both a demonstration of attachment deeply felt and a measure of the growing separation between terrace and boardroom.

The message was clear. This is our club, not yours David Sullivan. You brought us to this end, to this concrete wasteland of a stadium nobody wanted, a fitting setting for a club that has lost its centre. Your accomplice Karren Brady has gone. Now it’s your turn. Get out.

Should Sullivan have been in any doubt about the sentiment among fans, the scale of the ill feeling toward him was made plain when the second goal went in. The celebration of Jarrod Bowen’s sharply taken chance quickly turned to scorn as supporters chanted their hostility to the diminutive baron in the posh seats.

The ownership bears responsibility for relegation but none of the emotional weight. That falls entirely on the supporters, the only cohort at West Ham that really cares. West Ham is part of their identity, worn with pride on the crests of their shirts, an attachment passed down through the generations like a family heirloom.

In they filed from all corners, one young woman travelling solo from Port Talbot in Wales, standing quietly at the station, identifiable as a Hammer by the club crest. If you didn’t know football you would have thought her top an odd choice for a hot day. As the train journeyed towards the centre of her universe, it picked up fellow travellers, all connected by the same emotional tissue, hoping for the best, fearing the worst.

Even on a sunny day, the hottest on record in May, the London Stadium has never felt bleaker. Upton Park was beyond use as a 21st century football stadium, but this was never the answer, an austere pop-up of little architectural merit that just happened to be in the neighbourhood.

The supporters have never felt at home here and every inch of that dislocation could be felt as the team toiled away devoid of connection. The sense of belonging and place has been ripped away from the team and its supporters, leaving them rootless in their own land.

Relegation was not a given but the consequence of poor leadership and direction. The squad is not deep enough, recruitment not good enough. Pablo, who did not bring himself to West Ham in January, serves as an example of the errors made.

West Ham needed goals and he neither looked like scoring nor providing. Just one assist is the sum total of his un-Brazilian contribution. No surprise when he was hooked at half-time. His replacement Callum Wilson, a proven scorer, added a third with the last kick of the game. How’s that for irony?

Taty Castellanos, another January arrival, inverted the trend, his sixth of the season sending West Ham on their way here. It was never enough, the long tail of inadequacy finally taking its toll.

Their forebear in attack, Niclas Fullkrug, managed only three goals in 26 games before being dispatched to AC Milan. West Ham sought improvements and, Taty apart, got more of the same.

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Three years ago West Ham beat Fiorentina to become Conference League champions. Next season they trade derbies against Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea for Charlton Athletic, Millwall and Queens Park Rangers in the Championship.  

This was not the vision sold by Sullivan and Brady when they moved to the 2012 Olympic Stadium a decade ago. The disposal of Upton Park made sense financially, trading the burden of maintaining an outmoded stadium for an affordable rental, one that now falls to the taxpayer to share following relegation.

Sullivan sold not only the home of West Ham but its soul. The spirit of this club resides in the fans not in him. If relegation yields any benefit, it would, for the fans at least, come with his departure.

المصدر: iNews