Sorry if this is getting a bit like Brexit but it’s a topic which refuses to go away – should we have remained or stayed at the Boleyn.
Earlier today we ran a piece from a follower in favour of leaving the Boleyn. In the interests of balance, new subscriber John Gale gives an alternative view.
By John Gale
Moving to the Olympic stadium was the biggest mistake ever, a stadium not designed for football.
Upton Park was a ground where opposing teams hated coming, a place we were proud to call home. Now we are in a stadium most fans despise.
Wwhen the rain comes we get wet due to the club owners not caring when we queue up to get in. Then we get even wetter due to the roof covering not good enough making our seats wet.
No wonder a lot of the crowd stand up. It’s ok for them to sit in their warm comfy dry seats,get off their backsides and take an interest in these loyal supporters.
All they do is ignore the situation with overpriced food and drinks. Please sell the club and maybe get someone with a greater love and bring this great club back to where it belongs
Yep John it’s a topic that has been talked about wrote about sung about protested about cried about argued about but as sad as I am in the ‘souless bowl ‘that we unfortunately have to call “home” we have just got to live with it for the time being ..fingers crossed .. not for so long hopefully. .COYI
I think we are in a transition stage.
Trying to turn new ‘casuals’ into proper hammers fans and this will take a few seasons.
The board will buy the stadium outright and convert it – of that I am sure. David Gold is an actual football person and understands this is wrong. I remember being at the game Wolves v West Ham, we lost 3-1 with Franco scoring late on and the owners had given us all “happy clappers”. The atmosphere was as toxic as it is today.
I think the real problem at west ham has been the owners communciation. They keep talking about breaking the top 6, but dont have the football contacts, nous or experience to do it. This leads to a false reality where we think we can challenge but it’s just not possible. So much squandered money. This season we have been relying on our squad a lot as so many of our players are always injured.
Overall, the move WILL work. It will just take time. Once we can buy it by like 2025 we wont look back. In the interim though there will obviously be problems. Premier league survival is the only option this season. I pray we can do it.
The owners will never been forgiven.
They could have delayed the move to ensure some of the problems were resolved before moving in. We could have stayed a season or two longer at UP to make it ready. Having known the distances to the pitch from the seats the move should have been cancelled.
They over stated the benefits of moving. They live in the 1990s when big stadia meant you were a big club. No longer the case look at Leicester, Wolves and even Chelsea.
Renting limits the income we make from stadium.
They cry about the debt. Spurs owe 600 mil and never mention it.
They think spending 10 mil on the training ground is good. Leicester spent 100mil.
We have one full time scout and are over reliant on agents.
They appoint a manager and let him appoint the director of football so when they sack him they wipe out our recruitment team. DOF should be appointed by the owners.
We have conceeded home advantage by moving to stratford. Away teams like playing there.
They sold UP only for it to be immediately sold on by new owners again for a profit. Why?
Why charge interest on loans when they are already very wealthy? Very bad PR for little return.
Most fans dislike Brady. Replacing her would go a long way in rebuilding the relationship with fans.
The move has hardly improved our finances..We have moved for a couple of million in increased revenue.
They cry about Financial Fair play but our accounts show we are no where near FFP limits.
How much would it cost to fix stratford? I dread to think.
In the interest of balance lol the previous article was the balance given that 90% of this site seems to be dedicated to slating the new stadium!
LOL???? Some take an opposite view thus you will realise how hard it is to satisfy all. One can only try
Hugh have some decorum…. you’re the host – you’re supposed to be impartial – take a leaf out of Iain Dales book.
PARDON…WHAT WE TALKING ABOUT NOW?
its funny how after leaving a pre season at Fulham in the summer sun and watching Wilshire/yarmalenko/frederiks and listening to all pundits after Heller scored a couple saying we were top 4 or top 6 and we had Pellegrini not one of the moaning brigade was posting on sites like this. they all hoped we had turned a corner having spent big and hoped that our owners had listened to us for once. we had stopped the negativity hurrah. doesn’t take long, its as though you want us to fail so you can harp on about a pile of crumbling bricks in a right swamp part of east London that no fans even live or would walk through at night. its gone let it go, you nostalgic bunch of dreamers, re watch the video read the old history books, but give it a rest, its boring and doesn’t bring anything to the table re establishing some kind of atmosphere at out new home.
Well said!!
Every time I go to The London Stadium and walk from the station to the ground I think how much better this is than the old Boleyn Ground . Ok, supporters got used to their routine of trying to get to Upton park a couple of hours before kick off , parking about a mile away or battling through the underground, through the cramped station and onto Green St which was like a foreign land . Nothing against the people that live in Upton Park , but most of the people that live there are not interested in football . It’s not in their culture!
After struggling to get there , you might have had time for a quick pint in The Central or some other establishment that only had customers on match days .
The old ground was difficult to get into and out of and just imagine what it would have been like now with all the security checks .
The London Stadium , with all it’s faults , such as distances from the pitch etc , is a far better stadium and surrounds than where we used to be . The transport links are probably among the best in this country and possibly Europe . There must be a dozen rail lines coming into Stratford , with Crossrail still to come. We even have an airport within a few miles and hotels and bars etc a few minutes away.
If the owners could somehow gain control of the stadium and find the cash to alter it to improve the atmosphere it would be perfect . Why did Tottenham try to buy the site ? Because its has the best area and accessibility of any stadium I have ever been to , and I have been to most in this country .
The big problem at the moment is that the team are in trouble , mainly because the owners put their trust in a management team that were in decline . I never thought Pellegrini was that good at Man City, he just had the pick of the best players in the world and almost limitless funds .
If we avoid relegation I think we will be ok in the Prem next season . If we don’t , then we probably have a management team that can hopefully get us back .
Either way we need to get behind the players and stop giving the press fuel to put us down. COYI
Well said. Upton Park was a nightmare to get to and even worse to get out of. I can’t believe people are still bleating about the move. You can’t go back. It doesn’t matter what you think of the new place. It’s now home, like it or not. Blame Seb Coe for insisting on a legacy for Athletics
Well said and agree with Oliver, the club wanted to have input into creating a stadium that could be transformed into a football stadium instead Seb Coe refused insisting on his vanity project at huge ongoing cost to the tax payer, his legacy !!! The chairmen want the best for the club, I have sympathy and agree they shouldn’t bleat about not taking a penny out of the club when they have deferred interest payments due worth millions, that’s just spin. In their defence MP had won the premier league and guaranteed European football at every other European club he had been at, not always on a huge budget. I saw the players improve in the first season, so perhaps the manager isn’t the problem ?
As for UP it was a dump at the time we left it, imho it was never the same as an all seater. If it was so intimidating how come we never won the league and only rarely came within spitting distance ? It’s easy to remember the great times but think in a balanced way there were good as well as bad times and probably the latter were more prevalent than we all remember.
So, let’s get this straight…..
1. It never rained on anyone at Upton Park. Except me, obviously; I got soaked pretty regularly at the front of the Chicken Run
2. The huge extended roof that cost the taxpayers squillions of quid isn’t rain proof
3. ‘Upton Park was a ground where opposing teams hated coming’ Really? As a poorly paraphrased Shankly said ‘Nice team, nice football, three points for Liverpool’. Fortress Upton Park….
4. ‘When the rain comes we get wet’. What, like rain being wet is a surprise?
5. ‘A place we were proud to call home’. Although very few of us lived there or ventured in the neighbourhood outside of match days.
6. ‘Now we are in a stadium most fans despise.’ Good. Maybe it might just put them off. Most of them despise the fact they paid for it and we benefit. Or we would, if we could stop whining for minute.
7. ‘All they do is ignore the situation with overpriced food and drinks.’ I think the stadium operator sets the prices, not our Board. At least you can get food and drink at the new place; I never managed to get a pie at half time at UP without missing the last and first five minutes of each half! And it was all oh so cheap there, wasn’t it?
8. Oh, I give up…….. I wish some people would just grow up and let it go. Imagine the money the club would make if we held a sale of Upton Park rose-tinted glasses…..
Agree with all the comments made, if the moaner’s and protesters think we messed up with our player recruitment of late and think Gold and Sullivan didn’t spend enough in the last few windows perhaps they should go support Aston Villa. Didn’t they spend in excess of £170 million on players in the summer and look were they are, one point above us and in the same relegation scrap.
Utter nonsense.
“Upton Park was a ground where opposing teams hated coming” – This is simply not true. In one of his Secret Footballer books Dave Kitson explains how away teams loved playing at UP because they knew if they could get an early goal the home fans would be on West Ham’s backs all game. And he’s right. I’d still like to be playing there, but let’s not pretend it was something it wasn’t.
Two problems with West Ham taking over the stadium. First they would have to pay their own way like every other club instead of being subsidised by the taxpayer. Secondly it might lead to a public enquiry into the whole dodgy process through which you got the stadium in the first place.
Jod, when you say public enquiry, do you mean like the “public enquiry” that we did have, and then the second enquiry, the deal Brady got was the deal of the century, one that every club would love to get so good on her. so nothing dodgy going on there only a great deal for the club to build on. And thats what we should start doing, and i also believe we will own it soon once the new athletics stadium is finished in Birmingham.i think i can hear the missus calling you Jod, its sour grapes for tea again, yawn we’ve heard it all before
Should never have left ..its made no difference at all like they said it would,, I certainly miss Upton park…If we won a cup or got in the champions league like they said would happen with the so called extra revenue, it may of made a difference .but we have moved and it could now end up in relegation..so yeah I wish we never moved ..
Get me a Tardis; probably the only way to get away from this misery! The Boleyn Ground “was” it “isn’t” now. Like it or lump it; p or get of the pot; however you look at it we can’t turn the clocks back and the 20,000 extra fans who can attend matches now probably wouldn’t want us to.
Diamond Geezer your reply had me in tears of laughter.
Are you by any chance a professional writer? If not you should be.
Afraid not – just a bloke bored of all the pointless moaning. I don’t hate the new ground, I didn’t have any great affection for love the old ground after we went all-seater, I don’t really feel I was lied to, and I think GSB might well turn out to be a better bet than the complete lack of plan lots of people are bleating about. All I really want is do to watch my team; don’t really care where so long as they’re West Ham. And I reckon there are a load of people like me who aren’t spending their waking hours shouting insults at anyone who doesn’t agree.