Hammers urged to buy London Stadium

Daily Mail journalist Martin Samuel is urging West Ham to buy the London Stadium and redevelop it as a football-only venue.

Writing in his tabloid column Samuel says:

“Covid-19 prevented a major athletics meeting taking place in London in 2020; the cost of converting the London Stadium from its football configuration scuppered this summer’s event and there will likely be no athletics in the capital next year, either.

‘The biggest weakness is London,’ said Sir Brendan Foster. ‘To not have the sport in London is a big problem. London was White City, London was Crystal Palace. ‘Crystal Palace was the spiritual home of British Athletics. Events there were electric. You can’t have a major sport that doesn’t exist in London. It feels like athletics is in danger of losing its soul.’

Yet whose fault is that? There is an egotistical obsession with the grandiose London Stadium when a purpose-built, smaller home that can be identified as athletics’ base is needed. Crystal Palace was perfect. The focus on the London Stadium has seen it fall into decay and disrepair. Weeds have overwhelmed turnstile areas, pigeons nest in the stands, the concrete crumbles, the paint peels, there are potholes in the track.

Any maintenance investment exists merely to stop the place falling down. The exorbitant costs of converting the London Stadium for one meeting a year are a disgraceful misuse of funds, when athletics’ spiritual home is collapsing.

At the time when the legacy of the Olympic Stadium was being discussed, Daniel Levy’s plan was for Tottenham to buy it, convert the site for sole football use and restore Crystal Palace to its former glory for athletics’ purposes.

With the passing of time, however, that would now be the way forward.

Let West Ham, the London Stadium’s primary tenants, purchase and develop the site for football, and ring-fence some of the funds to make Crystal Palace the home of athletics again.

It used to have a capacity of 15,000, maybe increase that to 25,000. Athletics really doesn’t need much more.

It certainly doesn’t need to stay clinging to the memory of one glorious night nine years gone. It is this indulgence that holds back the sport.

Claret and Hugh say:

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but the reality it was not bulldozed and rebuilt from the ground up and there will be no political will to do it now with close to a billion pound invested in building the stadium twice and running it at a loss for nine years. Recent negotiations between a supposed takeover group and stadium owners the London Legacy Development Corporation shows that in principle that the public body are willing and eager to offload the stadium on a long lease but it has to be the right deal for West Ham.  Even if a long lease for the London Stadium was agreed for a single nominal pound coin per year there are serious financial risks for West Ham due to onerous contracts leading to losses of over £30m per year. Effective management of the stadium would plug some of those losses but not all of them. It could be that the public body would be prepared to subsidise some of this risk in the form of an annual grant to share the financial burden.