West Ham are in the progress of trying to relocate hundreds of fans with young families who want to move to safer areas of the London Stadium over fears of violence and persistent standing.
The club have received hundreds of complaints and are looking at the logistics of moving some season ticket holders away from the Bobby Moore lower and south corner of the West stand lower.
These two locations contain the majority of the relocated season ticket holders from the old Bobby Moore Lower and Sir Trevor Brooking lower stands who traditionally stood at the Boleyn ground.
We have been told that the club have already taking steps to relocate fans with young families who want to move and we have also been told some season ticket holders have already been successfully relocated.
Unlike the Boleyn ground, the London Stadium has no family enclosure but with 10,000 tickets sold to under 16s, many have asked to be moved away from potential trouble spots and the club have agreed to look at this.
I think however the issues could be solved fairly easily;
1. Introduce a family section in the upper tier of the Bobby Moore.
2. Put the away supporters in the upper tier only of the Trevor Brooking stand, blocks 218-226, with the usual tarped off areas between home and away fans. Access to the upper tier only could easily be controlled given the stadiums outer and inner ring on the concourse.
3. Introduce WHU STs to the entire lower tier of the TB stand, thus making thousands of seats available to those wishing to move to more ‘atmospheric’ seating.
4. Show leniency with people standing in the corner sections of the lower tiers and behind the goals.
5. Enforce the seating only policy in the other parts of the ground.
The OS would then be set up as a more tradition football stadium with areas to suit all types. That is what works at every other ground in the country!
I can see these problems with your suggestions:
1. The upper tier of the Bobby Moore is one of the furthest views. Nor sure kids would like that view.
2. You cannot have away fans above home fans. I don’t know of any club that do that. Missiles and spit would rain down on home fans
3. see 2
5. We stand in the very back row and are left alone
Why didn’t they have a family section in the first place?
It does seem to me that, even if it has taken four years to make the place ready, everything seems to have been done in a rush with all sorts of problems emerging that no one seems to have considered, like properly segregating the away fans, both while they’re in their seats and on the concourse. As much as I respect the owners, I think they’ve gone for too much too soon with this push to get to 60,000 and then 66,000. We really needed to stick to the lower capacity for a season to make sure everything worked. There’s no reason that they couldn’t have then, had they chosen to go up, just realised more season tickets for next season to those at the top of the waiting list.
Of course it doesn’t help that the club doesn’t own the stadium, and thus can’t do the things it wants to do without going to the stadium owners first.
The first game I attended was the Bournemouth match, I was amazed at 1) Lack of Police, 2) Not that many stewards 3) the ability to walk all around the ground virtually and 4) the bloody obvious inadequate segregation of the away fans. It was what I told everyone when I got home when asked ‘what was the stadium like’…..if it was that obvious to me then why not Lady Brady or the stadium security officials or even the police observers…..
Great news that the club have started to do this, first steps in the right direction
Look no one can deny many mistakes have been made but with sensible constructive talks amongst the different authorities,owners & people who are contracted to do this stuff it can be sorted out.It ain’t f*cking Armageddon as some fans will have you believe.Anyway if the Old Bill come back into the ground that will shut up some of the more chopsie b*stards in the ground 🙂
I think JB13 as got it spot on with his idea to put all away fans in Sir Trev upper.
Would be much easier to police than having them over two levels.
Chelsea use to do that and their fans use to spit on the away fans below.
…and vice versa