To connect private opulence with public negligence in the capital, walk the six miles between the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and the London Stadium. One of them will be staging second-tier football in August.
If West Ham are relegated on the Premier League’s final day on Sunday, City Hall, aka London’s taxpayers, will see an extra £2.5m diverted from public services to cover increased operating costs at the ground built as the main 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Stadium.
So said the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, this week. Under the terms of a 99-year lease negotiated under Boris Johnson’s mayoralty, West Ham’s rent on the London Stadium would drop by almost half from the current £4.4m per season. Revenue would also nosedive.
Operating costs are already heavily subsided from public money – a gift that reflects the Johnson administration’s desperation to find a club for an arena that cost £484m (or more than £750m after its conversion for football). Johnson said in 2013: “Through this deal with West Ham United we are defying the gloomsters who predicted this landmark would become a dusty relic.”
Khan this week called the deal with West Ham 13 years ago as “the worst imaginable” and joked that non-Spurs supporting Londoners should get behind the Hammers to stay up in the interests of public cost. Nobody is laughing. The stadium’s losses are measured in hundreds of millions and the onerous 99-year lease is said by the football finance expert Kieran Maguire to have reduced the ground’s value to zero.
To survive, West Ham will have to beat Leeds at home while hoping Everton can defeat Spurs at a stadium that is the polar opposite of the Olympic Park’s municipal folly. If West Ham win and Spurs draw, goal difference will save Roberto De Zerbi’s team. Whichever club sink are likely to go with the highest points tally of any relegated team since Newcastle went down 10 years ago with 37.
About the only detail uniting the two arenas is that neither has a headline sponsor. The common thread between the teams, meanwhile, is that each is a cautionary tale. Spurs and West Ham are a warning to the rest of the Premier League that it’s not just clubs such as Burnley and Wolves who can fall into the vortex. The descent of two big London names explains why so many American private equity investors abhor relegation.
In April 2019, Spurs unveiled an Americanised entertainment city a few hundred yards from the antique splendour of the old White Hart Lane. It cost £1bn and put even Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium in the shade. The ambition underpinning it stretched far beyond winning Premier League matches.
With its retractable surface, the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was built too for NFL games, big fights, rugby and concerts, with luxury conference and events facilities. It was as if a space colony had landed on Tottenham High Road. But the board forgot to build a football team to match the grandeur of the architecture.
Since their megaplex opened, Spurs have finished fourth, sixth, seventh, fourth, eighth, fifth and 17th. This time they will finish 17th or 18th. Simply, they have been one of the worst four teams in the Premier League for two years running.
Newsletters
Choose the newsletters you want to receive
View more
For information about how The Observer protects your data, read our Privacy Policy
The stadium can’t be blamed for the plummet from the Champions League and Europa League qualifying years to successive relegation battles. In the first of those they even beat Manchester United in a Europa League final. But after Harry Kane’s departure, the side’s collapse has been a rolling indictment of the club’s ownership and has come to make the place feel like a monument to hubris.
Britain’s flashiest stadium wasn’t built for a team with nine wins and 17 defeats in 37 league games. It didn’t soar in gleaming glass and steel to host Lincoln City, promoted from League One, or even Wrexham, however Hollywood they now are.
West Ham moved into the revamped London Stadium in 2016. Juventus came for the official opening match and stands were dutifully named after Bobby Moore and Sir Trevor Brooking, On the site of the old Boleyn Ground now sit 842 homes spread across the 18 buildings of The Upton Gardens, where a three-bed flat typically costs £500,000.
Ten years ago it emerged that West Ham were not responsible under the arrangement struck by Johnson for undersoil heating and floodlighting, dugouts, changing rooms and toilets, security, cleaning or pest control. The disgrace of the Johnson deal rolls on.
In the year to May 2025, West Ham reported a £104.2m pre-tax loss. When Baroness Karren Brady stood down from the board last month after 16 years, joint-chair Daniel Křetínsky praised her for securing “the long-term contract for the London Stadium” and “the British record transfer of Declan Rice” – who has just won the title with Arsenal. For many West Ham fans selling the club’s best player, even for £100m, wasn’t the stuff of bragging rights.
Like Spurs, West Ham have squeezed a European trophy – the 2023 Conference League – into a long dance with relegation. Their most recent finishing positions are 14th, ninth and 14th. Their best player, Jarrod Bowen, admitted this week that this season’s deterioration “was starting to creep in a little bit last season”.
Between May 2024 and September 2025, West Ham sacked David Moyes, Julen Lopetegui and Graham Potter before asking Nuno Espírito Santo to halt a chaotic pattern. Since Mauricio Pochettino, Spurs have run through José Mourinho, Nuno, Antonio Conte, Ange Postecoglou and Thomas Frank. In March they ditched the interim coach Igor Tudor after 44 days.
These are not stadium failures, architectural malfunctions. But symbolically both grounds speak of private wealth and public waste side by side in a single economic culture, and leading down a single road, for one of these clubs – to Lincoln, whom they will be in no position to patronise.
Photographs by Leon Neal /AFP via Getty, Ben Stansall / Getty