West Ham fans protest against a stadium that never felt like home

It wasn’t detention either. It was a protest: the latest in a long sequence aimed at the club’s owners and an inanimate object: the London Stadium itself, which many West Ham fans loathe. It’s not so much that they have fallen out of love with the former London 2012 main Olympic arena. They never liked it in the first place.

If you could have designed a home that was the opposite of the febrile, salty Upton Park (aka the Boleyn Ground), this is what you would have drawn: a track and field stadium – “gorgeous,” in the words of the London mayor Sadiq Khan, but with the wrong shape and atmospherics for football.

But it’s not architecture or a sense of dislocation West Ham supporters are most at war with. It’s the people who brought them here.

For the Brentford game two weeks ago, 20,000 West Ham fans refused to attend. This time a much smaller number refused to leave – for half an hour or so, anyway. It was all very civilised, with designated gathering areas.

Many will have felt conflicted. A convincing 3-1 win over Newcastle was the new manager Nuno Espirito Santo’s first at the club and alleviated what had started to feel like the certainty of relegation.

Boycotts, sit-ins and demos outside the ground have all been tried. In Graham Potter’s time, thousands marched to the stadium and protested outside. The fan group Hammers United called it “the start of a sustained campaign and series of protests which must be vigorous, but within the law... With Brady and Sullivan at the helm our club is going to die. It’s in serious decline and dying a slow death… We must show the world that Brady and Sullivan’s position is untenable and they must step aside for the good of the club.” Two weeks ago, West Ham’s fan advisory board issued a vote of no confidence in the board. Yet another protest is planned for the Burnley game next weekend.

West Ham deserved the win, mainly for a first-half performance that was unrecognisable from the torpor of recent weeks, when they conceded 20 goals in nine matches. The team’s defending has been so passive that it barely deserved the name. Non- or anti-defending would have been accurate. Their first defensive header was sarcastically cheered by the home crowd.

So a win that moved the Hammers to within three points of Burnley in 17th place (yes, small mercies) was bound to assuage the audience’s anger – for a while.

A man in a bobble hat chanted “we want [David] Sullivan out” with particular fury. His young children stood loyally by. Down on the touchline a schoolboy held up a banner that has become a favourite here. Alongside pictures of Sullivan (chairman) and Karren Brady (vice-chair) it read: “No more BS – just resign. This pair are killing our club.”

As Lucas Paqueta was celebrating an equaliser, his face was set on TV screens against a familiar banner that read: "Sold our soul – 15 years of destroying West Ham United." Rare joy in the foreground, anger as the backdrop.

It’s rare anyway for clubs with disliked owners to maintain emotional stability, especially after an unpopular house move (in 2016) and several relegation battles since. The more so, when the board is accused of under-investing in the team for 15 years, squandering the first European trophy win for 58 years and of generally lacking ‘class.’

But this isn’t a feud you look at and see easy exit routes. With a 99-year lease signed in 2013 on the London Stadium, new owners would find it hard to extricate their new possession. And where would they go? The cost of building another new ground in this part of London would be astronomical, and potentially take decades.

The disquiet therefore is of the circular, gnawing kind. The owners sit on their ‘investment,’ which exploited the impasse over the London 2012 stadium’s future use, and the team stays locked in survival mode while the fans experience a kind of existential dread.

West Ham though were good enough to force Newcastle into a triple substitution at half-time – something the Newcastle manager Eddie Howe said he had never done before.

“Our idea is to try and give something to the fans – and today we did give them a small thing, and the way they gave us back was huge,” Nuno said. “The noise in the London Stadium was amazing, I can’t thank them enough. So let’s try to give them a little bit more so they can make more noise and turn the London Stadium into a very hard place for our opponents.

“The fans saw something in the team today,” he went on. “This is how we should look at the situation.  How can we as a team show we want to fight, we want to change the situation?”

Thus a manager who was fired by a combative owner at Nottingham Forest finds himself trying to get the fans off the backs of deeply unpopular owners in East London. Everyone has to make a living.

Photograph by John Walton/ PA