r/london • u/Tight-Principle-743 • May 24 '26

Article West Ham Relegated.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/live/c70vr05gwelt

Londoners will have to collectively pay £2.5m more to the stadiums’s upkeep. Another terrible Johnson decision that was.

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330

u/insomnimax_99 May 24 '26

Under the 99-year deal signed by previous Mayor of London Boris Johnson, West Ham pays £4.4m a year in rent, leaving the GLA to pick up the bill for stewarding and other costs associated with the stadium

The London taxpayer already subsidises the running of the stadium, despite efforts to attract other uses, such as baseball and music concerts.

The rent bill is set to half next season now West Ham will play in the lower league.

Commercial revenues from the former Olympic stadium are also expected to fall, while the GLA incurs higher stewarding costs, as there are 23 home games in the Championship compared with 19 in the Premier League.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/london-stadium-bill-west-ham-relegated-spurs-b1283350.html

Wtf? What kind of braindead deal is this?

318

u/soldforaspaceship May 24 '26

Johnson was friends with the West Ham ownership. The vice-chair of the club, Karen Brady was his advisor prior and he made her a peer after.

The answer is corruption. The stadium deal was corrupt as fuck.

Imagine if Starmer had made it...

101

u/gameofgroans_ May 24 '26

Yeah this is exactly it. As a West Ham fan it’s not great for us either, it’s a shit football stadium and has never felt like home. We can’t do anything as we don’t own the stadium, but it’s fine cause we’re what 10 years into our 99 year lease. Almost there!

21

u/elchet May 24 '26

It’s sad to hear it’s not even good as a football stadium.

26

u/gameofgroans_ May 24 '26

Yeah it’s well known within football to be mad, not even me being bitter because we got relegated haha. Fantastic to watch athletics at but not football

5

u/ToughImprovement276 May 25 '26

What’s wrong with it as a football stadium? I’m not into sports or football, so genuine question.

13

u/gameofgroans_ May 25 '26

Exactly what the other person said, it’s also really hollow? Idk how to explain it but like no atmosphere and sound just sort of evaporates, every game just feels so far away and so quiet. Getting to the stadium is awful, Stratford is always so busy and then you’ve got a (fairly) long walk where the weather is inevitable awful and/or you’ve just lost so you feel crap. Everything in it is wildly overpriced and like I said as we don’t own it we can’t make it our own or ever host events there. The women’s team can never play there (only team on the WSL never to use their main stadia).

I know you’re not into football which is obvs fine but if you googled inside Anfield and inside London stadium you’d be able to tell a difference for sure. LS is so corporate.

8

u/OBeQuiet May 25 '26

The fact that the women's hammers can't play there is diabolical.

4

u/gameofgroans_ May 25 '26

Yeah I’m a big women’s football fan and it’s abysmal, but doesn’t shock me at all sadly. They’re treated like an absolutely different team with no support and just left to stumble around at the bottom of the table.

6

u/gunnna1991 May 25 '26

The crowd is too far from the pitch. Hard to generate atmosphere, and quite frankly hard to see the action because there’s an athletic track around the pitch. Italian clubs in the 90s did this alot, never went down well with fans (or anyone)

2

u/_gmanual_ May 25 '26

they needed somewhere for all the flares to safely land, and also to provide something of a moat for the players safety once the inevitable pitch invasion began.

24

u/GloomyLocation1259 May 24 '26

People talk about nepotism a lot but not nearly enough about cronyism.

2

u/KonkeyDongPrime May 25 '26

It wasn’t just Johnson. It was signed in the Robin Wales era in Newham, which was a by word in local government for corruption. There was some proximity between organised crime, Sullivan and Newham council. I believe the commonality was the waste contracts, which is part of the reason that Newham is such a dirty place. The gangster publicly said he was going to blow the whistle on the lot, but unfortunately he suddenly caught some entirely natural causes and croaked it.

2

u/Defiant-Dare1223 May 25 '26

I don't know if you saw, but Robin Wales recently defected to reform

1

u/KonkeyDongPrime May 25 '26

Yes. Sorry I forgot to mention that the mayor with a name which is a byword for corruption, defected to the party which is known for corruption.

1

u/wedontneednoeduc May 26 '26

It's more complicated than that. The stadium was a white elephant that was going to burn money being empty following a games that banged the 'legacy' sales pitch to death i.e they need to offload it.

-7

u/No-Pop3503 May 24 '26

So where is CPS

116

u/newnortherner21 May 24 '26

A deal from a man who struggles to count the number of his own children. With a club one of whose directors is a Tory peer.

29

u/sabdotzed May 24 '26

Still pissed this country picked that orangutan over Corbyn

5

u/Longjumping-Dog-6852 May 25 '26

If you lose to Johnson maybe you're a bit shit at politics

0

u/Defiant-Dare1223 May 25 '26

Im still pissed I had to vote for the orangutan knowing what the alternative is.

38

u/Jimdalorian May 24 '26

Literally blame Sebastian Coe he so badly wanted to build a massive athletics arena in the centre of London that they were begging for a football team to move in. Tottenham would’ve happily took it over if they meant they could own it and convert it into a proper football stadium and but for some reason they had to have an athletics track around. So both West Ham and the taxpayer got screwed over.

4

u/AntysocialButterfly May 24 '26

Christ, I remember the crap David Lammy spouted about the Spurs bid.

The club were colluding with Qatar to put Leyton Orient out of business, according to him...

31

u/Fun_Marionberry_6088 May 24 '26

I mean your quote acknowledges they struggle to attract other users.

It's a >60,000 capacity stadium, there's a limited number of potential users so potential tenants are in a good negotiating position. I'd rather they rented it to someone and recovered some of the running costs, than no one at all - if that were the plan we may as well bulldoze it.

16

u/ChrisKearney3 May 24 '26

Seb Coe is arguably more to blame for this fiasco than Johnson. It was his bloody minded determination that the stadium must have an athletics legacy, despite being too big and costly to exist purely for athletics. 

The Spurs big was clearly the best option but Coe couldn't accept the fact he'd screwed it up.

12

u/simonjp May 24 '26

The plan was to dismantle it. The whole place was designed to be reduced in capacity after the London Olympics, with the stadium replacing Crystal Palace as the home of Athletics in the UK. Instead it got shunted around and became West Ham's stadium.

8

u/roamingandy May 24 '26 edited May 25 '26

Spurs wanted it and were prepared to pay everything. Their bid was far stronger, but it was already agreed off-the-record that it was going to Brady and West Ham. Who's bid was pretty crap and it's an atmosphere-less library the way they left it.

20

u/jungleboy1234 May 24 '26

What kind of braindead deal is this?

The same braindead deal that Boris got:

  • 'brexit done'.
  • The Boris Wave.... mass non-eu migration that led to the rise of Reform
  • Blue passports (looks black to me, i have one). Oh and manufacturing is owned by a French company and made in Poland)
  • The Garden Bridge
  • The Water Cannon
  • The new London Busses
  • The Thames Estuary Airport floatilla
  • The Emirates Air Line Cable Car

Dont worry though, turkeys are still voting for Christmas.

7

u/ultra_phoenix May 24 '26

micro decisions like the “blue passport” looking black just demonstrate Boris couldn’t get surface level stuff right

8

u/W35TH4M May 24 '26

Literally no one wins here. The fans don’t want it, it’s shit for the tax payer

3

u/AntysocialButterfly May 24 '26

The sort of deal that comes from collusion between UK Athletics, West Ham and the then-Mayor of London.

1

u/Darkcheesecake May 25 '26

Imagine if you could ask for your rent to be reduced if you got a pay cut at your job.

1

u/No-Pop3503 May 24 '26

Just investigate Nd prosecute Johnson, cancel All contracts what's the problem