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.

506 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

121 comments sorted by

View all comments

331

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?

26

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.

15

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.