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A Bright Shining Lie is the title of Neil Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the tragedy of the United States of America’s participation in the civil war in South Vietnam. It’s the biography of an American, John Vann, who spent a decade there, firstly as part of their Armed forces and subsequently as part of the (so-called) Pacification Programme.

At its heart, as the books title suggests, it exposes the self-deception and outright lies that defined American Government policy there in an attempt to convince both itself and the wider world that if they just kept doing more of whatever it was they were doing, victory would come. It describes the arrogance of a nation that believed its version of events and ignored the views of those it considered lesser people.




It was a bright shining lie. All of it. We all know how it ended, and it wasn’t in victory. It ended with the most powerful Nation on earth utterly humiliated. Tragically, the majority of those who died did so long after the US Government knew for certain it could not win, but refused to change course believing the humiliation of defeat would be worse than the deaths of their own citizens.

Let’s start though by understanding the nature of self-deception, those little lies you tell yourself. They seem harmless enough and we tell them to ourselves to give ourselves a little boost every now and again. Small things like buying your favourite jeans from the brand whose 38” waistband jeans you can squeeze into to convince yourself you must be losing weight.

Deep down, of course, you know the manufacturer has simply told a bit of a whopper on the label. You don’t care though, because, what the hell, you feel good in these jeans, nobody’s died. I mean, it’s not like we are tracking progress in a war by counting enemy bodies, is it?

The problem of course comes when we start to believe we really do have a 38” waist band. We convince ourselves we are winning because the “data” says we are. In reality though it’s just an exercise in self-deception.

An example of the sort of self-deception some at the club appear to have convinced themselves of was the number of supporters who attended last weekend's protest march from Stratford Station to the London Stadium gates on Marshgate Lane. Sources close to the club were happy to promote an attendance figure of around 2-3,000.

Anyone who actually attended would know that number to be so wide of the mark as to be laughable. The tragedy is if the club actually believed it. Imagine, if you will, that is the reason the club continues to do just a bit more of whatever it is they have been doing, in the misguided belief that just a bit more will secure ” victory”. Whatever it is they think it looks like.

That is the problem with self-deception. It matters not whether there were 2,000 at last weeks protest or 10,000. What matters is there were any at all, and why they were there. One number that is not in dispute however is the number of arrests made at that protest. Zero.

Another obvious example of the club's self-deception is the published attendance figure for matches at the Athletics Stadium. Match after match we see a number that is 62,000 or so yet we sit there, looking at thousands upon thousands of empty seats.

The club might convince itself that all is well because their number reflects tickets sold, whereas the number they report to the SSAG is the actual, real, through the gate number. The differences are significant. The self-deception in this instance isn’t just the difference in the numbers, it’s the fact they seem to think it’s ok for the seats to be empty, providing they have sold the ticket.

A more mature organization and leadership executive may ask themselves why the seats are empty. Body count is easy to measure, hearts and minds, rather harder. It’s the latter that is important, as history taught the U.S. Government.

Of course not every game sees thousands of empty seats. Our next home match will be officially sold out and pretty much every seat on the day will be occupied.




Liverpool FC supporters, it’s fair to say, travel in numbers and nobody will be surprised to see them bring as many as 10,000 to the Athletics Stadium. The problem being there are only a fraction over 3,000 seats in the away supporters wedge.

If body count is all you care about you might convince yourself “we are winning”. The opposite, however, is nearer the mark, as it really does matter who you are selling tickets to, not just how many you have sold.

If Nuno’s selected team on the day do not produce somewhere near their best, it’s entirely probable that we will see problems all around the stadium which perpetuates the cycle of arrests, bans and ill feeling. That’s not scaremongering, it’s bitter observed experience.

A possible root cause of the club's ticketing problem is the piece of self-deception that it delivered the most successful stadium migration plan in history. The deception being that selling a lot of cheap tickets – as it did at the time – amounted to a success.

The offer of allowing every season ticket holder to not only buy their own ticket at the Athletics Stadium but also to buy two other tickets at concession rates has proven to be a problem for the club for nearly a decade. The migration plan, far from being a success, has proven to be an unmitigated disaster.

The impact of that ill-conceived policy is that the club is unable to raise a high yield from tickets in bands 1-4, with many seats in those areas being occupied by concession ticket holders. That is not the fault of those supporters who bought those seats in good faith as loyal supporters.

The club's problems are compounded by the view from seats in Bands 5 and 6 being so poor, nobody really wants to sit in them and they tend to be marketed at a discount for less glamourous fixtures. Despite that, we have somehow ended up in the situation where the cheapest child ticket available for the game against Liverpool as of last Thursday, is £85.

That doesn’t look like a success to me, nor does it look like affordable football. Maybe the club can convince itself that’s what victory looks like. I hope not.

The club tried to relocate some concession holders in Bands 1-4 last year, but a successful campaign from Hammers United, supported by Old School Hammers and the Supporters' Trust saw the club rightly back down.

Not for the first time had the club come within a whisker of creating a new problem when trying to solve a problem it had itself created. That’s what happens when you fail to consult stakeholders appropriately, when you make no effort to bring the people who will be affected by your decisions with you.

When suffering that crushing defeat inflicted by those supporters groups, the club might have thought that normal service would soon be resumed, as it had after the last wave of protests five or so years ago. They might have believed that all they needed to do was a little bit more of what they had been doing for the past 15 years would be all that was needed to see disquiet dampen down and fade away.




There’s that self-deception. Again. However the problems since the move run far deeper than that and every aspect of the club's performance is viewed through a more critical eye these days, while a series of mistakes has seen unrest reappear.

We’ve already seen a strongly supported boycott of the game against Brentford plus balloons and banners at Leeds United. The march last weekend was clear evidence the club's supporters are in no mood to back down anytime soon.

Support for the decision of the Fan Advisory Board to issue a vote of no confidence in Karren Brady and David Sullivan was underpinned not just by the numbers who attended it, but the fact it was being held at all. The campaign this time is being fought under a by-line of 'No more BS', a reference to those two directors.

Ultimately what did for successive US Governments and their misguided policies in South Vietnam was when the American public discovered everything they had been told for a decade was a different kind of BS.

The publication of what became known as the Pentagon Papers in 1971 by Sheehan in the New York Times was when the American public found out their Government knew they couldn’t win in 1965, yet they had continued to fight.

It was a pivotal moment in forcing their Government to change direction. There was no longer any point in deceiving themselves as the public were no longer buying the story .The public had learned the truth and their leaders had to face reality.

Now, fortunately for all of us, we are not at war, nobody has or will die. We’re talking about a football club, but the point is change can and will only happen when the self-deception ends, when the club understands the problems are not going away and neither are the thousands of supporters who were outside the gates on Marshgate Lane last week.

It was never about the numbers, it was always about the why. The fans were there because the world-class team and a world-class stadium appear to be invisible. The supporters outside the gates last week were there because they had believed, in good faith, what they were told before the move, but now know, deep down, the trophy in Prague - despite making us all feel good - was no different to the dodgy label on their jeans.

The move has turned out to be the club's own bright shining lie, a piece of self-deception perpetuated by looking at the wrong data and compounded by failing to listen to the right people.

When you face your own supporters protesting outside the club gates, over 20,000 season ticket holders do not attend a match for which they have already paid, your own F.A.B. has issued a vote of no confidence and you are losing supporters faster than you can replace them, the self-deception really does need to stop.

When that is your reality this isn’t victory, it’s humiliation. It’s time to stop fighting the supporters - and start listening to them instead.

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