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We’ve run you out of town. You’re off down the road with your tail between your legs, a trail of failure following you. It doesn’t matter how many fawning pieces appear from former journalists in the National Press singing your praises, your real bosses, the ones that really matter, the supporters, know the truth.

You utterly failed at West Ham United Football club. Failed to bring the supporters on the journey with you, in thousands of cases, quite literally, failed to develop a sustainably competitive position for the club and failed to avoid the No more BS card I handed to you a few weeks ago.




I knew then your time was up, as at your peak I wouldn’t have been able to present one to you. You would have seen it coming a mile off and dodged it. In the end though, you just ran out of energy. You presented me with a one-on-one opportunity and I didn’t miss. Prime Cottee. Yes, it was a cheap shot, but hey-ho, they all count.

Meanwhile, It’s time to declare a few things that may surprise some people. I don’t really care what salary you were paid by West Ham United FC. Some of your counterparts were paid more, others less, as someone once said about players wages, they all get it.

Nor do I care about the enormous losses the club has recently declared for last season: we’re back to having two Chairmen these days, so one of them can deal with it. They’ll ask me for more money to attend matches in due course no doubt, and that I do care about, but to be frank, they would do that if we had just declared an enormous profit anyway, so it’s not a function of the losses.

I don’t even particularly care about hovering in and around the bottom three all season. You see, I’ve seen that before, several times, both before you arrived at our club and on a couple of occasions, after you had done so.

The prospect of relegation doesn’t faze me, life in the Championship isn’t so bad, the football is of a lower standard, but you soon adjust : supporters watch the league they are in, pretty quickly we lose track of who is top of the Premier League. The eight extra matches is the other side of the coin, for those of us who go home and away, it’s a bit of a bonus.

Moving through the list, I’m not, myself, overly concerned about the change of club badge. Many supporters are and that is their prerogative, but we’ve seen it change over the years. It happens, many organisations have a rebranding exercise. For some it works, for others it doesn’t. It’s when it moves from a simple rebranding exercise that is no more than a logo change to a fundamental change in what is on offer that I object to.

New Coke didn’t fail because it was a bad product, it failed because there was nothing wrong with the old one as far as the people who bought it were concerned. Telling those people that what they wanted wasn’t what they had enjoyed for decades was too hard a sell for one of the world’s best marketing companies, let alone West Ham United. That brings me, neatly, to the move to the London Athletics Stadium.




The relocation was Moore than just a rebranding exercise, Moore than just a badge, Moore than just a logo change. It was a complete sell out of a club's history, identity and soul. A strategic error of epic proportions and this isn’t being written as being wise after the event. This was predictable, was predicted and Baroness Brady was told in advance it would be a mistake.

It’s not a difficult concept to grasp: if you take St Pauli out of St Pauli, well, they aren’t St Pauli anymore, are they ? It’s not about geography, it’s about identity.

When Arsenal moved from Highbury to The Emirates you could measure the distance by Nigel Winterburn's first touch. It wasn’t far, it’s not as though they had moved back to south London, but the feel of that club changed. Their supporters understand the impact of changing homes and were quick out of the blocks upon their first visit to play us at the London Athletics Stadium, singing “you’re not West Ham anymore”.

It stung, because it was the truth. Then again, is there a better case of the pot calling the kettle black than the fake clock end at their new home?

It’s about grasping nobody wanted New Coke in the first place other than some idiot in the Marketing department. It’s about understanding the people who were actually buying what you were selling quite enjoyed what they had been buying, forever, which is why they bought it.

Pepsi had been available for years, but if you drank one Cola drink, that was your preference. If you went somewhere that offered the alternative well, you night have drank it, but always with a feeling of knowing it was a substitute for what you really wanted and, frankly New Coke may just as well have been called Pepsi. Nobody believed it was Coke anymore.

Now, let’s give the Baroness the benefit of the doubt and assume she had in fact grasped these basics but weighed up the pros and cons – and I use that second word deliberately - and decided the move simply had to happen for the club to “grow”. Growing a business is difficult, especially a niche business which, if we accept the concept of a football club representing the community in which it is located, most certainly is.




It’s hard because by growing there is a very real risk you grow in such a way that you lose what defined you in the first place. You end up compromising on your original success chasing new “customers” which causes your traditional base to drift away. It’s referred to as the Growth trap in all the text books. Can football clubs genuinely grow beyond their local community, and should they even try to ? I have my doubts.

If however we take that desire for growth as justification for the move, it is the ground upon which Baroness Brady's record should face the greatest scrutiny And I mean the ground. The London Athletics Stadium is just that. It’s an athletics stadium, not a football stadium and worse still, we don’t even own it. That means we cannot substantially remodel it. A beer shelf? Sure, as long as you agree to fix the holes where the screws go in when you vacate the property in 99 year's time (now only 89 years). Much more than that, sorry, no, you aren’t the only occupant.

Now, not every view from every seat is bad, but every single seat is further from the pitch than what we had at Upton Park. That’s just a fact. Seeing a brilliant pass is one thing, even at a distance, but hearing the thud of the ball being struck, or the sound of a crunching tackle enhances the pleasure. It’s like cubes of ice in your Coke. Makes a good thing better, but far too many seats at the athletics stadium are poor.

Another malfunction of the ground not being ours is the loss of control over who gains access to the stadium and how. Our own supporters positively hate the utterly pointless security pat downs that delay entrance, resulting in lengthy queues at the end of the long walk from Stratford station. It may seem like a minor gripe, but mid-winter, in the pouring rain, at the age of 80, who, really wants to do it ?

Those who are willing to suffer it then enter the home “end” only to discover the club has somehow ended up selling a load of tickets to opposition fans who spend 90 minutes goading our supporters with the obvious consequences .A decade in, and things are not improving.

The Fan Advisory Board raised these matters time and time again with the club, specifically with Baroness Brady, but she seemed either unable or unwilling to resolve them. The security pat downs are there forever and the club cannot or will not control the flow of tickets in such a way they are only used correctly. Consequently, attendances at the Athletics stadium are falling and are now below 50,000 for Premier League matches this season.

Last season's botched attempt to eliminate some concession seats, alienated another group of supporters. Many of us recall the attempt the club made under Brady's administration to conveniently forget the five-year loyalty scheme introduced when Scott Duxbury was CEO, blaming it on a lack of due diligence when they bought the club. Of course.




It’s those declining attendances that are starting to hurt and may get worse should the club make the mistake of increasing ticket prices, again, this summer. Sorry, we haven’t got Coke, we haven’t even got New Coke, what we have is Pepsi and it’s twice the price, is not a winning proposition. Especially so if you have no ice cubes to enhance it.

Fewer people attending means lower revenue and lower revenue means a smaller playing budget. It’s fairly obvious, but being so doesn’t make it any the less true. It’s the reality that the stadium that was meant to catapult the club forwards is actually what is acting as an anchor.

There is no discernible difference between West Ham United’s revenue generation and that of Brighton or Crystal Palace. The 30,000 extra seats we have don’t appear to add very much to our top line, let alone our bottom line. Brighton, on the other hand do have a long-term naming rights partner for their stadium, something we have failed to do due to ongoing, a decade in, relationship issues with our landlords. A crucial revenue stream forever delayed.

Putting aside the mistakes her boss makes in the transfer market – all clubs do – or the mistakes he makes in terms of who to put in the dugout – again, all clubs make those errors, the single biggest failure of Baroness Brady’s tenure has been the deal struck for and the decision to move to the London Athletics stadium. It simply hasn’t worked.

It may well have been - as she is oft quoted as saying - just her, in a room, by herself, with an army of lawyers and officials from the Government opposite her negotiating the deal for the stadium, but she misses the point. They may have done a bad deal for the taxpayer, but she did a worse one for West Ham United and the impact of that bad deal is starting to be felt as the effect of the Premier League financial control rules kick in.

Doing the deal with the Government, however poor a deal it turned out to be, was one thing but ultimately it was the deal she failed to do with the club's supporters that proved to be an even worse mistake. Her failure to engage in any form of legitimate consultation with regards the move has proven to be the mistake that has come back to haunt her.

The problem is, not enough of us who were happy with Coke have bought into the whole New Coke idea. Worse, we are refusing to die quickly enough and we will never be happy, due in no small part to many feeling they were sold a pup.




Many took the promises at face value and have found the reality to be so different to what was said on the tin they cannot forgive or forget and no longer bother with home games. Thousands of long-standing season ticket holders have walked away, each taking their own part of the club's identity with them. A tourist, without the emotional or community attachment is no substitute.

Instead, they flock to proper football grounds, such as Selhurst Park and Anfield, where they haven’t fallen for the nonsense that New is necessarily better. Palace are going to knock up a new stand, but stay put, much as Liverpool have done. Surrounded by rows of terraced house, street vendors, far from plush neighbourhoods, but each unmistakably located in the communities they represent.

It’s what we had, what we loved, it was the Real thing and lest we forget, three sides of the Boleyn were less than 20 years old when we demolished the stadium.

Baroness Brady took that from us and now, with zero accountability, zero self-awareness on her part in destroying the innocent pastime of thousands of people, has simply walked away. Her legacy is one of bitterness, she will be forever hated by a large section of our support. No amount of PR spin and stories being written by client journalists will wash away the stench of failure that will deservedly cling to her for the rest of her life.

Her shameless self-promotion and personal marketing may fool the terminally, intergalactically stupid or the sycophants she has surrounded herself with, but to those who have seen her work, up close and in person, she will be remembered as an individual not quite up to the job.

The day she arrived at West Ham United the club found itself skint, one place outside of the bottom three and facing the very real risk of relegation. Here we are 16 years later and we’re all of that, playing in a stadium not fit for purpose with a dwindling support. It’s a legacy, for sure, but not one to be proud of.

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