The firestation in your neighbourhood is closing down ? You have to wait ages for treatment in your local hospital because there are not enough nurses and doctors in relation to the number of patients ? The potholes in your road are getting more in number and bigger in size every single day ?
Look no further than West Ham if you need a quick fix and an easy scapegoat.
If you look through various news outlets or forums from other football clubs West Ham are very much the bad guy these days, cheating their way into a stadium for free, not paying more than a token pittance (15 million upfront plus 2.5 million rent a year), getting a pitch with goals including nets in return, stewarding and policing all for free, basically being handed Champions League football on a plate, pocketing pots full of cash in the process while the government apparently had no chance than to sign every single clause West Ham wanted just so that the OS wouldn’t become the proverbial white elephant like in so many other places which had the pleasure of hosting Olympic Games in the past.
Basically then the government has spent around 800 million Pounds to gift West Ham a stadium. Maybe the Olympic Games too were merely a clever ploy from West Ham to get a stadium on the cheap ?
The latest so called investigative piece of journalism has come from the Daily Mail who claim that internal LLDC paperwork show that the LLDC and Newham Council will only make a profit of 200.000 Pounds Sterling in 2016/17 from all activities in the OS, including West Ham playing the first half of their inaugural season there.
My first question here would be: How does internal LLDC paperwork get into the hands of Daily Mail journos and secondly, how serious can you take an estimate like that when you may know the level of costs involved at this stage, but certainly not the level of income the stadium will generate in year 1 ?
To get an idea you’d have to know how much money will come in due to naming rights.
One might say a 200.000 Pound profit in year 1 is better than a loss or a black zero, but either the naming rights income has been estimated at a very low figure, there have been lousy negotiators on behalf of the LLDC or maybe that income simply has been forgotten in the year 1 projections.
The same applies to the income from other activities. Are we really supposed to believe that in year 1 we will see an athletics event or two there in July and August, West Ham football and nothing else aprt from that ?
I do question the reliability of that 200.000 profit figure. Someone else who is doing a lot of questioning these days (some of which is quite understandable) are the petitioners from various football clubs (mind you, the supporters’ Trusts, not the club hieracrchies themselves).
They seem to think because we are talking about a public asset here ALL details of the deal need to be published immediately no matter what.
Confidentiality for commercial reasons doesn’t seem to wash with those critics. They want all the information and they want it now.
Again, I’m surprised if even the LLDC (or West Ham for that matter) had a clear idea of any exact figures in terms of income from naming rights, catering, ticketing or even subsequent income generated in the Stratford area in connection with ongoing events there.
Fact is: The withholding of information reflects badly on the business partnership between the LLDC and West Ham. Anyone who is not West Ham (and maybe even a fair number of West Ham fans) automatically expects that something fishy has to be going on, some underhand business, shady shenanigans if sections of the deal still remain redacted for the time being, without the government showing a great degree of willingness to change their stance anytime soon.
If this piece by the Daily Mail is another one or even the final straw for the petitioners to pin their hopes on it is indeed a desperate one. It is far too easy to paint those who work for the LLDC and the government in particular as incompetent know-littles who keep wasting taxpayers’ money without a second thought.
To me it still looks as if a few poor souls had to salvage something positive from a very bad situation arising from numerous bad decisions, setbacks and shortsighted actions.
West Ham overall appear to be benefitting from this bad situation, but I still refuse to believe that the guys from the LLDC would waste money on purpose just in order to help West Ham.
The conversion costs of 280 million were unncessary, at least in terms of the amount, to begin with, but why would you agree to any kind of deal that had no chance to ever recover your outlay and make you a tidy profit on top over the years ? It doesn’t make sense at all, unless you go into territory where you want to bluntly accuse individuals of exchanging money for personal gain without any care for public finances.
There is no easy solution here after all that has gone on in the last few years. One part of me simply wants to mock the rival fans and accuse them of being jealous, hypocritical and deluded. Another part of me realises that indeed it must look to the normal folk as if something unruly must have happened somewhere along the road if vital information is shrouded in secrecy. It just doesn’t look good.
My big relief here is though that the stadium conversion is nearly finished. More money has been spent, deals have been signed and we are too far gone now to make some sort of U-turn. The petitioners have found their collective voices (which are loud maybe, but not exactly plenty in number at this point) at least a year too late.
If those Charlton, Orient (and funnily enough also Man U and Chelsea) fans find a way to bring down a government, a rival football club and a multi-purpose stadium in the process it’d be one hell of a script for a film. Real life in most cases is different though.
Like one of our esteemed favorite posters on this site has so catchily phrased: This will run and run. But eventually even this race will be run.
It’ll leave behind a few winners (with West Ham hopefully being among them), but unfortunately also a lot of people losing out or ending up with egg on their faces.
Maybe this can be a useful lesson for anyone else hosting Olympic Games in future interested in keeping a legacy post games. Too many mistakes have been made with the London version. There is no reason to repeat those mistakes elsewhere ever again.