Blind Hammer looks at Sam Allardyce Claim that Sunderland are a bigger club than West Ham.
Allardyce’s recent claim that Sunderland is a bigger club than West ham seems to come out of left field. Why he would need to make such a statement is puzzling. He could easily have diplomatically said that both West Ham and Sunderland have great tradition and support. Perhaps he still harbours resentment towards our club and its supporters. More likely it was probably an insecure Sunderland supporting Journalist trying to desperately scrape together the meagre reasons for current pride in their club. Given that Allardyce has raised it, though, we should perhaps look at whether there is any substance to his claim.
There is no doubt that in advance of the move to the Olympic Stadium that Sunderland’s Stadium of Light is a bigger stadium than Upton Park. The figures are approximately 49,000 at the Stadium of Light as opposed to the 35,000 at Upton Park.
The average attendance at Sunderland is also higher, at 42,000 as opposed to West Ham’s 34,700. However the striking aspect relating to these figures is that Sunderland, on average, fail to sell 7,000 tickets for every home game whilst West Ham consistently completely sell out their home ticket allocation for every single Premier League game.
In many ways looking at Stadium capacity is misleading. Chelsea’s current 41,000 capacities is much smaller than the current Sunderland maximum but can we really say that Sunderland is a bigger club than Chelsea? It may be a more accurate measure if we look at ticket demand.
Exact figures for Season ticket holders at Sunderland are not immediately obvious from a Google search but on Fans Forums there seem a consistent belief that Sunderland has approximately 28,000 season ticket holders. West Ham, from reports I have seen, have currently a smaller core of just over 26,000 season ticket holders at Upton Park. So currently Sunderland appears to have a slightly greater number of season ticket holders. However this is a surprisingly small number when compared to their capacity.
Allardyce made a claim for the passion of Sunderland supporters compared to the West Ham support. Yet in terms of passion for their club the demand for tickets amongst supporters at West Ham appears far greater than that at Sunderland. Not only does our stadium consistently sell out, whilst the Stadium of Light rarely does, the current 26,000 season tickets is a far greater proportion of our current capacity compare to the Sunderland ratio of 28,000 to 49,000. When we were looking at an OS Capacity of 54,000 at the OS, broadly similar to Sunderland’s current 49,000 capacities we had already sold well in excess of 40,000 season tickets.
In the expanded OS of 60,000 or even 66,000 we will have something approaching 50,000 season ticket holders, dwarfing Sunderland’s current season ticket support by over 80%.
A second aspect to Allardyce’s claim is that Sunderland are the sole club for a major city. The size and dominance of Sunderland support in this area provides a passionate core to their club. According to the 2011 Census Sunderland has a population of 275,300. However according to Wikipedia Sunderland’s population is dwarfed by the population of just the local borough of Newham, at 324,322. Now it would be farcical to claim that West Ham’s support simply comes from Newham, I live in the adjoining borough of Waltham Forest and our support extends across London, Essex and beyond, but even looking at local area there will be a bigger core. Sunderland will also have a hinterland of support by but making an argument based on passion amongst a large local population seems extremely difficult for Allardyce to maintain.
So let’s look at finances. In 2014-2015 West Ham had a turnover 10th highest, in the Premier League at £115m. Sunderland was 12th highest behind West Ham at £104 million.
Interestingly, despite West Ham’s much smaller Upton Park, our match receipts exceeded Sunderland at £19m compared to Sunderland’s £16m. Clearly West Ham tickets are more expensive than Sunderland’s but this reinforces the view that there is greater demand despite our current smaller capacity.
West Ham’s share of TV revenues is also greater than Sunderland, £75m as opposed to £71m. In fact if you go through the money stats West Ham consistently outperform Sunderland. For example retail and commercial figures are only £1m at Sunderland, again dwarfed by West Ham’s figure of £6m.
You can check the figures on the Guardian website here.
Where Sunderland appears, on the face of it, to have the edge over West Ham is in the number of trophies they have won. West Ham has never won the top division but Sunderland have achieved this 6 times. However historical context is everything here. Five of Sunderland’s titles were achieved before the First World War, and their last successful title challenge was in 1936. So Sunderland’s title successes are largely beyond living memory.
Since the Second World War, Sunderland has only won one major trophy. The FA Cup in 1973. In the same period West Ham have won the FA Cup in 1964, 1975, and 1980. They also won the European Cup Winner Cup in 1965.
So whilst both Sunderland and West Ham have endured Trophy Drought in the last 30 years, largely caused by structural dominance by Champions League clubs, West Ham have arguably the better, more recent success.
So in whatever way you look at it, even in our current stadium, Allardyce’s claim simply does not stack up. I genuinely wish the bloke well, as he did a critical job rescuing us from the Championship and establishing us back in the Premier League. However his consistent sour grapes grumbles from afar are testing my patience with him and diminishing what should have been a respectable West Ham legacy.
COYI
David Griffith
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Stadium h
Looking at the so called “size of clubs” is not an exact science. There are a number of factors to take account of.
If you look at trophies