Off Topic The Sullivan & Gold Comedy Corner

I feel as if Nemesis is saying :

The longer the Spanners stay at the TPA (TM)
with the D1ldo bros as owners, the longer I
will ensure that Spurs current on-pitch and
financial progression continues at its present
trajectory.

 

Regardless of who sources and ultimately pays for the stewarding, the responsibility for identifying the NEED and the level of threat for any specific match must fall on the club in the first 8nstance. West Ham knew that there would be protests and demonstrations at the ground - and that some of the protesters were linked to Far Right Hooligan elements.
If the club didn’t flag that to the Police and Stadium owners then they should be held culpable 100%.

It’s not as if they haven’t had ground trouble in the recent past.......

 

The main defence that gets used time and again is that it's Newham Council and not the club that provide stewarding, so West Scam can't be held responsible.

Bollocks.

It was unearthed during the tendering process that the third party company that West Scam are leasing the White Elephant from was founded by employees of both Newham Council and...errm... West Scam United FC, which means approximately 50% of the responsibility for hiring stewards comes right back to the club, and more than anything else the club knew what they were getting into when signing the contracts when taking over the stadium and they could have very easily raised concerns during that process but instead greedily lunged for the keys.

Sullivan's said that moving into the White Elephant has improved West Scam's finances by £10m a year. Considering the numerous costs they're avoiding by palming them off onto the local taxpayer, that's pathetic.

Think of it this way: the average price for a Category B adult ticket at the White Elephant is £45, while an under 16 ticket averages at £27. If we were to assume a full capacity of 57,000 and say 2/3 of the tickets sold were for adults and 1/3 were under 16, the matchday revenue would work out at £2,223,000 in ticket revenue per match or, to look at it another way, £42,237,000 per season from league games.

If we applied those same ticket prices to Upton Park with its capacity of 35,000, they would have had a matchday ticket revenue of £1,364,922 per game or £25,933,518 per season from league games.

Has anyone noticed how those figures don't add up?

The overheads of running the White Elephant are much lower than at Upton Park considering the club has subcontracted out such things as stewarding or police (among many, many other things they're not paying for but we are) while, at least on paper, they should be making an additional £20m in ticket revenue - so how they are only £10m better off per season when the increased ticket revenue and reduced costs asks a lot of questions.

 

Their wage bill is allegedly the 7th highest
in the PL, even though their average league
position is well below that.

http://www.transferleague.co.uk/west-ham/english-football-teams/west-ham-transfers

Their annual net transfer spend this decade
has also been going up steadily.

I suspect these alone are probably the reason
they are only a puny 10m pa better off
(anyone feel free to correct me by looking at
their financial reports for the usual things -
directors taking big salaries/dividends, loan
repayments etc) .

 

I've seen mention (albeit by a couple of their fans on r/soccer) that a certain amount of that figure can also be explained with the following image...

please log in to view this image

 

That loan stuff, if true, is disgusting.

Their owners would be making each year
in interest what Levy has been paying himself
since the NDP work really ramped up.

 

If this were to happen, then what happens to people that have already paid for tickets? Do they get their money back?
What about away fans that might have already planned journeys and even booked accommodation?

 

I'm patiently expecting a 2% increase on my council tax bill.

 

West Ham will be given a fine...cos obviously the £115000 fine they received for the violence against Millwall (2009) meant that there was no repeat...apart from against Man Utd having their bus windows smashed up and crowd trouble (including fighting with the police) in 2016...and apart from violence in the stands in their EL qualification matches in 2017. ..and apart from the crowd violence v Watford in 2017... oh and Chelsea in 2017... so as it is a one of freak occurrence a small fine should suffice.

 

With the general lack of atmosphere, but the absence of vitriolic abuse, the main beneficiary of that would be WHU!

They will again walk away intact from a disaster of their own-making and others will foot the bill.

 

Spanner TV just been on BBC London news.
Increased costs of 50K per game for
stewards/police per game at the TPA (TM) .

If you don't wanna know who is paying
for that, look away now (Brian) ...

 

There should be rival protests outside the ground because of this: one by West Scam fans against their owners and their Inter-City Firm cronies, the other by the London taxpayer sick of footing the bill for this bullshit.

 

It would seem that having made a pact with the ICF, that failed to deliver obedience, the Spammers board are now wanting police protection from the people that weren't in on the 'deal'. That's what happens when you disenfranchise people, you get civil disobedience, you stupid bastards...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/43380242

One of the myriad problems with that stadium is that it's ****ing enormous. The perimeter of the running track has a circumference about the same size as the MCG. To get enough police/stewards into that place to keep the revolting ones away, will cost a King's ransom and will still be likely to fail. Brian is NOT happy and will not be happy until we build a wicker man in the centre circle, put Boris, Lord Coe, Brady, Sullivan, Gold, et al in it and dance round it as it burns, whooping and hollering.

 

Now that's an out of season event I would pay good money to watch

 

So I cribbed this from r/soccer, and it has quite a lot of detail that the BBC et al are only too happy to omit from their reports (credit to sonofaBilic)

Alright fellas.

Following on from all of the dramas that transpired at the London Stadium last Saturday I’ve seen plenty of questions asked around here about what exactly it is that has the West Ham faithful wound up tighter than a two quid watch, so I was hoping to use this opportunity to air a few of our grievances and let you decide whether you think we are overly entitled mugs or whether our concern for the direction our club is heading is well founded.

Transfer Dealings: How to make enemies and influence your reputation.

Now there’s been plenty of complaints about the transfer business we’ve conducted and these complaints are routinely met with comments akin to “you’ve broken your transfer record in the last two Summer windows”, which is an absolute fact – we have done. Under the Gold, Sullivan & Brady regime we’ve seen our record outlay increase from £10m for Craig Bellamy to £22m for Marko Arnautovic. Hell, the sole reason we returned to the Premier League was because we hurled money at the problem, signing more or less any player in the league who’d scored 10 goals.

That’s not necessarily the issue here though, the big complaint you’ll find from most Hammers is more about how this business is conducted, and just how fractured it’s left our squad.

I know you’ve all seen the transfer stories that crop up every transfer window, those lovely one’s where tinpot little West Ham have submitted a derisory bid for a player such as Arter, Defoe, Dembele,, Snodgrass, or Dendoncker – well this has essentially become the raison d'etre for the transfer business we conduct. The incentive for our chief negotiators, which Sullivan has admitted he plays a central part in, is clearly to submit a bid and try to unsettle the player and get them to force a move by leaking it to his trusted sources in the mainstream media like the Sun – a rag that both our chairman’s son Jack Sullivan, and co-chairwoman Karren Brady (more on your column later you slug) happen to have written regular columns for.

We saw this last winter when Snodgrass attempted to force a move, we saw it in the Summer when Carvalho tried to force a move, and this winter when Dendoncker tried to force a move. Now obviously not everyone has an affection for Only Fools and Horses, so this dodgy whealin’ and dealin’ has in some cases gone down like a lead balloon, as evidenced just this past January when Kuban Krasnodar and their number 1 geezer up front Fedor Smolov refused to deal with us, stating:

“I have spent two and a half years in Krasnodar, and I think that the club has the right to receive a decent compensation for my transfer. When I realised that this might not happen, I asked the club and agents to stop any negotiations on this topic.”

Meaning the Russian club have joined the ranks of Anderlecht, Leicester, Sporting CP and Tottenham in refusing to deal with us. Now surely that is an untenable situation. The board are willing to drag the name of the club through the dirt, ruining any sort of mutual respect that should exist between clubs as businesses all in an effort to penny pinch and save a few bob in an era where we were promised "World Class players in a World Class Stadium".

I’m sure you’ve all seen it already, but you seriously need to look at the leaked “transfer negotiations” conducted by David Sullivan in our efforts to sign William Carvalho -

“We wish to conclude this asap or we’ll be borrowing aplayer from PSG”

Embarrassing.

What happens when our derisory transfer tactics actually work out and we actually bring players in? Well that won’t stop the powers that be from throwing you under the bus either – as Marouane “Not My Pick” Chamakh, or “My kids begged me not to sign” Snodgrass and Fonte will testify. Not to mention using the signings as a platform to disrupt players already at the team as, such as Adrian or Andy Carroll. In January we shipped out Andre Ayew to relegation rivals Swansea, Jose Fonte to Dalian Yifang and Diafra Sakho to Rennes after all three refused to feature for us any more, all a bit reminiscent of a certain chubby French Mohawk merchant currently sunning it up in Marseille. Maybe they're all drama queens, but surely this being such a regular occurrence can't be representative of a harmonious changing room.

Top all this off with January’s developments when emails were leaked our highlighting that Tony Henry, director of player recruitment – something we’ve already identified that Sulli likes to stick his oar in to – had told agents that we “don’t want any more African’s”. Asked whether this was club policy he initially replied “no”, only to then change his answer. “Yeah, because we had three and we felt we didn’t particularly want any more African players”. Henry was sacked, Sullivan denied any connection, but given how hands on he likes to be and with his penchant for leaking stories it's hard for many of us to take his word for it.

World Class players at a World Class Stadium we were told. While the was little illusion that we’re suddenly going to be competing with Man City and Barcelona in the transfer market, we were told our move to a new ground would spark a much more ambitious way of handling ourselves in the transfer market, and how have we ended up looking to our peers? Tinpot.

The London Stadium and our legacy

Now I’ve seen plenty of people look back at our final season at the Boleyn Ground and say “you were all excited about the move” as if we were eager to be the first ones knocking down the John Lyall gates and lead the charge to the promised land of Stratford International, but what you need to understand are the absolute raft of porky pies we were sold in the build up to the move to this "World Class Stadium" that lead to the tentative excitement from the fanbase.

“There is no way that we can go to the Olympic Stadium unless our seats are in a similar distance to what they are now”

David Gold was quoted saying while stood pitch side at the Boleyn. The distance between the fans and the pitch at the London Stadium was about 4 miles, but don’t worry – it was all under control. In reality, it was only the result of Tottenham and Leyton Orients refusal to accept the initial bidding process that allowed the option for retractable seating to be installed, so if it had all gone to plan then we would have been even further from the pitch then we currently are. So what we've been given here is a bare faced lie.

Sticking with Gold, last week he was interview on Phoenix FM radio and he claimed that the ills of the stadium are down to athletics, and if athletics were no longer at the ground then everything would be hunky dory. Which is a bizarre statement to make given that you and your business partners have agreed to rent an athletics stadium, under the proviso that it would remain an athletics stadium appropriated to sublet as a football ground.

We were repeatedly told the redevelopment of the Boleyn Ground was impossible. The erection of a new East Stand would restrict natural lighting for the flats behind the ground, so the fact that new apartment blocks are being built there that will tower over the height of the proposed East Stand now seems a bit odd. We were told that the old bus depot behind the ground would restrict growth, so the bus depot going bust and getting sold off for peanuts also seems a bit odd. It was the only option way we could grow, we were told. The fact that the Double D’s launched their first presser after purchasing us with their intentions to move in to the Olympic Stadium seems to suggest that they’d not even looked in to the option of staying put on Green Street, instead they’d seen the huge money making opportunity available in acquiring a stadium funded by someone else. Almost as if they’d tried it on before at Birmingham City.

Despite all this, we were actually able to post record £43m profit for the 16/17 season so perhaps the move is the perfect money spinner the club needed – ah no wait we would’ve posted the same at the Boleyn. Why is the stadium so good David Gold was asked in his interview, “because we get 60,000 turning up each week” was the best he could give when any mug watching the tele, seeing those clear white seats peer right back at you, could tell you that he’s sat counting the ticket revenue and paying no mind to bums on seats.

The "World Class Stadium" is not a football ground, anyone who has been there can tell you that. We’ve been told we can’t change the seats from white to claret, we can’t ditch the green felt surrounding the pitch, there’s a good chance we will never be able to play at home on boxing day because the Metropolitan Police won’t let us, and as was clearly evidenced on Saturday we cannot ensure the security of players and families inside the stadium. World Class players at a World Class Stadium. Imagine fleecing the tax payer for that soulless bowl.

The legacy of the Boleyn Ground isn’t the only part of our legacy that Sullivan and Gold have tarnished, mind. Perhaps one of the most important figures of our recent history is a chap named Tony Carr. His is a name that those outside of the Hammers fan base may not have heard of, but you will certainly witnessed the fruits of his labour – as the director of our academy Carr helped nurture talents like Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard, Joe Cole, Michael Carrick, Jermaine Defoe, Glenn Johnson and Mark Noble, and after 43 years of service the board ran down his ambassadorial contract and made him redundant.

“The way it was done with people from HR, who have been here hardly any time at all, was particularly disrespectful in my opinion but that’s the way of the world these days.”

The club legend was quoted as saying following his departure. Other club legends like Billy Bonds and Frank McAvennie had the nerve to question whether the ground fit for purpose as football stadium. They haven’t been invited back since.

Right then, how about that Badge Change – now we’re not exactly averse to a badge change, lord knows we’ve had a few in our history, the big issue for most fans (aside from the obvious ms paint looking unveiling) is the forcing of the word “London” in to it. There’s 16 badges on that picture I just linked, how many of them have London in them? We’re not West Ham London. We’re West Ham. This is the most blatant attempt at commercialising our identity since Baroness Brady proposed that we change our name to West Ham Olympic.

We’ve lost our home, our legends and our identity to this mob who continue to spout tone death nonsense about their plans to elevate us to the elite.

A Nightmare on PR tweet.

Getting wound up writing all this now, so I’m just gonna throw an assortment of examples of how poorly the board and their relations represent us as a club:

• West Ham have just been humiliated and dumped out of the Europa League by Astra Giurgiu, but no dramas ‘cause Chairman’s son Dave Sullivan Jr. got his end away
• Don’t worry taxpayers and West Ham fans alike, Karren Brady thinks the stadium is a brilliant deal for all involved – if anything, we should be congratulating her
• Thumped 3-0 by Arsenal? No worries there, at least Brady got to enjoy a cheese board
• Chairman’s son no.2 Jack Sullivan canvasses the fans to find out how we’d feel about signing a former gang rapist
• “Don’t go to bed. dg”
• Announcement that Sam Allardyce is gone while he’s still giving his post-match presser
• Remember I mentioned Brady's column in the Sun earlier? Well it turns out slagging off other club owners in your column can have ramifications, eh Karren?
• David Sullivan features his B-Movie knock off “Rise of the Krays” on the club’s news section, suspicious reviews of the film appear elsewhere online by totally unconnected industry titans like as davesullivan-01061 and davidsullivansoffice
• David Sullivan insists that we snubbed Inheanacho, Sanches and Krychowiak after missing out on all three. Then manager (WARNING: Daily Mail link) Bilic doesn’t quite agree with that series of events.
• Nothing says keeping politics out of football quite like a £12.5k donation to the Conservative party under the clubs name.
• West Ham are subjected to “very serious” investigations by the HMRC
• And a nice fresh example of the shambles we are behind the scenes, West Ham are fined £30,000 over anti-doping breach

Individually, we might be able to write these indictments off as a bit of a PR slip up - but realistically these, and many other occasions of the club being used as a platform form the egomaniacal cronies in charge are symptomatic of the fairground funhouse we have become.

I could go on and on here, but the point i'm trying to get out here is simply how alienated many Hammers fans now feel from the club they love. I know there have been posts on here detailing the absolute state of the march that had been arranged for last Saturday, and why it is that West Ham fans had wanted to march. Well that march didn't go ahead amid rumours of the board buying off the extreme right wing fan group claiming to represent all fans, so again countless fans felt that their voices aren't being heard because of the absolute circus they are trying to speak to.

What I want to pick up on here though is that not once have I bemoaned our lack of a champions league push, or the second relegation battle on the trot. We’re West Ham. We’re ****. Our club song literally says “fortunes always hiding” so you’re not surprising anyone when you try to remind West Ham fans that we’ve never been one of the big boys. We never had a raft of trophies or a rich European heritage to hold on to, but what we did have was our identity and that is being stripped away by David Sullivan, David Gold and Karren Brady and for what?

We are little more than a vanity project for them, and for all the fed up fans who vented their fury on Saturday afternoon – I may not necessarily agree with throwing coins or harassing players, but I certainly agree with why they did it.

 

If I could give this a million "likes", then I would.

 

I think PISKIE has a few sockpuppet accounts he can loan you...

 

They were a shambles at Birmingham and continued to be a shambles at West Ham. I wonder who they'll **** up next?

 

Sunderland fans are suddenly hoping they drop into League One.