West Ham swirl in modern football’s vortex, with home a distant memory

TOM JENKINS/THE GUARDIAN; MARTIN RICKETT/PA

West Ham last played at Upton Park in 2016 

Nuno Espírito Santo has walked into a dispirited club

You can still visit Upton Park now, but it looks a little different

2 Oct 2025 - The Guardian

Jonathan Liew

Graham Potter still turned up for work on Saturday morning, even though there was no work left for him to do. A team meeting was arranged, at which Potter announced to general bewilderment that he had been sacked. Potter left. Training was delayed because nobody was available to take it. Eventually the new coach, Nuno Espírito Santo, arrived on site and hastily began preparations for the Everton game on Monday.

Perhaps it was inevitable that West Ham United’s big set-piece appointment went the same way many of their set pieces have gone this season. Consider the evidence. A bungled sacking. A fiesta of contradictory leaks and briefings. Chaotic performances on the pitch. A vacuum of leadership and direction. Catastrophic recruitment. An early relegation battle. Fans in open revolt. I don’t know. Sounds pretty West Ham to me.

In many ways Nuno is the perfect manager for the current shambles, which is not entirely a compliment. Nuno will sort out the leaky defence, inject some energy in midfield, put some points on the board, turn a diplomatic cheek to the foibles around him and extravagances above him. He will not become a face-swap meme. He will not go on Monday Night Football to point at a large television and explain what a genius he is. But what he will also not do is provide any wider sense of mission and purpose or give this restless and sick club any clearer idea of its place in the world. The protests may subside. There may even be some decent, stirring football and a tilt at Europe some day. But West Ham have had these things in the past and it has not brought peace, because what they lack is something far deeper and more existential.

What makes the identity of a football club? Place, people, history, memories, symbols, songs. West Ham should be one of the easiest sells in English football: an east London institution attracting 62,000 a week. In a league run by investment instruments, it is one of the very few in local ownership. David Sullivan grew up in Hornchurch and his late co-owner, David Gold, lived on Green Street. There is a community and a global brand, and plenty of cash. How do you get this so wrong? Perhaps the enduring paradox of West Ham is that while it has always been a club in London, it has never truly been a London club. It is an East End club, not tourist London, not establishment London, but a kind of walled fortress where everyone knew who they were because everyone knew where they were.

The London Stadium was conceived as a world-class athletics venue and perhaps the kindest thing you can say about it today is that it remains a world-class athletics venue. The shallow rake efficiently disperses the noise up the back straight. A walled fortress it is not, and can never be. It is the most visible symptom, if not the underlying cause, of modern West Ham. The stadium has secured the future of the club, but at the expense of its present. And put yourself in Sullivan’s and Gold’s shoes for a moment. You took over a club nursing nine-figure debts, competing in a rapidly overheating league populated by billionaires and nation-states. You are not men of football but men of numbers, and in this landscape all your principles are secondary to the first: you must not get relegated next May.

Everything flows from this survival instinct. This is why West Ham have a squad full of short-term fixes, assembled with no real vision or coherent idea. This is why, despite being situated in one of the richest talent seams in the sport, not a single academy player born since 2000 has become a regular Premier League starter. The potential is out there. Ezri Konsa played at Senrab up the road. Rio Ngumoha learned his football in the five-a-side cages of Newham. Ayden Heaven was in the West Ham academy until the age of 13. The under-18s won the Youth Cup a couple of years ago, and most of them are still at the club. But for reasons of opportunity or circumstance, quicker movers or richer predators, this is no longer a place where you can envisage local talent flourishing.

The money is clearly there, too. Premier League revenue, European revenue, the Declan Rice fee, sell-outs every week, the removal of many concessionary ticket categories: why is there so little evidence of West Ham’s richness where it matters? Perhaps this explains the sense of bitterness between the fans and the boardroom: a fanbase invested for life and a board that can barely see beyond the weekend.

And on some level the tale of West Ham is a parable for something larger than West Ham, something larger even than football. The feeling of loss and dislocation, communities broken up and parcelled off, the total absence of control and agency, the suspicion that your toil and your tears are making somebody else rich. And few places have endured this process as swiftly or violently as east London.

You can still visit Upton Park now, but it looks a little different these days. The old ground was broken up and sold off for housing. Ken’s Café on Green Street is now something called Bad Boyz Diner. You can buy a flat in Lyall House or Sealey Tower, stroll along Ironworks Way, sit in the Boleyn Ground memorial garden that has been landscaped in a bubble-themed design. Place, people, history, memories, symbols, songs, a 24-hour concierge and private balconies. You ask who West Ham are these days. Perhaps a better question would be where.