LONDON STADIUM — An emotional chorus of “Forever Blowing Bubbles” met the end of West Ham United’s 15-year stay in the Premier League. It was both a demonstration of attachment deeply felt and a measure of the growing separation between terrace and boardroom.
The message was clear. This is our club, not yours David Sullivan. You brought us to this end, to this concrete wasteland of a stadium nobody wanted, a fitting setting for a club that has lost its centre. Your accomplice Karren Brady has gone. Now it’s your turn. Get out.
Should Sullivan have been in any doubt about the sentiment among fans, the scale of the ill feeling toward him was made plain when the second goal went in. The celebration of Jarrod Bowen’s sharply taken chance quickly turned to scorn as supporters chanted their hostility to the diminutive baron in the posh seats.
The ownership bears responsibility for relegation but none of the emotional weight. That falls entirely on the supporters, the only cohort at West Ham that really cares. West Ham is part of their identity, worn with pride on the crests of their shirts, an attachment passed down through the generations like a family heirloom.
In they filed from all corners, one young woman travelling solo from Port Talbot in Wales, standing quietly at the station, identifiable as a Hammer by the club crest. If you didn’t know football you would have thought her top an odd choice for a hot day. As the train journeyed towards the centre of her universe, it picked up fellow travellers, all connected by the same emotional tissue, hoping for the best, fearing the worst.
