As West Ham United move in the Olympic Stadium this summer, the club is beginning to transform into something new. A new badge – with which we bid farewell to the iconic Boleyn Castle on our chests; a farewell to historic West Ham fan traditions, such as Nathan’s Pie Mash & Eels and various pubs around the ground (most notably the beautiful Boleyn Pub) and a vibrant Green Street on Saturday afternoons.
Though the club desperately trying to hang on to their history as a working class football club (i.e, by outlining a blueprint for the new badge with an explanation, it’s designing philosophy and placing the John Lyall gates in the new club store), it will never feel as it were at The Boleyn. It’s okay that not every tradition can exist forever, despite our best wishes. New traditions emerge as old ones die, and soon enough we’ll smile at the old memories and enjoy the new ones as well.
Despite the club’s best intentions of holding onto the West Ham culture, alongside it follows a marketing plan that is perhaps interesting to global investors but is not the thing a football fan wants to be associated with. Their attempts at creating a hype and excitement along the way are the perfect example of misjudging their audience.
BOND: All day we've been asking for your Hammers #BondXI to mark the release of the new James Bond film #Spectre! pic.twitter.com/DY7szPY1Eq
— West Ham United (@WestHam) October 26, 2015
As a football fan, you carry a pride for the club you support. You have cheered, laughed, cried for your club. All possible emotions have run through your body, just for this club. And then the media team sends out the above tweet. A football club is like your wife: you’ll love her forever, but hell, isn’t it hard sometimes? And the media team doesn’t make it any easier.
Last weekend’s home kit presentation was on the top of it. The idea was to create a hype by signing a prolific striker and then present him with the new home kit on. On the other hand, we could’ve known that this idea was to be a failure. In the age of digital communication, football fans known of a signing far before it is even done. (For example, @WestHamFanTv spotted Gokhan Töre two days before the announcement was tweeted. Three days after that Töre was announced.) If a new player is about to join the club, fans would’ve know already. Creating a hype and excitement should be done on the pitch, not outside of it.
Like who I saw outside the Boleyn….. #welcomeTore pic.twitter.com/gDlRoFJnXs
— West Ham Fan TV (@westhamfantv) July 8, 2016
Besides that, the execution of the whole event was a disaster. How about the freestyle footballer that gave a show on the kit launch, to attempt to create even more unnecessary (and eventually futile) hype when it has nothing to do with West Ham? Or the annoying display of freshly generated hashtags by the media team?
The worst part was the poor attempt at a ‘comedic’ rap about suits on a skinny guy, which was about as funny as the Battle of the Bulge, which was not humorous in any sense. When the first chords of America’s worst post-90’s hip-hop product his “Yeah” started rolling, all of ours heads went in unison:
I don’t blame the kid, he did his best. Perhaps it could’ve been funny if the timing was right, but it was not, not for me anyway and not for those watching at home. It is the club that forgets the principle I just laid out over again, and that a football audience isn’t the right public for artistic expressions which haven’t been proven to work, that should have been done in a comedy club. As these poor marketing plans continue to be executed, the club indulges itself into a state of public target of ridicule.
So therefore I raise the question: Can we start being a football club again?
