Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.
It is almost seven years since West Ham supporters marked the 25th anniversary of Bobby Moore’s death by storming onto the London Stadium pitch and creating one of the most remarkable scenes in Premier League history. Co-owners were escorted away. Mark Noble, then the club captain, threw someone to the pitch. The directors’ box was almost breached by an angry mob, some of whom were wearing flat caps.
My abiding memory of that day was of Trevor Brooking, West Ham’s other great sir, sitting in a stand surrounded by empty seats with a look of powerless horror wiped across his face. Brooking is there, wrapped in a claret-and-blue scarf in the middle of a white elephant stadium, wondering where it all went wrong.
That anger was representative of straw breaking the backs of a dozen camels, bubbling over during a home defeat to Burnley. It was a multifaceted failure. Supporters wanted to blame the players, but the manager wasn’t inspiring them.
So supporters wanted to blame the manager, but those above him kept throwing banana skins into his path.
Seven years on, what has really changed at West Ham? There is a new minority investor, Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky. But David Sullivan and Karren Brady are still there and David Gold’s 25.1 per cent ownership continues through his family trust.
The manager on that day of chaos was David Moyes, who was eventually replaced by a former Real Madrid manager who arrived with wild fanfare and then flunked. That manager was sacked just after Christmas. For Manuel Pellegrini in 2018, read Julen Lopetegui in 2024. History tends to repeat at the London Stadium.
The latest grand idea to move on from Moyes was, like the last one to do exactly the same, well-meaning but calamitously executed. Wet Ham went for a 58-year-old Spaniard who reportedly falls out with people, who failed to inspire his players and whose football hardly seemed different enough from Moyes’ to be worth the bother.
Lopetegui may have seen West Ham as a stepping stone; he quickly sank like one. Most alarming – although there was a long list – was the defensive disorganisation, the one thing Moyes truly excelled at. West Ham conceded three or more goals in eight of Lopetegui’s 20 league matches.
There is a change from 2018, of course: anger has become disengagement. That’s inevitable when the anger doesn’t actually cause any long-term shift; it is human nature to avoid wasting emotional effort. Were you feeling uncharitable, you might label that as the tagline: “West Ham – oh what’s the point?”
It is a Tuesday and I am sat in a mostly empty London Stadium an hour before kick-off. This is the night on which Graham Potter will be announced to the home supporters and several people have been tasked with generating a fervent atmosphere in a stadium where supporters tend to hang around in the bars and concourses.
DJ Lewis Jimenez – “One of our own” – is blasting out tunes that contain samples from early noughties dance anthems and thus make you feel older than your years. There is news of a light show and fire will be forcibly ejected around the pitch before kick off. These sensory overloads are unnecessary additions to many football matches, but here it especially feels like a distraction technique.
Let us sate your eyes and ears now! Forget the match! Watching the pitch is optional!
To an outsider, this latest West Ham rut is particularly baffling because they ostensibly got what they wanted.
In 2018, anger also represented unrequited hope. West Ham hadn’t won a trophy for 38 years and hadn’t finished in the top six of the top flight for almost 20. They had experienced four European campaigns in the Premier League era: elimination by Steaua Bucharest and Palermo without scoring in either tie and consecutive qualifying exits against Astra Giurgiu.
And then West Ham did finish in the top six. And then West Ham did win a European trophy. And it ultimately meant far too little outside the joyous context of those fleeting days and nights because, before long, their club proved themselves incapable of escaping their own self-inflicted destiny. Even while Moyes was dancing in Europe, West Ham were drifting domestically. Then only the drift was left.
What makes West Ham different is that this drift – which we would usually associate with passivity – combines with an eternal sense of panic. There always seems to be an emergency here, either happening or just around the corner, that leaves people at the end of their tether. That is despite West Ham never finishing less than five points above the bottom three since promotion.
It is the repetition of this combination that causes the disengagement, because it is exhausting to be a West Ham supporter. You spend half your time wondering whether answers have been found and the other half working out who to blame for finding the wrong answers or for ignoring the questions completely. Every year becomes year zero.
You cannot doubt the endeavour to fix problems, with or without competence. Money has clearly been spent here, despite never backing up one good season with another. West Ham have sold one player in their history for an initial fee of more than £25m (Declan Rice was, in fairness, sold for a lot more than £25m). They have signed 11 different players for fees of more than £25m since June 2021.
West Ham vs Fulham (Tuesday 14 January)
- Game no.: 56/92
- Miles: 262
- Cumulative miles: 9,529
- Total goals seen: 157
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: This is incredibly solipsistic, but seeing a familiar face at a Doing The 92 game is a lovely treat on a solo pilgrimage. Kat, tremendous to see you.
Many have fallen into one of two positional black holes. West Ham have spent more than £150m on central defenders in three-and-a-half years and got no better at defending; go figure. Their spending on strikers is even more infamous: how many have been signed since an unqualified success – 10? 20? 30?
That cripples all progress through its unsustainability. Ask a West Ham supporter to name the players that constitute “the makings of a team” and there will always be four or five names. Now notice the players that they don’t name. Those will largely be the same players that they did name when you asked them the same question 18 months earlier.
What we’re really talking about here, I think, is identity. It was telling that in his first interviews as the manager, Potter chose to make multiple references to West Ham as a “family club”. If that ever really meant anything tangible at all, it certainly means less than it did.
But Potter was subconsciously trying to convince – us? fans? himself? – that there is something positively special about this club in 2025. Without unlimited budgets, creating an identity is the only way you can make this club greater than the sum of its parts. You need to land upon an innate West Ham-ness and that not just be a topic for dark humour.
That identity development is badly hampered by an absence of coherent leadership. Nobody on the outside can really work out who is in charge. Is it Sullivan or Kretinsky, or does Gold’s estate still hold some sway? How much influence does Brady have? If sporting director Tim Steidten is now the guiltiest party, no longer appearing at the training ground, who allowed him to make all the calls and who appointed him? He was the future not long ago.
You see how this produces mess. A month after that day of chaos in 2018, reports suggested that plans for a director of football had been abandoned and Moyes backed (after a three-game unbeaten run). A month after that, Moyes left. Then the will-they-won’t-they with bringing Moyes back and him leaving at the end of last season. Then Lopetegui as a dead man walking for at least a fortnight while everybody – including him – heard reports of them talking to Potter. All of it: messy.
To that we must still add the London Stadium. It is now eight-and-half years since West Ham played their first match here and, sorry, it doesn’t feel like a home. That’s as much to do with what Upton Park had that this bowl lacks: tight stands, a proximity to the players, an intense atmosphere, a sense of heritage and tradition, a deep connection to a local identity.
There have been nights in here when you could see the nucleus of a meaningful attachment (particularly in European competition: Sevilla, Lyon, Freiburg, Leverkusen) but you prove this stuff more when chips are down and then this place contains vast empty spaces into which discomfort dashes and hangs thick in the air. Ultimately, the greatest event in West Ham’s stadium was Mo Farah winning a gold medal. That’s not easy to process
This identity vacuum holds up even if you go more granular: the style of the team. The entire concept of the “West Ham way” – and yes, I wanted to avoid this cliche but it’s important – is based upon a Ron Greenwood quote about supporters turning up to see good football whatever the results. Over time, though, a sense of East End grit permeated into the definition.
And so you have a club that perennially seems desperate for someone who is going to play sexy football that supporters supposedly want, yet all the while the club seems to be at its most successful when earthiness and commitment are at the surface.
These are not necessarily mutual exclusives, but look at a rough list of fan favourites over the last 30 years. You have your skillful artists (Paolo Di Canio, Dimitri Payet, Joe Cole) and you have your soldiers/athletes (Julian Dicks, Mark Noble, Scott Parker, Declan Rice). This is a club that has signed countless strikers to take them to the next level and for whom Michail Antonio is the record Premier League goalscorer because nobody has ever fully pushed his qualities aside.
And, so, there is just something so definitively West Ham about all this, a constant struggle to work out what the club should be and who should lead it, arguments about arguments. Perhaps it inadvertently provides the answer. Discombobulation about identity is the identity.
I don’t know if Potter is the answer to any or all of this. You don’t know if Potter is the answer to any or all of this. West Ham don’t know if Potter is the answer to any or all of this. I’m not even convinced that they know what he is: team builder, fire fighter, project manager or just the best coach who would sign up for whatever this requires?
At football clubs in rude health, the adage is that the system defines the manager; if the manager leaves the system stays true. At West Ham, the managers lurch – Allardyce to Bilic to Moyes to Pellegrini to Moyes to Lopetegui to Potter – because the system itself has no obvious blueprint or tangibility. Instead, a football club with vast opportunity chases its own tail and desperately rushes to stop everything tumbling into a black hole. It’s no way to live.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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