It will not only be fans of Tottenham looking on with interest when the architects of one of English football’s most astonishing acts of corporate brutality watch life after Daniel Levy begin with a game against rivals where most supporters are waiting for something similar to happen at their club.
The small talk should be fascinating when the owners of West Ham welcome members of the Lewis family into the directors’ box at the London Stadium on Saturday afternoon. And how was your international break? Get up to much? And just when did you decide that it was time for Daniel to step down as chair?
Perspective is a funny thing. While Spurs fans are mostly celebrating the demise of the figure widely blamed for holding them back, West Ham’s are wondering if it really would be so bad to have a chair capable of delivering a world-class stadium and the occasional season of Champions League football. Perhaps chants of “We want Levy in” will soon be heard around Stratford.
West Ham fans are fed up. Widespread disdain for David Sullivan, the largest shareholder, and the vice-chair, Karren Brady, means there will be anti-board protests before next Saturday’s home game against Crystal Palace. Mutiny is in the air. A boycott of next month’s game against Brentford has been proposed by Hammers United, a vocal fan group, and there is also the drama of West Ham’s official Fan Advisory Board going public with a recent vote of no confidence in the club’s board.
The big target is for Sullivan and Brady to step down. It is not the best look given that West Ham describe the FAB, which represents more than 25,000 supporters, as the club’s “primary mechanism for formal consultation and engagement”.
Subsequent attempts to paint Hammers fans as deluded are wide of the mark. The person who talked of a “world-class stadium with a world-class team” when West Ham left Upton Park for the London Stadium in 2016 was Brady.
That was the trade-off for moving. The reality is nobody decides to support West Ham because they want trophies. They go to be entertained, to sometimes upset a bigger team, to feel part of something. The argument from many is that has all been lost now that West Ham play in an athletics stadium. Discontent is inevitably going to rise when you find yourself watching bad football from a bad view, sometimes with away fans sitting in home areas and making no attempt to keep quiet after a goal for the visiting team.
There would not be as much anger if West Ham had not struggled so much since winning the Conference League in 2023. Nobody worried about a lack of identity during the David Moyes era. Fans can be reactive. This situation is not dissimilar to the one that flared in early 2020. Yet that was just before the onset of the Covid pandemic. Momentum came to a halt and the problem for the protesters is that West Ham were, well, good by the time stadiums were fully reopened in August 2021.
Yet there is a feeling that Moyes papered over the dysfunction. The FAB’s point that “the likes of Brighton, Bournemouth, Brentford and Crystal Palace outperform West Ham on and off the pitch” is not meant to patronise those clubs. It is not unreasonable to feel that a better structure, with new football and commercial executives prising power from Sullivan and Brady, would stop West Ham from falling behind clubs with lesser histories, smaller fanbases and smarter owners.
The recent transfer window was a mess. Another relegation battle is a distinct possibility, although it is worth stressing that much of the ill feeling can also be traced back to the club trying and failing to do away with concession tickets at the start of last season. What a waste of time. All it did was make supporters less willing to trust the board. Reports that West Ham had to sell to buy this summer were viewed suspiciously, even though it was communicated to outside intermediaries working on signings.
There is a desire for Sullivan to rethink the structures around him, to modernise and make sharper appointments, to have less sway. The 76-year-old still calls the shots – and this is where it gets tricky. The difference with Spurs is that Levy ran the day-to-day for 24 years but was never the ultimate power. Maybe supporter unrest played a part in his exit but it was the Lewis family who made the abrupt final call. At West Ham, Sullivan is both Levy and the Lewises. Nobody directs Sullivan. Barring a coup orchestrated by other shareholders the question is simply whether Sullivan ever decides to walk away.
This is how it is. Sources say that Brady, who met the FAB for talks on Thursday, is not about to resign. As it stands, one path forward is for others on the board to come together and demand change. But the fact that the Gold family put a proportion of their shares up for sale almost two years ago, without a deal being struck, suggests they are not looking to take control. Daniel Kretinsky, the Czech billionaire and owner of Royal Mail, and Tripp Smith, the US businessman, seem content to remain minority investors. There has been no public rocking of the boat. Perhaps it will all take place silently and secretly. For now, though, there is little prospect of West Ham having their own Levy moment.
