HamburgHammer wrote:It's a long way now for Orient to reach the Championship level. It may take them anything between 5-10 years, if it happens at all. At that stage we should be well established in the OS and the stadium will be very much associated as the home of West Ham.
New football fans don't grow on trees. Even if Orient made it into the Championship the best thing they might look forward to is selling out Brisbane Road on a regular basis. Their hardcore fanbase is around 5.000 people.
It'll be incredibly difficult for them to raise that figure to even 20.000 in the Championship.
Orient never had a big fanbase, so even while being based in London I think you cannot call them a sleeping giant. There is too much competition in and around London and their initial fanbase is too small to begin with.
They have made a good start to the season and may well get promoted back to League One at the first time of asking. But even then it'll be very hard to make another step up.
In theory, Orient could be in the Championship in August 2017. They have started this season looking like they mean to be promoted straight back to Division 1. They came within a whisker of being promoted to the Championship two seasons ago. All it takes is a new owner willing to splash some cash and a competent manager. As soon as they stumble across that combination, they'll be in the Championship. And then the fun will begin.
I do think that football fans grow on trees. In this generation, there are more domestic and international migrants in London than ever before. London's indigenous population has never been lower as a percentage, and its overall population has never been higher. And the big growth area now and in the medium term will be in and around east London. It's not like in the 1980s when the country had 10,000 net inward migration per year. These days the country has 300,000 net inward migration per year. You couldn't ask for riper conditions to win a new fanbase. Orient's big complaint about the Olympic Stadium was that West Ham would undercut them on price and steal their current and potential fans. Can you imagine what Orient would price tickets at in the Olympic Stadium? They would be handing out 50,000 tickets for £5 a game. It would still be Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Spurs turning up to Orient games, and with tv money Orient would be putting out a team as strong as anything Swansea or Southampton can do. It's Premier League football. At £5 a ticket it won't matter to the people pouring through the turnstiles whether the home team is wrapped in a claret and blue home shirt or a red one.
Since Hearn has gone and Orient have been relegated, it's very easy to assume, as a fan and for those on the club's board, that the issue is dead, buried, gone away forever. But I think it's just dormant. Someone will come along and clock the opportunity and do enough to get Orient into the Championship, and then they are just forty-six matches from getting £100m+ a year tv money. At that point, the first signing I would make if I were the Orient chairman wouldn't be a £10m winger or a £15m striker. They would be my second and third signings. My first signature would come in the shape of £3m and it would go at the bottom of a letter to Vinci proposing to pay them double what West Ham pay for use of the Olympic Stadium.
At that point, economically, politically, in the media, in popular opinion, the issue is very much back on the table. And all that then stands between Orient and moving in on West Ham's future is their ability to demonstrate a season or two of consolidating themselves in the Premier League like Swansea have, and the reluctance of people in government to lean on West Ham to capitulate whether by threat or bribe or a combination of the two.
I hope that someone makes sure that Sullivan, Brady and Gold are not complacent about Orient, and that they have a strategy to ensure that this scenario never gets going. The two best things they can do in the short term are get a rugby club signed up for the alternate week (ideally a West Ham branded rugby club) and without delay start a project to get the seats fully claret and blue, block by block, over a number of seasons. Who cares if Vinci and the LLDC moan that we are just one of multiple tenants when we go to them with our demands? If we keep bugging them about fan discontentment they'll give in eventually.
What the club must not do is get used to playing the "We're only tenants" card whenever fans demand something of them. It's understandable, say, when it comes to this busy construction period, but that is the exact ethos that will open the door to Orient.