bondsbootlaces wrote:
In answer to your original question, in a purpose built home, in the most successful period of time for a club I would expect to pay more. Had Spurs been middle table at best for the past 10 years, A) would they have moved? B) would they have charged those prices?
I don't think they would do either of those.
I don’t think Levy would’ve built the new stadium if the demand wasn’t there. When he took over at Spurs from Sugar, the first thing that he did was can Sugar’s plans to redevelop the East Stand (there were plans to build an 18,000 capacity stand there that would’ve taken WHL to 44,000). He always said that the plan (in order) was:
1. Build a World class training facility
2. Build a team that could challenge at the top of the PL
3. Build a new stadium, fit for that team.
I think he was always clear that item 2 couldn’t happen until 1 did and item 3 would not be needed without 2.
aaronhammer wrote:Well they’ve started that by making it not affordable! Cheapest junior ticket is £397.50, and I would guess quite limited based on the small sections they’re located. The majority bringing kids will have to pay £90-£100 even more! A half decent adult ticket starts at £975 (cheapest being £795 in the small family section).
I don’t doubt they will sell the required number, why wouldn’t they when they’re doing as well as they are (even though trophy-less). However will they keep kids interested as parents can’t afford to take them to football? If they fail to build on where they are, will they keep the likes of Kane there - especially when they don’t pay top rate wages (unless with these increased prices they decide to).
I could see this backfiring very quickly if it goes wrong for them, though it could cement them as one of England’s top clubs if they get it right on the pitch.
For all my hatred of GSB, I will credit them on the pricing of tickets at the London Stadium. They’re affordable and also have room to grow massively over time - but until they sort the ‘experience’ at and around the stadium and what happens on the pitch out, they can’t increase them, and we will watch Tottenham go light years ahead of us.
You're living in the past .... 20 quid a week is not a big deal for millions in London and the South ....
Spurs are charging 1,000 quid for a season ticket, 1,000 quid to watch a top six side with first call on CL/EL and Domestic Cup tickets ... that's roughly what Arsenal fans pay and what Chelsea fans pay, and neither of those clubs have any problem selling season tickets. Spurs have a 52,000 waiting list (allegedly) they will sell out no problem ...
At the end of the day it's 20 quid a week. Would you pay that to have an 800m football stadium, a top six squad, have the option to watch CL football? feckin' sure I would ......
Don't kid yourself GSB priced our tickets as they did because it's the only way they could sell them ... no increase next year pretty much proves that .... the 'Souless Bowl' versus the 'emptycrates' or Spuds new gaff ... are you kidding ....
and most importantly they've played Real Madrid, Dortmund, Juventus this season ... and held there own .... whereas we've won just five times at home .... what happens on the pitch matters (not that our owners think that) I'd happily pay 900 quid to see us challenge at the top, rather than give away 500 quid knowing that the best I can expect is to avoid relegation ....
From today's Times, an astonishingly accurate piece from a highly unlikely source:
West Ham United fans deserve a stadium fit for football
henry winter, chief football writer
There’s no place like home and the London Stadium is no place like home. Just look at the name: West Ham United are proud East End, not tourist-board “London” shoehorned into the crest to help day-trippers. Just look at the ground’s configuration: designed for happy-clappy athletic meetings, not the passion play that is football.
Just listen to the West Ham fans, the sensible majority, not the few hundred shamefully sending scared kids running for sanctuary in the away dugout, or coin-throwing cowards forfeiting the right to debate, but the proper West Ham faithful frustrated by a stadium patently not fit for football purpose, as well as their obvious disconnect with the board.
A deserved game behind closed doors might make the owners think of their own mistakes. The chaos engulfing a famous old club and an unloved rented residence is what happens when boards put egos before supporters.
Just look at what Juventus did when they constructed their atmospheric new home: they appointed an architect in Gino Zavanella who understood the tifosi, who throughout his career working on arenas promised to put “the fan at the centre of a stadium project” and guaranteed proximity to the pitch, which he delivered fully in Turin. Fans at the centre.
Just listen to what the distinguished Basle-based architects Herzog & de Meuron pitched in its successful design for Bayern Munich’s splendid Allianz Arena: “As in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, spectators sit right next to where the action takes place . . . each of the three tiers is as close as possible to the playing field.” Fans next to the action. These draughtsmen had an emotional contract with supporters and actually cared to think of their match-going experience, their sightlines and what constitutes their home. These architects were guided by the premise forgotten by too many of those in charge that football without fans is nothing.
Fans’ match-day needs and logistics were scandalously low on priorities of the ill-fated Stratford project as the awkward conversion from athletics to football was made. It was always going to be an emotional wrench when West Ham vacated Upton Park; all those
match-day routines gone, all those associations with famous moments severed.
Now they are in limbo and it hurts. Many did accept the need to move for modern, commercial reasons, and they were sold a dream by the board who then did not confront the configurational inadequacies of the Olympic stadium. West Ham fans were also deceived by politicians, such as Boris Johnson, juggling individual agendas and the collective problem of what to do with the Olympic stadium after the 2012 London Games.
An aside here, but Johnson’s involvement in football is invariably catastrophic, from not knowing the difference between rugby and football tackles in a charity match to backing
ill-judged World Cup bids (get the government to invest money in grass roots first). Somebody please keep Johnson out of football.
But back to proper football people. Everybody should really have listened to Daniel Levy, the Tottenham Hotspur chairman. They should have torn down the Olympic stadium, saying thanks for the memories but you’re only important for a fortnight every four years, and built a real football stadium there, applying the Zavanella and Herzog approach of fans at the centre. Shakespeare’s spirit in Stratford — now there’s a headline.
They need to move. West Ham are tied in to a lengthy annual tenancy of £2.5 million (£1.5 million in the Championship), so extricating themselves from the so-called “deal of the century” will be complicated, but that is why they employ expensive lawyers and they can argue with some conviction that they have been short-changed by the stadium owners and the authorities.
The stewarding is poor, and even the tabard types at Crufts reacted quicker to insurgents at the weekend. The police were alarmingly slow too. It’s not as though the West Ham fans hadn’t been fulminating and raising about the possibility of protest in the previous fortnight.
They can put up as many pictures of Bobby Moore, Billy Bonds and Sir Trevor Brooking as they like but the Olympic stadium will still not feel like home, a football home. The location is not the problem, for all the fuss about treks from the station around a shopping centre, because the only distance that matters is the distance from the pitch. And it’s too far.
Since Saturday’s pitch invasions and protest against the board, many have argued cogently that West Ham’s predicament runs far deeper than the stadium. They are undeniably engulfed in the perfect storm of on-field and off-field issues of an indifferent team, a manager in David Moyes who doesn’t imbue confidence with his comments or tactics, and the unfulfilled declarations of the co-owners David Sullivan and David Gold.
They are inhibited by some horrendous recruitment, such as purchasing Andy Carroll when everyone else waved his injury record in the air and screamed “buyer beware”. They prevaricated over William Carvalho last summer, just the type of powerful, disciplined holding midfield player they crave.
The board balked at the cost, supposedly £40 million, for a widely respected Portugal player who won Euro 2016, and bowed out, muttering about injury issues with a player who is now 25 years old and three games short of 250 appearances for club and country. West Ham’s board can be very small-minded at times.
Their sympathisers proclaim that the owners’ largesse is evidenced by having the eighth largest wage bill in the Premier League, but the club should really wear this as a badge of shame; they are clearly not as cute at recruitment or negotiation as they think they are. And why exactly did they offload James Tomkins for £10 million? Crystal Palace are struggling but Tomkins has been decent.
On Saturday, Sean Dyche’s players outfought and outplayed Moyes’s, so let’s dismiss all the nonsense about demonstrations being responsible for West Ham’s defeat. The visitors led by the time of the pitch invasions.
Let’s acknowledge more the contrast. Burnley sit bottom of the Premier League wages list but seventh in the table that counts. They were hungrier, better organised and overseen by a better manager in Dyche. As a club as well as a team, Burnley are better run than West Ham.
No wonder the fans are protesting. Some who ally themselves to a legitimate anti-board campaign are simply adrenaline-chasers, boredom-banishers and thugs, but the majority aren’t. Even the pitch invader who attempted to plant a corner flag in the centre-spot — an obvious echo of the fan protests against the club’s controversial bond scheme in the early 1990s — bore the mournful look of a supporter pushed beyond despair.
The West Ham captain, Mark Noble, a touchstone for the game’s soundest principles, grappled with another pitch invader and then spoke mournfully about the club’s predicament, and how he actually understood some of the fans’ vexations if not their means of expressing them. Mournfulness defined the image of Brooking sitting alone in the directors’ box after Sullivan and Gold had retreated to escape the coins launched their way.
Such sights and sounds of deep mournfulness are not what West Ham are about; they have traditionally been a family, dysfunctional occasionally, but united. That fan with the flag, that man with the armband and that knight forlorn in the smart seats are actually on the same side.
It is three weeks until the club’s next home game, against Southampton, which by rights should be played behind closed doors because of the reprehensible acts of some. A protest march is planned, or “stroll” as it is being called to avoid detection, so the club, and football, face another day of shame unless the FA is strong and makes the game played behind closed doors.
There was daft talk yesterday of imposing a fine on West Ham, laughable really given the wealth of top clubs, and another reality in all this is that the FA lacks a leadership able to gather all parties together and at least mediate, if not sort the mess.
The truth remains that the London Stadium is the primary cause and lightning rod for disaffection. It embodies much of what the fans are railing against: gentrification and the attempted cleansing of the old support. It resembles commerce first, support second.
Until it is ripped down and rebuilt as a football stadium, the problem remains and the politicians won’t countenance that. West Ham have to face biting the bullet, absorbing the financial cost and finding a new home, a home fit for football.
DasNutNock wrote:
It is three weeks until the club’s next home game, against Southampton, which by rights should be played behind closed doors because of the reprehensible acts of some. A protest march is planned, or “stroll” as it is being called to avoid detection, so the club, and football, face another day of shame unless the FA is strong and makes the game played behind closed doors.
Also, Henry, for what it's worth the first one was a stroll, this one is a ramble.
DasNutNock wrote:
It is three weeks until the club’s next home game, against Southampton, which by rights should be played behind closed doors because of the reprehensible acts of some. A protest march is planned, or “stroll” as it is being called to avoid detection, so the club, and football, face another day of shame unless the FA is strong and makes the game played behind closed doors.
The FA only needs to ban Sullivan(s) and perhaps Brady & Gold; no more, to massively reduce chance of pitch invasions.
Seems the joys of a new stadium are now dawning on Spurs ticket prices have raised from 25%-50% with the max ticket £2,200 and most around £1000 only a few bellow £950 I can't upload pics but there is a pricing bend online it's quite high and tweets are quite explosive
Luke- my cousins are actually in the east stand. Their ST will go up 50% ish but thats because they’ve had to bring east stand prices inline with west stand. They too are gonna go for the south stand ,tbh to be in that single tier behind the goal watching top 6 football for 1k a season in London seems about right to me. As said £20 a week.
Winter is making amends for his stance regarding the Tevez saga all that time ago. This is the best article I've seen written highlighting the entire **** show.
DasNutNock wrote:From today's Times:
West Ham are tied in to a lengthy annual tenancy of £2.5 million (£1.5 million in the Championship), so extricating themselves from the so-called “deal of the century” will be complicated, but that is why they employ expensive lawyers.
Am I missing something? Why can’t we just walk away? Keep paying the £2.5m a year so there’s no breach of contract but just don’t use the poxy stadium. £2.5m is noise to a PL club and lawyers fees saved into the bargain.
Obviously there are all the costs etc of finding/building a new ground but that aside I don’t see how we’re “tied in” to the OS at all.
There's a lot of things I don't like about the Running Track, but these f*ckers really wind me up.
It's like a game of Nerve Agent Russian Roulette on the way home. I'm anxious as soon as I leave the Stadium, wondering whether I'm going to get stopped in my tracks by some acne-faced youth in a high vis jacket.
The worse thing when the red sign goes up is that this appears to give licence to anybody nearby to start giving their views on the game, and more often than not it's a load of absolute bollox. It's like being trapped in your nan's living room with relatives you don't like at a wedding.
Last Saturday, whilst halted by juvenile lollipop man, I heard some former contestant of Mastermind trying to argue for the benefits of relegation "to teach Sully a lesson". He didn't seem to understand my point about how when the Captain of of the Titanic sunk the ship it took the passengers and the crew down with him as well to an icy, watery grave. Funny enough, that lack of investment in the playing squad was like an iceberg. Everybody with half a brain saw it looming on the horizon, but transfer supremo Sullivan decided to steer HMS Irons straight towards it.
"What the f*ck you doing?" we all shouted, but Captain Sully just said, "Don't worry, we'll sail round it." F*ck me, I'd rather have Stevie Wonder at the helm.
The other night I woke up in sweat as I had this nightmare that I was racing to the station only to find my way blocked by Payet holding a stop sign. He looked at me and said, "I f*cking told you these owners were merde de chien."
I'm that worried about things, I have decided to swap the windy congestion of the exit of the Southampton game for a bar in Tenerife. As if I need to justify why that looks like a better option than a trip to the Running Track. F*ck me, I'd rather go to the dentists for root canal work with no anaesthetic. It's a story state of affairs when I'm looking forward more to going to Lumpalard's Lair than a home game. On the case later for that. We will win that game, mark my words.
