Reclaim the game
Ciaran O’Donoghue, West Ham season ticket holder
The board of West Ham United Football Club has scrapped concession prices for match tickets, and fans are rightfully outraged. They’ve done the same for new season tickets too. Now children and pensioners will have to pay full adult prices.
Many with young children have said that they will not be able to take them to watch West Ham. Many have called for a boycott of the pre-season match against Celta Vigo, with a poor turnout of fans.
Bubbling
It is not the first time that the anger of West Ham fans has bubbled to the surface. The current ownership has been disliked and mistrusted since taking over the club in 2010.
David Sullivan and the late David Gold set about moving the club from Upton Park to the Olympic Stadium. This was widely criticised by fans.
Grievances include the obscene prices of tickets, food, and drink, the distance between the pitch and the stands, and the loss of the renowned atmosphere that was a feature of Upton Park. It has, for many, sucked the joy out of watching football.
This came to a head in 2018 in a match against Burnley. Fuelled by these grievances and the poor performance on the pitch, many fans charged onto the pitch.
Fans also gathered below the director’s box, and made it abundantly clear to the board what they thought of them. Many other small-scale protests have been called in the years following, with anti-board stickers reading ‘GSB Out’ found across east London.
These issues are not unique to West Ham. Liverpool’s owners have raised ticket prices. Clubs like Bury have gone out of existence, while hundreds of millions of pounds pass through the owners of Premier League clubs.
Fans have had enough. The Socialist Party supports the campaign fighting for £20 maximum ticket prices.
Football reflects society under capitalism, dominated by big business. The Socialist Party was at the protests over the Super League in 2021 – when the owners of the richest clubs attempted to break away to carve out even more wealth for themselves.
Fan protest
Fan protest shelved those plans. But the threat is not gone, as long as football clubs are run by capitalists.
Most football clubs have their origins in the working class. Football clubs need to become democratically run, by fans, staff, and local communities. Big business needs to be kicked out of football.
We must reclaim the game, and fight to remove the rotten capitalist system.
