The Hammers Tumble in Modern Football's Worldwide Whirlwind, With Home Currently a Distant Memory

Graham Potter nevertheless turned up for work on Saturday morning, although there was no task left for him to do. A team meeting was organized, at which Potter announced to widespread confusion that he had been sacked. Potter departed. Training got postponed because nobody was available to take it. Eventually the new coach, Nuno Espírito Santo, came to the ground and promptly began preparations for the Everton game on Monday.

It's possible on reflection it was inevitable that West Ham United’s key coaching choice ended similarly many of their set pieces have gone this season. “We’re not West Ham any more,” unhappy fans have been chanting at recent protests against the club’s ownership, but look at the evidence. A botched sacking. A celebration of contradictory leaks and briefings. Messy performances on the pitch. A emptiness of leadership and direction. Ruinous recruitment. An early relegation battle. Fans in open revolt. I don’t know. Sounds quite West Ham to me.

Bowen fights back at Everton to earn a point for West Ham in Nuno’s first game.

In many ways Nuno is the ideal manager for the current shambles, which is not entirely a compliment. Nuno will sort out the weak defence, introduce some energy in midfield, get the team functioning cohesively, put some points on the board, be tactful to the foibles around him and luxuries above him. He will not become a face‑swap meme. He will not go on Monday Night Football to indicate a large television and explain what a genius he is.

But what he will fail to do is provide any larger sense of mission and purpose, provide any broader footballing vision beyond the creation of tactical superiorities, give this restless and seriously ailing club any more distinct idea of its place in the world. The protests could ease. There might be some good, stirring football and a tilt at Europe some day. But West Ham have had these things in the past and it has not given them calm, because what they do not have is in the end something far deeper and more existential.

What makes the character of a football club? Setting, people, past, memories, icons, songs. On foundational assets alone, West Ham should be one of the simplest pitches in English football: an east London institution attracting 62,000 a week, the eighth-most established club in the Premier League. In a league run by unclear funds and investment instruments, it is one of the very few in community-based ownership. David Sullivan grew up in Hornchurch and his late co‑owner, David Gold, lived on Green Street. There is a culture and realness, a community and a international image, and lots of cash to burn. How do you mess this up?

It could be the persistent paradox of West Ham is that while it has consistently been a club in London, it has not ever truly been a London club. More precisely it is an East End club, a part of town with its own nature and perspective, its own rituals and slang, the weathered pride that comes with being strangers in your own city. Not sightseer London, not conventional London, but a kind of walled fortress where everyone held tight, where everyone knew who they were because – importantly – everyone knew where they were.

The London Stadium was designed as a world-class athletics venue and possibly the kindest thing you can say about it today is that it remains a world-class athletics venue. The gentle rake efficiently disperses the noise up the back straight; the high distant seats offer a spectacular view of the javelin competition. There is a pleasant canal alongside and as much boutique street food as you can eat. But a secure bastion it is not, and can never be. And truthfully it is the most visible symptom, if not the fundamental cause, of current West Ham.

The stadium has ensured the future of West Ham, but at the sacrifice of its now. And place yourself in Sullivan’s and Gold’s position for a moment. You acquired a club nursing hundred-million debts, competing in a rapidly overheating league populated by billionaires and nation-states. You are not football experts but finance professionals, and in this environment all your beliefs are secondary to the first one: you must not, under any circumstances, get relegated next May.

Everything flows from this need to stay up. This is why West Ham have a squad full of quick fixes, assembled with no clear plan or coherent idea. £40m for Max Kilman, £27m for Nicklas Füllkrug … £7m to take Kalvin Phillips on loan. This is why, of the 86 players purchased since the takeover, only three – Dimitri Payet, Flynn Downes and Mohammed Kudus – have generated substantial returns. This is furthermore, by the way, how you wind up appointing a head of recruitment in January and probably dismissing him before the year is out.

This is why, despite being placed in one of the richest talent veins in the sport, not a single academy player born since 2000 has become a established Premier League starter. The promise is out there. Ezri Konsa played at Senrab up the road. Rio Ngumoha developed his skills in the five-a-side cages of Newham. Ayden Heaven was in the West Ham academy until the age of 13. The under-18s won the Youth Cup a couple of years ago, and most of them are yet at the club. But for factors of prospect or context, quicker movers or richer predators, this is no longer a place where you can foresee homegrown players flourishing.

The money is obviously there, too. Premier League revenue, European revenue, the Declan Rice fee, sell‑outs every week, the discontinuation of many discounted ticket categories: why is there so little evidence of West Ham’s wealth where it matters? Perhaps this clarifies the sense of animosity between the fans and the boardroom: the massive degree of waste, the total disconnect between a fanbase growing more financially strained and an ownership squandering resources, between a fanbase dedicated permanently and a board that can hardly look beyond the weekend. Meanwhile your owner has become more and more distant and your vice-chair has a weekly column in the Sun explaining why you all just need to calm down, actually.

And on some level the tale of West Ham is a parable for something greater than West Ham, something more important even than football. The sense of deprivation and separation, communities split apart and divided up, the complete absence of influence and agency, the belief that your toil and your emotions are making another party rich. And few places have endured this process as quickly or violently as east London: a community essentially removed from itself, stripped and gentrified, overwhelmed with investment that for some reason always seems to be moving somewhere else.

You can still visit Upton Park now, but it seems a little different these days. The old ground was demolished and sold off for housing. Ken’s Café on Green Street is now something called Bad Boyz Diner. The old supporters’ club headquarters is now a gym. You can buy a flat in Lyall House or Sealey Tower, walk along Ironworks Way, sit in the Boleyn Ground memorial garden that has been landscaped in a bubble-themed design. {Place|Location|Setting