How much is that "new" stadium worth to Wet Spam? There's been lots of discussion of the details of the dodgy contract etc (and rightly so), but it would be interesting to put a figure on how much they've benefited from public subsidy. Well I say subsidy its more like a gift isn't it. All in the name of the legacy committee not losing face - and rather an expensive way of achieving that! I mean how much does such a stadium actually cost to build and run, and how much extra revenue are they going to generate? I think we can discount the so-called rent as that is a pathetic amount and over a hundred years probably wouldn't pay off the construction and conversion costs. So I wonder if this is the biggest gift that a government has ever given a sporting club? It's running into hundreds of millions isn't it.
The thing about the rent is that it came out a couple of years back that the company that are leasing the White Elephant, which Wet Spam will be paying rent to...if half owned by Wet Spam and half owned by Newham Council, which essentially means that half of the pittance that the Spammers are paying in rent goes right back to the club.
Not when you've chucked a load of money at the people that gave you the deal. The Tory party are effectively funding themselves, using West Ham as a middleman. The taxpayer pays for the stadium and they get a cut from Gold, Sullivan and Brady. Lovely.
You may be interested to hear that the club has requested our last two league games of the 16/17 season, be played away. This is of course due to the construction of our new stadium.
We haven't requested our opener be away again as well, have we? Always seems like a disadvantage, to me.
I also see it as a disadvantage. In answer to your question, we have only asked to be away for the final two games. PL have agreed to consider it.
Fantastic that we're still in London. Bit of a shame not to be able to send the Lane off with CL football but if the regulations don't allow it due to the ongoing works then I guess that is out of our hands.
Have to say, I don't see how this could be agreed to, and I don't think it should be agreed to. The fixtures are random, and as soon as you start messing about wih that, you open up a whole can of worms.
The fixtures are certainly not random, hence the NLD is regularly on the same day as Merseyside derby for example. Policing would demand that some fixtures are planned
Fair enough. Policing requirements are different to club requirements though. Don't get me wrong, if TH wants it, then I hope the requested is granted. I just don't think it will be. And I have no doubt that we would be up in arms if it was another club.
Clubs ask for fixtures to be rearranged all the time. We always ask to be away on the opening day, annoyingly. There was a decent article on it on the BBC several years ago: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulfletcher/2009/06/secrets_of_the_fixture_compute.html I don't think that there's any randomness left in the system, to be honest.
It became obvious that something fishy was going on the season when the Sky Four played each other the weekend before Christmas and on Easter weekend
I think it's so that the pitch gets as long a break from use as possible. Seems to work quite well, as the surface is pretty decent, barring the corners. I don't think that that the trade-off is worth it, though. Starting away is an obvious disadvantage, especially as we seem to get tricky fixtures a lot of the time. Ending away as well just seems silly to me, as those games are often very important. We tend to miss out on things by very fine margins too, so I can't help but feel that we're suffering from self-inflicted wounds.
Correct. It's the Park Lane end goalmouth which is the main area as it only gets a few days of natural sunlight per year, around Midsummer Day if I remember correctly.
