Written by : George Marchant
There’s been a change over the past few seasons. This change can be noticed when scrolling through the opinions universe that is Twitter. Ever since our last season at Upton Park, where we achieved a club record of 62 Premier League points and arguably had one of the best players in Europe at the time playing for our badge, West Ham seem to be the topic of other teams’ fan opinions. Having also moved into a 60,000-seater stadium and playing continental football, West Ham United had started to mimic the big boys of the league. Now, you ask, what do other team’s fans opinions have to do with the size of our club?
People love to see success turn into failure. It’s human nature to find this amusing. Think throughout all the years supporting a mid-table Premier League club to a time when one of the league’s best teams loses to a league-two team in a penalty shoot-out or when get beaten by a European team made up of part-time shop assistants and firemen; it’s hilarious. Fans of other teams then take great pride and joy by heading straight to Twitter or Facebook to berate the losing team and their fans. This happens more often to ‘bigger’ teams than it does to smaller ones. So why has the hatred to West Ham on social media increased so much in the past few years if, apparently, we are not a ‘big’ club?
Frequent ‘anti’ West Ham opinions that can be found on social media are usually related to Declan Rice being ‘overrated’, needing binoculars at the London Stadium, anything Mark Noble related and our ‘Dildo Brothers’ owners. These opinions are seen week in week out by opposition fans trying their best to get under our skin. There has been a substantial increase in this type of activity ever since our successful 2015-16 season. This is because other fans want to see our successes turn into failures.
Find a Facebook post from any ‘top 6’ team where they announce a loss at Full-Time; the post is littered with fans from rival and other clubs commenting and mocking the team and their fans for their hilarious embarrassment. Whenever West Ham would suffer from an embarrassing defeat, we would always receive jokes from our classic rivals such as Tottenham, Chelsea, Millwall etc. However, since 2016, you can witness a foray of fans from various different clubs jumping onto the mockery. Everton fans, Newcastle fans, even Wolves fans.
When did they ever care about our downfalls? It’s because they see us as a bigger club than what we were before.
The proof of our size does not end at having a big stadium and attracting some of Europe’s most exciting talents. West Ham are currently the 17th most valuable club in the world. This growth in value has been helped by the stadium move and an investment into better quality of players. All of this adds up quite nicely when considering whether West Ham are a big club.
Now before, you start shouting ‘delusional,’ this is not an argument to say that our club is amongst the elite – especially given fans are still trying very hard to pretend we haven’t just lost 4-0 to Oxford (rival fans have already been the first to comment about our hilarious defeat). This shows that we are not elite. It will take much more to become internationally renowned as a ‘big’ club but, from where we are standing, parts of the footballing society are starting to notice our rise.
