Enough is enough for us fans?

Just what was it with the home game against Manchester City that had the PR team at West Ham hell bent on making it a complete disaster?

Weeks before the game we were told that we shouldn’t pass up the chance to watch “City’s Superstars” and to buy tickets for £50. If the price wasn’t disgraceful enough, the attempt to market the game around our opposition rather than our own ‘superstars’ was, quite possibly, the biggest PR fail in the history of PR fails. Just why on earth would we, as passionate and committed West Ham fans, want to pay £50 to watch the opposition at Upton Park?

The club quite rightly made a u-turn and began marketing tickets for the game around our own players, but the damage appeared to have already been done.

That was in the shape of several hundred empty seats remaining for the televised game. Obviously the club can’t be seen to have empty seats at the Boleyn Ground when they’ve insisted for years that they’ll have no problem with filling the 54,000 seater Olympic Stadium when they move in. That would be a disaster.

However, that sounds insignificant to insulting their own fans by offering £5 tickets to members of the local community. Members of the local community who do NOT support West Ham. Members of the local community who were evidently laughing at the club’s fans during their 3-1 loss on Saturday evening.

The club takes pride in its work in the community, and rightly so. It’s community work that plays a big part in the move the Olympic  Stadium in three years. But if making football affordable to members of the community means giving supporters of other clubs tickets to home games for just £5, then us life-long supporters should have cause for concern.

Video footage and witness accounts from fans at the City game show a group of muslims praying in the Sir Trevor Brooking stand ten minutes before the end of the first-half. Some comments under some articles claim some of the men praying were also seen at their seats quite clearly cheering on Manchester City and disrespecting West Ham supporters.

The issue for me is not the muslims being able to pray at a football stadium, nor is it the fact they are muslim, but the fact that the club sold VERY CHEAP tickets to supporters of other football clubs (if any at all), solely to fill the stadium.

The opportunity to watch Premier League football and, evidently, City’s Superstars, for a fiver, would have been too good to turn down for anyone, and you can’t really blame them.

The aftermath is something the club didn’t really think through, though. The video going around of West Ham fans standing around in disbelief as the men said their prayers at Upton Park on Saturday makes the fans look like “West Ham thugs”, as one commenter said under an article on the Daily Express website.

But these fans were not hounding the religious ritual that was happening in front of them, they were more likely to be protesting against the club’s decision to sell tickets to those men who had no intention of supporting West Ham, let along watch the game. This ultimately puts the club’s supporters in a bad light once again, so soon after getting over the incident at White Hart Lane last season.

This latest PR fail from the club joins a long list of mistakes. The decision to allow a child (David Sullivan’s son) to make official announcements via Twitter is, quite frankly, an embarrassment, while the aforementioned decision to market a game at the Boleyn Ground around West Ham’s opposition was an insult.

How many more before it gives real supporters of West Ham no choice but to stay away? After all, there are thousands of supporters who have since voiced their anger and concern underneath online news articles, in forums and on social media.

The bottom line is that the club made thousands of true supporters pay £50 for a game to watch the oppositions ‘superstars’ and then offered supporters of other clubs a 90% discount.

That is unacceptable, regardless of the club’s ‘good intentions’ from the beginning.