Been thinking about this situation quite a bit lately, and i've basically concluded that it's a complete farce on the part of London's olympic committee, Newham's Council, West Ham, and most of all Spurs.
First and foremost, what in the hell were they thinking when they proposed an athletics legacy? Seriously? As a former distance runner, I would care less if my hometown hosted the olympics and we ended up with a massive stadium to host athletics events once every two years.
Second of all, Newham council are an absolute farce. I'm obviously not a West Ham supporter, but I do realize what teams mean to clubs. If West Ham move to stratford, they're no longer west ham united. At the end of the day moving to a stadium even a few miles from the original ground is completely uprooting the club. The council doesn't understand this, and only sees the potential revenue that stratford and its environs will generate when West Ham moves. Moreover, money is leaving one of the more deprived parts of London.
And what in the hell is West Ham thinking? You don't have to look any further than Italy to see what happens when put a football club in a massive stadium with a running track. They'll be playing in front of quarter-empty crowds. How in the hell does the club expect this move to increase its fanbase? Who's going to want to see a game there?
Spurs are the worst of the lot though. Not only do they cease to be that North London club that they pride themselves on being, they become just another club whose interests are exclusively fixated on the bottom line. Supporters are no longer supporters; they're merely units that draw income into the club. And say what you want about how inbred Spurs fans are, they've got one of the more dedicated fanbases in the country.
I think the biggest loser in this whole debacle is English football, which we're obviously an integral part of. It signals how money is literally the only thing on the minds of club owners. As a supporter, I feel like i'm part of something bigger, and I'd expect my club to realize that(even I think our club could give a fuck less about the fans). This is a highly symbolic move that demonstrates how far the sport has come over the last twenty years. Football clubs are no longer sets of fanbases looking to congregate on something we all have in common; they're mechanisms that wealthy people use to extract profits out of a large group of individuals.
