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CONFESSIONS OF A WEST HAM SUPPORTER

It’s difficult following your football team from abroad. In America you have two options: spend a small fortune on a satellite sport subscription or find a bar that shows "international sport", packed with Americans, draped in internet-ordered Chelsea and Manchester United scarves.

I recently visited Lucky Bar, Washington’s infamous (if a bit dingy) football emporium, just a few streets from the White House. It’s run by an affable Welshman who serves a proper British fry-up breakfast from 8am on weekends. I arrived for an afternoon weekday match (evening in England) to see a smattering of supporters covered in Liverpool Football Club paraphernalia, confident of victory. But I was there in support of the opposing side, West Ham United, a storied but angst-ridden East London club accustomed to losing its star players to richer clubs. More recently it has become known for crippling financial troubles owing to its previous Icelandic owners, casualties of the banking crisis.

We lost 3-0. Another defeat in a season of insipid play and a bevy of off-the-pitch problems that almost saw us relegated. How does one endure a club like this? Supporting West Ham requires a healthy dose of fatalism—the club anthem is about dreams fading and dying. One must take great pleasure in unwavering devotion, despite the odds. Apart from a few bright moments (we won the domestic Football Association Cup in 1980) most seasons are about remaining in the league—avoiding relegation is West Ham’s annual Dunkirk, except we are trying to stay. 

Our redeeming claim to fame is the great English players we produce (and sell), a list too long to recount here. And derision is always met with an undeniable fact: without three West Ham greats—Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst, and Martin Peters—England would never have won the 1966 World Cup. Naturally, it is West Ham’s greatest trophy.

But it seems time for me to admit that my near-religious association with West Ham United Football Club is more coincidental than rational, and more charlatan than cockney. I’m not even English. I never stood in the old North Bank Stand with my father; nor did I sneak into the "chicken run" (a stand of sorts) during half-time. My claim comes from being transfixed by the the rare transatlantic broadcast of recent greats, such as Frank Lampard, Joe Cole, Rio Ferdinand and the mercurial Paulo Di Canio (who scored the greatest goal I've ever seen). The club also wears colours similar to those of my hometown ice-hockey team (which I did see with my father). When I moved to England for a time, I bought a season ticket straight away.

Nevertheless, my transatlantic affiliation does afford me an interesting sociological perspective, especially in observing American fans of the game. In the not-too-distant future England will play the United States in the group stages of the World Cup, a match England can ill-afford to lose—points-wise and for the sake of national pride. The country has never really recovered from losing 1-0 to a rag-tag band of American amateurs in the 1950 World Cup.

Whether America should care about football (or soccer) is a matter that crops up every World Cup. Soccer in America is nothing like its British counterpart. Americans celebrate the sport as an innocuous and family-friendly activity for suburban children. For the Brits the sport is grittier, a pastime for dock-workers and coal miners.

To many in America, soccer is a threat to their sporting heritage. In "How Soccer Explains the World", a highly entertaining and perceptive book about the sport and globalisation, Franklin Foer, editor of the New Republic, argues that soccer divides yuppie Europhiles from those who believe in American exceptionalism. For the latter, embracing the World Cup would surely lead to an invasion by the United Nations and the enforcement of all sorts of global heresy.

Do I care about the World Cup and all of its sociological implications? Not really. In fact, I don’t care who wins the England-America match or the final trophy. I support West Ham, and that is all that matters. And with no less than ten current and former West Ham players in the 2010 England squad (the Americans have one too), maybe we will win it again this year.

~ ALEXANDER EWING

Picture Credit: law_keven (via Flickr)