Weeks of picketing West Ham matches, home and away, with the Football Supporters’ Association banner reading ‘Stop exploiting loyalty’, have paid off – the black balloons won. The club has announced concession tickets will be available again in all the six main ticketing bands and that ticket prices will be frozen for the coming season.
Everyone who took a black balloon, blew it up and released it inside the ground can be proud of their part in a successful campaign. Those whose balloons made it onto the pitch – and onto TV screens – helped make it impossible for the club to ignore the views of the fans. Chants of ‘United!’ now refer to the diverse groups representing West Ham fans. Hatchets, rather than hammers, were buried. Old differences were set aside. New friendships have been formed. At times when the disparate groups had alternative ideas on tactics or presentation, we all agreed to unite behind a single strategy. Pride was swallowed. Mouths kept shut. Fan groups at West Ham have never worked so closely together as now.
Negotiating with the FAB
Huge credit for this has to go in no small measure to Andy Payne, the Hammer’s United rep on West Ham’s Fan Advisory Board (FAB), who is the fans’ joint chair of the FAB with the club’s head of supporter services Cat Smith. Andy has pulled his hair out pulling the fan groups together and keeping us all onside. He has also had to negotiate with a club that has, let’s say politely, been challenging at times.
The U-turn in the club’s position came as a shock to many. Websites and podcasts were being spoon fed messages from club sources that ticket prices would rise and concessions were gone for good. And the club’s blatant breaches of trust and of the FAB’s own rules was reaching a point that fan groups were beginning to discuss walking away from the FAB. WHUST raised this at its AGM in February. Having offered members a vote on joining the FAB, the board felt it had to get permission from members to leave and spoke about a ballot giving permission ‘up to and including resigning from the FAB’.
A Future Built on Consultation
Our greatest hope is that the agreement on concessions is the start of a new relationship with the club. The future concession regime will need to change. How the club engages with the fan groups must improve too – and it appears that is already happening.
The club’s official announcement included an agreed statement from the FAB. This said: ‘As the FAB, we do recognise that the current levels of discount will need to be reviewed over the coming years as in the process of consultation we have acknowledged that some of these levels of discount are disproportionate. ‘We will work with the club to reach a fair and uniform policy in the future. We look forward to continuing to work closely and constructively with the club for the benefit and good of all West Ham United supporters.’
Much of the work on this has already been done. HU and WHUST have volunteers who spend hours poring over ticketing documents and spreadsheets. For the past few months HU’s Lee Pearce and myselfl have worked together, meeting in person, by phone, email and text message and sharing a Microsoft drive. Instead of producing separate documents we now produce single position papers.
Breaking the Status Quo
Fan groups have made clear the ticketing system needs reform, has anomalies and unfairness. It has evolved rather than been planned and that means it has gremlins in the system. As WHUST said in its statement following the club’s announcement: ‘If the club had consulted first, instead of withdrawing concessions unilaterally, we could be introducing meaningful and sensible changes this year instead of just beginning negotiations. Our message to West Ham is clear: consult with fans and positive change will happen faster.’
Fingers are firmly crossed that this is now going to happen. In the weeks running up to the concessions announcement, the club brought three members of its ticketing staff to meetings but refused the fan groups permission to bring Lee or myself to aid their FAB reps. Just days after the announcement, the club invited both Lee and myself to meet for direct talks. These small steps represent a sea change in attitude.
National Pressure and the Regulator
The protests and black balloons have played a major part, but they alone have not achieved all this. There have been other pressures. The Premier League cartel began to splinter. Fan groups across the country facing cuts to concessions rose up. The Liverpool fan group, The Spirit of Shankly, scored the first goal securing a price freeze. That no doubt influenced West Ham’s decision.
But the club read the runes in east London too. It swore the FAB to secrecy when it said it wanted to raise prices by between 2% and 5% and then leaked it in blatant contravention of the published confidentiality agreement. The pro-price rise PR spin was parroted by the club’s favoured sources. One story doing the club’s dirty work said: ‘It would be a surprise if season ticket prices are frozen for next season and a rise between 2% and 5% is almost inevitable considering the financial challenges facing the club.’ So much for independent fan media. The club’s own accounts, only recently published, had made clear there was no financial crisis.
Political Winds and a New Era
But instead of laying the ground for price hikes and softening up the fanbase, it just got up people’s noses. And that message got back to the club loud and clear. The prevailing winds in both houses of Parliament blew against the club’s position too. Lady Brady tabled a number of wrecking amendments in an attempt to derail the bill that will bring in a regulator for English football. She managed to get the confused new Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, on her side. But Badenoch has previously written to a WHUST member confirming her support for a regulator when it was a Conservative manifesto commitment.
The FSA used that email to make Badenoch look baffled. And the government made clear it will force through the regulator unscathed. The club was on a losing streak politically. A regulator that will force clubs to consult over ticket prices is coming. Other clubs were keeping concessions and agreeing price freezes, which was setting the standard. West Ham’s use of tame friends in fan-based media had failed to soften up West Ham fans’ resolve. And those black balloons kept getting past the stewards armed with pikes.
A Power Shift at the Top
It finally dawned on West Ham’s recalcitrant top brass that the club had to consult with fans and it had to find some agreement. As that realisation came just as the fan groups were talking about walking away from the FAB altogether, the club had to act fast and concede more than it wanted. It could not risk having no fan consultation in place and being the Premier League pariah.
WHUST hopes this represents a power shift within the club. There have always been pragmatists who saw consultation as positive and practical, but they were overshadowed by the political prejudices of Sullivan and Brady. That means it will remain difficult for those involved in meeting fans, hearing their views and suggestions and feeding that into the club’s decision-making process. We expect reform, not revolution. It will be slow, but we are willing to put in the time.
WHUST’s statement on the concessions climbdown includes the following: ‘WHUST hopes this signals a new willingness on the part of the club to consult properly and that the club will now stick to the terms of the FAB. WHUST will now work to ensure future consultations are based on mutual trust and cooperation.’
Hope for the Future
It is sad we felt we needed to say this, but it is worth recapping on the club’s isolationist resistance to genuine consultation with fans. When WHUST was being formed, of the 92 clubs in the Premier League and English Football League only two were refusing to consult with fans: West Ham and Hull. When, in 2022, the PL demanded clubs establish FABs, West Ham dawdled and delayed.
The first meeting was not held until September 2024. Even then the club instantly broke its own rules. After that first meeting, West Ham bosses refused to share a transcript of the meeting, as required in the FAB Terms of Reference (ToR). The ToR had taken months to negotiate and had been agreed just weeks before. It was published on the club’s website. Instead, the club proposed minutes that were PR puff and ignored key concerns fans had raised. That meant the minutes could not be agreed for weeks, when the ToR required publication within 14 days.
The club also abused the Confidentiality Agreement. It demanded more items be treated as confidential than the agreement covered – and all the club’s suggestions had been incorporated into it. But the club was also the only source of leaks of supposedly confidential information, to its tame website reporters. West Ham has a sorry history of fan engagement. We have to hope that is now firmly in the past. Fans stand ready to engage, to help, to work in partnership. This is potentially a win-win situation. Let’s seize it.
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