West Ham United's bright start to the season has once again led to discussion of what constitutes the famous "West Ham way." Supporters and tabloid hacks have in equal measure been suggesting that Slaven Bilić's entertaining style of football is rather more in keeping with the club's proud traditions than that played by his predecessor Sam Allardyce, who's portrayed as an anthropomorphic black hole sucking up the enjoyment of all who stray near.
West Ham fans are not delusional for demanding pretty football
It’s time to stop mocking the “West Ham way.”
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The very idea that the Hammers have a tradition of furnishing viewers with a purified form of the beautiful game is, when compared with their recent history, a complete fantasy. Sure, there was something stunningly absurd in Gianfranco Zola’s strike force of David Di Michele and Diego Tristán. There was something even more spectacular about the Hammers managing to flog Julien Faubert to Real Madrid. But they’ve hardly been Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona.
It's therefore easy to understand those who poke fun at the very idea of the "West Ham way" and dismiss it as a blatant attempt at self-aggrandisement in the absence of the greatness and glory that Bobby Moore and friends once really did bring to the Boleyn Ground. Sir Alex Ferguson (perhaps tellingly a friend of the aforementioned Allardyce) famously incurred the wrath of West Ham United supporters on the release of his updated biography last year, by declaring his hope that: "before I die someone can explain the ‘West Ham way.'"
But we shouldn’t be quite so dismissive: Though they don’t have a snappy alliterative title, the sentiment of the “West Ham way” is echoed in football grounds across the country. Its purpose is not so much an artificial yardstick by which delusional supporters can measure their current underperformance, but an emotional appeal that all can use to connect the present with the past.
For many match-going fans, supporting a team is more than a mere pastime. It’s a rose-tinted responsibility to those who passed down the love of their community and its club. Perhaps more than anything else, it’s based on that most powerful of human sentiments: nostalgia. Every week many football supporters retrace the footsteps of their childhood, and their parents’ childhoods. Even if it’s not familial, sporting events still carry emotional weight as signposts in one’s life, as Daniel Harris described in his eloquent article on the 2005 Ashes series and a divorce:
“People who like sport remember their lives better than those who don’t. Nothing, not even music, tracks things in quite the same way; sure, you listen to stuff as you go, but stuff from different eras and areas, stuff that appears, disappears and reappears into consciousness. Sport, on the other hand, necessarily runs the continuum of existence, each evoking and fortifying the other to sublime, disquieting extent.”
It’s at least partly subconscious, but sport serves to keep precious memories from being lost in the haze of time.
However, in the modern era, when football stadia have steadily morphed into identikit oblongs of grey and glass, and offensively wealthy players have become as separate from the local populace as to only engage with it within the artificial environs of club community events, maintaining that link with the past has become increasingly difficult for supporters. It's part of the reason why the home hero and the one-club man are so beloved. It's part of the reason why Mark Noble is the West Ham captain.
It also explains why Hammers fans warble on about wanting their teams to follow the “West Ham way.” Of course it’s not real, Much like Benedict Anderson’s influential description of nations as “imagined communities,” it’s a nebulous concept that a couple of supporters would never be able to define in identical terms. With football teams no longer truly belonging to the community, the aspiration of a return to greatness is a way of invoking a mythical past and connecting it with the present, and meshing the most intimate and personal of memories with the sterility of the Modern Matchday Experience.
So, to describe such a concept as determined by on-field success, as Sir Alex Ferguson did when he sneered that West Ham “last won a trophy in 1980,” is to rather miss the point. Of course, that means the idea of the “West Ham way” is irrational and immaterial, but dismissing it as inconsequential is to ultimately reduce fandom to an irrelevance. One may as well suggest that we need only look at a list of results and possession percentages every Saturday for our football fix. Without its emotional dimension, sport is futile. With it, it’s as meaningful as anything.
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