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Is he a Spurs fan by any chance?
From todays' Times:
Matt Dickinson Chief Sports Correspondent
Last updated at 12:01AM, January 9 2015
For the first time since that indelibly uplifting summer of 2012, I wandered through the Olympic Park this week. The memories came flooding back as, for £11 between four of us, we swam in the very pool where Michael Phelps made history.
For another £22 each (including bike and helmet hire, and an hour’s group tuition), we cycled around the wooden velodrome of Sir Chris Hoy’s epic triumph and Victoria Pendleton’s tears, feeling the thrill of defying gravity on its daunting 42-degree wooden banks.
Perhaps one day, too, we will sit again in the stadium where Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis and Greg Rutherford put the Super into Saturday, and Usain Bolt danced down the track into immortality, although I may resent paying that entrance fee. When West Ham United reopen the doors, me, you — all of us — should be demanding a free ticket given everything we have already put into that ground.
As the cranes and diggers continue to convert the Olympic Stadium into a new Barclays Premier League venue, I am not sure if any of us have quite cottoned on to the scale of our collective generosity and West Ham’s enormous good fortune.
Across London, Tottenham Hotspur are working out how to stay competitive while rebuilding White Hart Lane and only now Arsenal are emerging from the years of austerity paying for their £390 million home. Liverpool will have the financial pain of reconstructing Anfield.
Meanwhile, David Sullivan, the co-chairman, talks of “wonderful” times for West Ham and you can practically hear the champagne corks popping with his team flying high in the Premier League, a record £10.3 million profit last season and the move next year into a new gift-wrapped stadium.
There are many ways of measuring the bounteousness of our political leaders in the deal for West Ham, but the simplest is to consider that building and then converting the Olympic Stadium into a fitting home for football will eventually amount to more than £619 million (the figure is still rising) — and West Ham are contributing a paltry £15 million.
They are already guaranteed considerably more than that back for the sale of Upton Park to property developers. West Ham have declined to disclose the figure, but, whenever the amount emerges, it will only reinforce that they have won the jackpot.
It is not just any old stadium they are being handed on a 99-year lease, but an iconic site with fantastic accessibility; with newly installed undersoil heating, retractable seats so that the fans do not have to bear an unsightly running track, a vast extended roof (the largest single-span cantilever in the world) so they do not get wet and hospitality areas so that the owners can maximise matchday income.
There were questions regarding whether the arena would be suitable for football, but no one need have any fears now — certainly not West Ham. When the costs of converting an 80,000-seat Olympic stadium to a 54,000-capacity football ground leapt another £35.9 million last year to £189.9 million given the complexities of the roof, it was not the club’s problem. The stadium owners, the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), had to dig into its contingency fund by flogging off more spare bits of the Olympic site.
The costs to the LLDC are still climbing, ramming home the epic foolishness of excluding football in the original plans.
It is a mistake that has been rectified by all of us, through the Treasury pot, the Mayor of London’s office and a £10 million loan from Newham Council, which gets to use the stadium for mass community events.
There will be a return to the taxpayer in the basic rent paid by West Ham, of between £2 million to £3 million a year — though that amount, too, has to be a bargain for the club given how easily it should be covered by a surge in matchday income.
Consider that West Ham will take all the revenue from ticketing and corporate hospitality. That includes 3,600 premium seats, with the highest cost for whoever wants to sit in Her Majesty’s old seat.
Oh, yes, and rent is automatically reduced in the event of relegation — so Newham Council’s income will diminish if Sam Allardyce messes up, which is probably not how it should work in one of the capital’s most deprived boroughs. West Ham must share income from catering kiosks and naming rights, but they would not have had a penny from the latter at Upton Park.
The club talk up job creation and the boost to the area that their arrival will bring.
And, yes, the more vibrant the Queen Elizabeth II Park becomes the better. The regeneration of a deprived area can be reality and not just political hogwash.
There will be new opportunities for the local community, but no one stands to gain quite like West Ham’s owners. Over many decades, the taxpayer can recoup some of its investment but the obvious, spectacular and immediate gains are all for the club.
Sullivan is already boasting of West Ham being worth £400 million at the new home. It was valued at £105 million when he and David Gold bought it in 2010.
The owners have had to agree to pay a one-off windfall back to LLDC in the event that they sell up in the next ten years, but there is nothing to stop them trying to offload 20 per cent to reduce their debts or cashing out down the line.
No wonder Barry Hearn, the owner of Leyton Orient at the time, was so enraged to lose out in the bidding, calling the deal given to West Ham “state sponsorship beyond my wildest dreams”.
He claims that the contract requires LLDC to pay for security, police, stewarding, ground maintenance and other ancillary costs that, in coming to more than £2 million a year, effectively gives West Ham the stadium rent-free.
In the circumstances, it is surprising that more Premier League rivals have not kicked up a fuss. Maybe it has not yet hit home that this is a deal that, especially given London construction costs, outdoes anything that Manchester City secured when they took over their new ground after the Commonwealth Games.
Maybe we are all just glad that the place is not a white elephant; relieved that there are no more political rows.
The stadium always did need football and perhaps we should just accept West Ham’s luck in being best-placed to capitalise — but what luck it is when their own website positively gushes about all the gains.
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