West Ham now seems broken beyond repair

There’s a couple of Premier League teams with a deep sense of the claret-and-blues right now, with Aston Villa’s bold and brilliant attempt to crack English football’s cosseted elite under Unai Emery looking very much like a cycle coming to its end with only memories to show for it, but an even deeper existential funk taking hold of West Ham.

Funny, really, that the only claret-and-blue Premier League team currently even halfway content with their lot is the one managed by Scott Parker.

West Ham, though. Bloody hell. It’s a crisis that’s been, if you’ll forgive the p*ss-poor pun, bubbling away just below the surface for years but has now finally erupted. This is a club that has entirely lost its way and with a fanbase now on the verge of the true sign of utter catastrophe where anger, that can at least potentially be channelled to some kind of positive effect, gives way to apathy.

There’s just too much that’s too wrong here, and so much of it just bleakly unsolvable. Everyone knows the deal with the stadium by now, but the sight of Everton moving into a shiny new stadium that is also actually recognisably a football stadium doesn’t help.

It was different watching Spurs do it, because for all West Ham’s noise they know deep down that Spurs are bigger than them, just as Spurs deep down know Arsenal are bigger than they are.

In modern 21st century Premier League terms, Everton are not bigger than West Ham. They’ve got what West Ham could have had, but West Ham favoured the quick and the cheap over doing something properly. You can insert your own joke about their on-field problems here, if you wish.

It’s always worth remembering that even if Spurs had won the battle for the old Olympic Stadium – which given both the location and magnificence of the stadium they have now constitutes one of the great dodged bullets in football history – their plan was to knock down a wholly unsuitable stadium and build something akin to an actual football ground in its place.

West Ham have been left with something that just doesn’t work, where no atmosphere can be created beyond that generated by a few forlorn bubbles drifting listlessly on the east London breeze.

The only consolation is that at the present time having supporters miles from the action and impossible to hear properly might actually be for the best.

We maintain the punishment that is the London Stadium is a karmic one for West Ham, a direct and necessary result of their attempt to gaslight the entirety of English football into believing their old gaff had always been the Boleyn Ground and never Upton Park. It was and remains a deeply weird incident, and we’ve still never satisfactorily worked out what West Ham were actually trying to achieve.

The point now, though, is that when everything else feels wretched it doesn’t help that one of the things making you most miserable is so vast and unsolvable. Managers can be sacked. An underperforming squad revamped and rejuvenated. It takes time, but no matter how bad those things might get, there is at least the prospect of better times to come.

What are the prospects of the London Stadium magically just not being sh*t? Zero. And somewhere between ‘the stadium’ and ‘the football’ on the ‘how difficult is it for these sh*t things that need de-sh*tting to be de-sh*tted’ come ‘the owners’.

There’s a growing sense that their only interest lies in doing just enough to keep West Ham in the Premier League and no more. The bar to achieve that least ambitious of goals has never been lower than it has in the last couple of years, but it appears to have been raised again this year.

And when you set your goals at the bare minimum, the danger becomes that you don’t need to fail all that hard for disaster to strike.

Right now, West Ham are failing hard. They simply did not do enough in the summer to address what went so alarmingly wrong in the second half of last season, the sheer extent of the bottom-three’s historic awfulness and the sight of Man United and Tottenham making complete arses of themselves apparently lulling the Hammers into a false sense of their own security.

Four defeats in their five games this season, with even the entirely misleading 3-0 win over Nottingham Forest now looking like a deeply cruel trick, culminating in a pair of bleak home derby defeats including a thoroughly unacceptable capitulation to the worst possible opponent when Spurs sauntered away with three offensively easy points.

Graham Potter has continued to make mistakes and will probably pay with his job over the days or weeks ahead, but it’s enormously difficult to argue he’s been given the proper tools to succeed.

His own career lies at a deeply awkward crossroads where his next step is tough to predict but will surely have to be another one down the ladder after adding West Ham failure to that at Chelsea.

But at least his next move, in whatever direction, will be away from the London Stadium.

West Ham fans are stuck there. And right now that feels like the worst punishment of all.

There is no escape from a soulless stadium and very little prospect of escape from soulless owners. And that means that even the prospect of escape from the current soulless football feels like an impossible dream doomed to fade and die.