Leyton Orient are caught in the middle of a fight between Spurs, West Ham and UK Athletics for use of the Olympic Stadium. Matt Churchill worries for the future of the O’s and their efforts in the East London community.
There has been much debate over the final use of the Olympic Stadium after the games, with possible use as a football stadium one of the proposed solutions.
This week, a decision was due to finalise the legacy of the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, East London, following the three week athletics tournament. This was postponed on Monday, with the announcement that further time was needed for the Olympic Park Legacy Company to reach a verdict.
Both West Ham and Tottenham Hotspur are keen on using the site for new stadiums, but until recently, Orient, little more than an innocent bystander, had largely been ignored in their calls for the stadium to not find itself in the hands of a Premiership club.
On Sunday, Leyton Orient’s board of directors released a statement, since re-published on Tuesday, outlining their deep concern at the prospect of a Premiership club with a supporter base in excess of 35,000 moving in up the road, literally a couple of goal kicks away.
Their concern is not the immediate result of having a glitz and glamour club a few doors down stealing the limelight. It is much more deep-rooted than this.
It is not the effect that this will have over the next couple of years that will be worrying the Leyton Orient ownership, but the impact on future generations of O’s fans coming through to sustain the club well into the future.
As a child, If you are given the choice of watching League One football every week with players who it likely you will never have heard of, or going to watch the famous faces who grace Match Of The Day each Saturday night, chances are you’re going to choose the names and glory of the Premiership club.
How do we know this plays out in reality?
Given the opportunity, the majority of football supporters from Manchester will go to watch United or City, not Droylsden, currently plying their trade in the Blue Square North.
That is not a criticism of football supporters, it is the natural order of how a club has developed over a long period of time.
It does not mean that Droylsden have any less of a role to play than their illustrious neighbours, indeed it means that they have an even more important place, galvanising their local community, rather than a global one.
There are also legalities of course, and John Beech’s excellent post on this topic outlines how the Premier League will be in contravention of their own rules if they allowed such a move to occur.
As a Watford supporter, I know how it feels to come close to losing the club I love; I cannot imagine how it feels for fans of the hundreds of other clubs who have been lost over the years, despite the best efforts of their community. We came close to liquidation before Christmas in 2009 and we were lucky to escape – although the circumstances are different to Orient’s, the end result would have been just the same: a displaced community with nowhere to go.
Following the movement of Wimbledon to Milton Keynes, and subsequent creation of MK Dons, there was the birth of AFC Wimbledon, a club who have risen up the footballing pyramid and stand a real chance, just nine years after formation, of creeping into the football league. The community worked together to create, and subsequently run, a club whose average attendances currently run at around 500 per game less than Leyton Orient.
This demonstrates the importance that a community places on a football club. It is not largely symbolic – it is a reality where supporting and interacting with the local team is part of the day-to-day life. The club may provide the social events, or offer people a place to meet and catch up every other week, because the necessary social facilities are not present.
All clubs have grown up by becoming established within their own community, building a fanbase as dictated by success, the local economy and a whole host of other factors. That these clubs grow at different rates is not an issue, it is a way of footballing life.
What must not be allowed to happen, is for one large community to displace a smaller one. Allowing this to occur demonstrates that money is more important to the Football League, the Premier League, the Olympic Park Legacy Company and the government, than the people the game is for – the fans.
Matt Churchill blogs on digital communications at The Seldom Seen Kid. You can follow him on Twitter at @geetarchurchy.
Tags: Barry Hearn, Droylsden, East London, Leyton Orient, Olympic Stadium, Spurs, Tottenham Hotspur, West Ham
I find it amusing that after weeks of bleating about the WC from the english, I finally read more about this stadium deal and wondered where keeping your word, following the rules and faiir play come in. The english have been very, as usual, pompous about these things when it comes to FIFA but when it comes to breaking engagements, they have no prroblems doing it.
Was the deal not that the olympic stadium was to be used for athletics?
You cant it both ways.
Its like claiming that FIFA members take bribes yet the english contingent did exactly the same thing. Offering FIFA members vacations to come watch the 2012 Games is the very definition of bribery. Taking the offer back when no one votes for you just reinforces that this was a quid pto qup bribe.
So i fail to see why reneging on your promises should be acceptable.
I do feel bad for the smaller teams that are often nothing more than roadkill when these big money decisions are made.
Unluckily, those bylaws like paragraph 6.5 can easily be siidestepped.
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