A writer’s complicated relationship with the pantomime, myth (and correct pronunciation) of the Hammers. Words by Sam Diss.
So I guess it’s a cliché to say you started following your team because of your dad. Because of the way he shoved it into your hand like a few pound coins at an arcade and told you to knock yourself out—except the arcade holds the population of a medium-sized town, and while the games come and go, the colours and sounds never end, because the fire doors of this arcade are locked and there’s no way you can escape it, you can only become delirious on fizzy lager and reconstituted meat products, looking through the smeared windows and see other people walking into slightly nicer, more successful, cooler arcades, and you’re left to make the most of it.
So instead of saying that, I’ll just say it taught me about identity.
The East End was always this thing my parents talked about. It wasn’t a place, it was a personality. A behaviour. A moral code. Lessons to live by: Be sharp. Be streetwise. Dress well, but don’t show off. Help your mate if he’s in trouble. Don’t be a grass. Don’t be a mug. Don’t be tight. Know the difference between taking the piss and being a piss-taker. Know when to run. Know when to stand. Know when to speak up and when to keep schtum. Oh, and fuck off, Millwall.
It sounded like folklore. Especially as I was whisked off to the ash-end of the Essex suburbs — all manicured gardens, flashy motors, and dying high streets. I couldn’t wait to return, but when I finally had the chance, the London I found didn’t match the picture that had been painted for me. The streets weren’t rough, they were quiet. Nobody shouted “WHEYYYY” when someone dropped a glass in the pub. The shops were organic. No one seemed duck-and-dive-y; they just worked in media. Everyone in East seemed to live in South London. The ultimate betrayal.
But before that, on matchday, for years in that mucky middle between adolescence and adulthood, that old world came alive. West Ham felt like the last place where the version of the East End foretold really showed up. Not perfectly. Not even pleasantly. But recognisably. Like an accent stomped out of you by your day job, that only returns when you’re drunk or you’re angry.
West Ham became the anchor. A place I went back to—not for football exactly (let me dig out a John Moncur highlights package for you) but for a sense of character I didn’t see anywhere else. Complex masculine hierarchies delineated by choice of outerwear. Old women in football shirts shouting cunt at their cunt kids—but in a loving way. Blokes in bomber jackets selling programmes like they were precious metals in pubs so loud they made the Boleyn sound like the Bombonera.
It felt real. For a minute, anyway. Even if it wasn’t mine. I wanted it. I thought I wanted it back, before I realised most of it wasn’t even real at all. Because, eventually, the spell always breaks. You get older. You notice the cracks.
You realise it’s not tradition, it’s routine. Not a rite, but a script. A pantomime of identity, performed by people—like you—desperately trying to prove that something hasn’t been lost. Holding onto something they’d been assured means something.
Matchday doesn’t preserve culture. It refracts it. Through nostalgia. Through subcultural hand-me-downs. Through the aching need to belong, even when everything around you has changed. Even when the stadium’s hollow, a hotdog costs seven quid, and the club is run by people that definitely don’t get a round in.
But weirdly, you learn to love the lie. You learn what it does. What it’s for. Why we keep myths alive even when we know they’re broken. Because they help shape the parts of us we don’t know where else to put. Because they let us rehearse emotions we’re not allowed to show elsewhere. Because sometimes it’s easier to say “I think West Ham United should be liquidated and its name scrubbed from the history books” “fold West Ham” than “I’m feeling miserable today.”
Fold West Ham. I’ve written those words so often—a day-dream of my boyhood club’s immediate cessation—that now my friends text them back to me when we lose. Which is, to be fair, pretty regularly. It’s a bit—but, like all longstanding bits, it is also not a bit at all. Just like all of football. It’s both serious and resolutely not-so. I feel like we’d all be far happier fans if we realised that.
The truth is: West Ham have given me the hump more times than I can count. Far, far more times than it’s made me happy. I’ve walked out of stadiums and turned off television screens swearing I’d never watch them again. I’ve fantasised about some graceful quirk of administration wiping them from the Football League entirely.
And still, I stay. I choose to. Not because I think it’ll get better. Or out of blind loyalty to my dad, who’s fed up with them as well. But because the story only makes sense if you keep telling it. Who else would I support? Spurs?
People needle you about supporting a club that’s crap, but what kind of club wins all the time? Where’s my arc?
I don’t go to West Ham expecting answers. Or even joy. And I never went expecting anything even remotely approaching joy. I go to feel part of something larger than myself. Maybe I’ll never really understand it. And maybe that’s the point.
Maybe identity isn’t about where you’re from, or who your dad supported, or what the East End really was. Maybe it’s about the things you choose to carry—even when they’re heavy or out of fashion or a bundle of neuroses and recurring rituals masquerading as supporter culture, gripping onto clichés like rosary beads because none of this can hurt you, not really, because all of this is just a figment of your imagination.
Yes we’re regularly whipping boys, but every time I walk through those turnstiles or turn on the TV or hear someone say the club’s name the way it’s supposed to be said—WESSSSTAAM… Call me a glutton for punishment, but I still feel like I’m home.
Even if home has moved to a newer, shinier, infinitely more ugly address. Even if I have, too. Even if the East End I still claim—living in Hackney where you’re never more than a spray of negroni-on-tap away from a coworking space or yoga studio—is nowhere to be seen.
Because that’s the thing about a myth: You don’t believe in it because it’s real. You believe in it because, deep down, some part of you needs it to be.
So congrats, bro: your dad’s dumped you in a haunted allegory of the working class. You can’t leave the arcade, so you might as well make the most of it.
