Friends have been very considerate to me about West Ham United’s relegation last week. They know how devoted I was to the club. Thank you all.

But in fact I’m not half so upset as I would have been if it had been the West Ham of my youth and middle age. Upton Park was a friendly ground, in the heart of London’s East End, with the club’s players mainly coming from there, or from the Essex suburbs I used to live in. It really did represent the area.

But no longer; with its move to the huge and soulless Olympic Stadium in Stratford, and most of the team being foreign mercenaries. Does that sound a bit UKIP-y? But local identities matter in sport. When I first followed them, 90% of ‘my’ team came from and still lived a few miles from me. Now I’m told that, in this World Cup year, only 30% of the players in the entire English Premier League are qualified to play for England. No more Bobby Moores, Geoff Hursts or Martin Peters’s. Those days have gone. And my interest in football – certainly West Ham, and even England – has waned as a result.

I’ve posted on this topic before. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2016/05/13/old-west-ham/; https://bernardjporter.com/2016/05/10/coyi/; http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/05/11/bernard-porter/goodbye-to-boleyn/; https://bernardjporter.com/2017/01/07/football-0-capitalism-5.) There I put most of the blame on the recent major capitalist take-over of the sport, at least as a public spectacle. (I’ve recently been offered a book to review which I think may bear on this. More later.)

In the meantime I have the latest West Ham scandal to confirm my prejudice. That’s the forced departure of David Sullivan, the club’s majority owner, who made the fortune which enabled him to buy it, from his profits in the ‘porn’ (he calls it ‘adult’) market, and is now under suspicion of sexual harassment, rape and the rest – the sort of conduct which is nowadays being associated with some of the world’s richest capitalists. (See https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/west-ham-david-sullivan-quits-allegations-b2990979.html.) West Ham United, and English football generally, would be better off without them.

Of course I’ll be watching the World Cup on TV, despite Trump’s efforts to politicise it. And I’ll be following my old, faded West Ham in the Championship: a lower but less tainted division of the English League. So far as the Premiership is concerned, my second love, Hull City, recently just crept into it via the ‘play-offs’, compensating in part for the demotion of the Hammers – although I can’t see them surviving long there. And here in Sweden, the national team has an English trainer, with a name a bit like mine; and Hammarby IF – about a mile up the road from us – are doing pretty well in the Allsvenskan. Plus the women’s game, which features a lot on Swedish TV. So I won’t starve this summer, soccer-wise.