West Ham To Be Confirmed for London’s Olympic Stadium

After seven years of haggling, a news conference is planned for Friday to announce that West Ham United will sign a 99-year lease to use the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, London as their new home venue. The club, currently in 14th place in the Premier League, will move out of the 35,000-seat Boleyn Ground in Upton Park, its home since the team’s founding in 1904.

West Ham will sign the lease with the London Legacy Development Corporation, and the team is expected to complete its transfer to the rechristened Olympic Park in time for the 2016-17 season, conditional on the club clearing all of its bank debts by that time. The stadium itself, built exclusively for the 2012 Summer Olympics for an estimated $700 million, has not had a tenant since that time.

It has been a bitter battle between the Hammers and League One side Leyton Orient, whose chairman Barry Hearn had sworn to fight for the ability to share the facility since the LLDC declared West Ham as the “preferred” bidders for the site in December 2011. Orient was granted a judicial review, which will apparently go ahead; if the review goes against Orient, Hearn says his club will consider a plan to move to Essex.

The O’s were not the only opponents to West Ham’s move to the facility. Fellow east London side Tottenham Hotspur also objected to the idea, particularly the role played by Newham Council. The local government put up a loan of approximately $62 million towards a $230-million refit, including retractable stands to extend the seating capacity to 80,000. Spurs argued the loan constituted state support of a privately owned club, which contravened European Union laws.

For what it’s worth, the move is endorsed by both London mayor Boris Johnson and the chairman of the British Olympic Association, Lord Coe. “It would be so important to the project as it is now a stadium with a serious history,” Coe said in an interview. “I know there are issues around timing and rebuilds, but I can’t think of a good reason why it should not be used.”

Now that a deal appears to be on once again, the major concern is whether West Ham United’s owners, David Gold and David Sullivan, will be tempted to sell the club immediately. The Hammers will be Olympic Park’s primary tenant, and as such the facility will be considered an asset, immediately adding value and increasing the potential for the club to be sold.

The owners have given assurances no sale is imminent, but they are rumoured to be deep in debt. London mayor Johnson insisted on a clause in the contract for a share of the proceeds going towards paying down the club’s debt should the team be sold. So there are plenty of reasons to think that this match will go into extra time — and could even involve penalties.