Andy Payne has been on some journey. He’s seen it all, travelling home and away with West Ham, experienced soaring European highs and crushing domestic lows. The devotion he feels to his boyhood club is a mixture of wide-eyed joy tempered by a cynicism at what he sees as the profit-grabbing nature of modern football, that places the bottom line first and the fans second.
We’ve met at his home to talk about the changing dynamics of football fandom and the rising costs associated with supporting your club, a conversation that is littered with constant references to all of the incredible memories he’s made over the years. Jarrod Bowen in Prague, 2023. Trevor Brooking’s winning goal against Arsenal in the 1980 FA Cup final— watching a lad from Barking help a Second Division side win the oldest national football competition in the world, and become the last team outside of England’s top flight to do so. That Saturday afternoon in August 1971, when he stepped onto the Upton Park concourse for the first time, saturated in the smell of grass and cigarette smoke. The Hammers lost 1–0 to West Brom, but Andy still has a soft spot for them because of the ‘West’ in their name. He relates to me various overseas escapades, like when he tried navigating Bilbao in post-Francoist Spain during the 1982 World Cup with stab wounds… and that’s where the story gets a bit vague, Andy trailing off into mumbles. Sounded enjoyable in the main, though.
He says he is an environmentalist, but residing in a country home—the Walthamstow boy has mellowed in his elder years and moved to an Essex suburb—means he uses things like wood burners for warmth. “I love bonfires,” he says. He’s obviously not seen that Roy Keane recently called them overrated. Not that Andy would care what Roy Keane thinks, of course.
He has a lot of grievances about the modern experience of being a football fan, but he is quick to assure me of the glimmers of positive change he’s seen as well. “It's an attractive, safe, fun thing to do for the family, which it wasn't in my time, and that's a tribute to society frankly, it's cross-generational, it's cross-gender. Anyone is welcome.” Payne points out the supporters groups Inclusive Irons and Pride of Irons as big reasons for the positive turnaround in welcoming the large South Asian and LGBTQ+ communities, allowing them to feel free to identify with West Ham, a club that didn't always feel hospitable to those communities.
Payne is one of the chairs of Hammers United, an independent West Ham supporters group. He wants to pass on the beauty of following his club to the younger generation, but like many others, he believes there have been concerted efforts made to price long-time fans out. His work in the video games industry during COVID allowed him another perspective on the treatment of fans by clubs, and what he saw in a post-COVID world disappointed him.
“My friends at EA Sports were involved with piping the sound of fans from their games into live coverage of Premier League games without supporters present to try and beef it up for people watching on telly because it was just silent. COVID was devastating on so many levels, for everything but especially for football,” he says.
“All the football clubs said at the time football's nothing without fans, and now that's forgotten again. Four years on, it's like, ‘Fuck you lot!’”
