- The Great Mistake which the others made but Arsenal avoided
- Court decides footballers have the same basic employment rights as everyone else
By Tony Attwood
If we look through the last 40 games between Arsenal and West Ham we get back to 29 September 2007 and a match for which the result was West Ham 0 Arsenal 1. Put another way, 12.5% of the games have been won by the club who were given their stadium for nothing after the Olympic Games, playing at home.
I doubt that many people will recall many of these 40 games since then, since the results have become as predictable as the refusal of the club to say a proper thank you to British taxpayers for funding their stadium, only asking for an annual payment which is so small no one dares mention it. The only amusing thing to come out of the affair is that a fair number of WHAM supporters seem to want the club to pull out of their contract and go back to their old ground – or at least something like it. But then you can’t actually please everyone. Or in the case of West Ham, anyone.
Since the number of Arsenal defeats to WHAM has been so small, I thought I would look them up, and I found the first was match number 18 in the recent sequence of wins and draws, on 9 August 2015, when the score was Arsenal 0 West Ham 2. The next one was on 12 January 2019 when the score was West Ham 1 Arsenal 0. So as we can see with some of these games, the gap between the WHAM victories was quite a few years.
But then, just as we got used to beating them most of the time, we had an utterly extraordinary event of two defeats to the WHAMs within 58 days. The first was on 1 November 2023 in the League Cup where Wham beat Arsenal 3-1 in the tax payers stadium, (a stadium named after 37,800,000 taxpayers who each paid for a bit of it. Sadly the monument recording our names has never been erected at the stadium, although as an English taxpayer I have petitioned my MP for one to be put up. After all, I doubt there has ever been a stadium paid for by so many for so few.)
But now going back to the football, on 28 December 2023, Arsenal lost at home to WHAM. It really was quite a shock.
Since those two games, we have played four more against WHAM. First off came the revenge game on 11 February 2024, when the score was WHAM 0 Arsenal 6. That was followed on 30 November that year by WHAM 0 Arsenal 5, making a cumulative 11-0 to the Arsenal in two successive games. They got their win (although with significantly fewer goals) on 22 February 2025 in the league with a 0-1 win at Arsenal Stadium, and then this season at home, we were back to normal with a 2-0 win.
But even so, despite the odd defeat, we normally win. In fact, the results show that out of the 154 competitive games between the two clubs, Arsenal have won 49%, with 27% drawn and 24% won by WHAM. A victory ratio that almost makes it worth going to the ground, except I am still waiting for a refund on my tax bill for funding a stadium of a club I don’t like. Asking supporters of other clubs to pay for a club’s new ground seems to push fraternity between supporters a bit too far.
West Ham have been on the ups and downs a bit of late, having won two, drawn one and lost three of their recent games, although they have managed to win the last two league games at home. But perhaps we should add the fact that the BIG win for WHAM was 4-0 at home over Wolverhampton Wands who will (perhaps like WHAM) be in the Championship next season. In fact in the last eight league games between the two clubs, I am not sure that WHAM have won any, but I must admit my eyes started to blur over a bit, so I might have got that wrong. But the general point is that they don’t win many games against Arsenal, either when they have paid for their own ground or been given it by Boris because no one wanted to buy it from him after the Olympics.
In terms of the home and away results, we find
| Pos | Club/venue | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts |
| 16 | West Ham United home | 17 | 5 | 4 | 8 | 24 | 29 | -5 | 19 |
| 1 | Arsenal away | 17 | 9 | 5 | 3 | 27 | 15 | 12 | 32 |
This would most certainly suggest an away win is likely by a score of 0-1 to Arsenal. I’ll take that of course, but it would be rather nice to see a few more goals. What with me having paid my bit toward the building of the stadium.
