Being A West Ham Fan On Twitter

Twitter is a fantastic app to have. For the most part everyone tweets about useless trollop that in reality no one is particularly bothered about. Come match day, and that all changes. One thing I have found is that it is incredibly hard to find a fan that agrees with everything you tweet about regarding the club. I have also noticed there are different types of fans, something I will come on to during the rest of the article.

There are a couple of subjects that I have noticed, regularly split opinion: Sam Allardyce, Carlton Cole and the Olympic Stadium. It is on these matters where I’ve discovered the different sets of fans. Personally, I have fairly strong views on all these subjects. I think Big Sam is useless, Carlton Cole is a very good striker and that the move to the OS is what the club needs but the owners have dealt with the whole thing atrociously in an effort to protect their own financial wants. If someone disagrees with me (as many do) I don’t start telling them to support another club, insult them or proclaim that I am a better fan than them I just accept it and we move on, we are all West Ham fans at the end of the day.

That is my biggest issue with some fans on twitter. It seems to be more about saying “I am a better fan” or “go support another club” than actually supporting the team. Football is all about differing opinions. We see on this site how people react to someone who has a different opinion to them. As a writer I get frustrated by some of these opinions as we all take the time to write these articles only for someone to say we should go support another club. I have no issue with someone completely disagreeing with me but some fans feel compelled to go the extra mile. It is no different on Twitter.

Those are the negatives of twitter. The positives however far outweigh those negatives. We are undoubtedly the best fan base on twitter. Our banter is the best, we seem to make ourselves trend far more than other teams and on the most part we keep it civil unlike others. I rarely find fans that agree with everything I say but that is the fun of it. It is a forum to listen to and share your own opinion on a potentially global scale. The minority of fans who insult and suggest people should go support another team are just that, a minority. In fact, my life as a West Ham fan would be significantly less interesting if I couldn’t look at and write tweets about it daily.

We also have an owner that has twitter. I would be lying if I said I am a big fan of the David Gold and David Sullivan because I am not but it is nice to be able to tweet him my views, even if I have only been acknowledged once. It offers a connection to the hierarchy of the club, something that many clubs miss out on. One thing we also have over every other team in the world is a legend of the club on Twitter. Carlton Cole’s bantering of Dan Jarvis (@WHUFCJarvo) will go down in the history books.

Life as a football fan is significantly enhanced by having twitter, it brings the whole community closer together, such as when Fabrice Muamba was fighting for his life. As a West Ham fan it brings us closer together as a fan base too, I have never met most if not all of the West Ham fans I tweet yet in many cases we are pretty much mates. Despite the few negatives that I have noticed it is a fantastic, global forum, for West Ham fans to relish in and no other club rivals us as a twitter fan base.