Nick Hilton

With parliament in recess, silly season is in full swing. In fact, silly season would be an apt name for the transitional period between the dying days of the previous Premier League season, and the Bacchanalia that greets the opening weekend of the next one. Football’s silly season is a time when Slovenian journalists can sentence Jose Mourinho to three years in jail, when Wales can become (arguably) the third best team in Europe, and when Manchester United can decide that a player – any player – is worth €100 million. That last, silliest of silly season traditions, is the essential contradiction that greets the start of a new season. The return of football has a quotidian significance, like the re-rising of the sun every morning.

The Boleyn Ground, commonly known as Upton Park, has been home to West Ham United since 1904. It stands on Green Street, a road in London that bisects the parishes of East and West Ham. With its slightly tacky fortress-inspired design, it has become a symbol of East London’s resilience against the tide of gentrification and development. Until this summer, that is. West Ham will today play their final match at the Boleyn Ground, because the stadium is due to be bulldozed in order to make way for a trendy block of flats.  Developers are busy drawing up plans for the property, which they purchased in February 2014. Their original designs – which were rejected due to a lack of affordable social housing – looked like something out of J.G.

[audioplayer src="http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/262486539-the-spectator-podcast-erdogans-europe.mp3" title="Roger Alton and Nick Hilton discuss Leicester's title win" startat=1063] Listen [/audioplayer] Jean-Philippe Toussaint, in his recent book Football, observes that the sport is ‘measured and appreciated’ in the imagination. Toussaint, an intellectually fanatical supporter of the Belgian national team, is used to failure. Indeed, he is an acolyte of the view that football support is built on failure. After all, aren’t the grown men and women on the terraces of English stadia simply not good enough for a place on the pitch?