West Ham are in the Championship, Millwall are back on the fixture list, and the Docker's Derby ended 2-2. Historian and lifelong Hammers fan Max Portman joins the show to ask whether relegation can be liberation, just as it was for 1860 Munich. He argues the club spent forty years chasing commercial success while the East End that produced it dispersed into Essex. What remains is the idea of a community strong enough to pull people back on Saturdays. That tension runs through everything we discuss: a relegation that feels oddly like relief now that David Sullivan is gone, a London Stadium that never feels quite real, and a crest that tells everyone what they already know. It even shapes a Millwall derby whose hatred Max dates to a 1972 testimonial. Along the way: Bobby Moore drinking in his grandparents' pub, why football is one of the last places where we still have to argue with people we disagree with - and FootyCon 2027.
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Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind
Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/
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