By West Ham’s recent standards, a 2-2 draw is a relatively positive result.

After three defeats in a row, a point is gratefully received. Two goals were scored. Thanks to results elsewhere, a little ground is gained on the teams ahead of them. Brighton are a confusing team, but they were just below the Champions League places a few weeks ago.

Reasons to be cheerful, then?

Not so much. The boos rang out at the final whistle. Nobody was celebrating the point. And that’s because the fans in the London Stadium weren’t reacting to the result.

They were reacting to the performance, which was merely poor rather than the dreadful it has been, but featured numerous attempts to throw anything positive away, not least conceding two penalties.

They were reacting to the substitutions, in particular Callum Wilson’s removal after an hour which neatly coincided with Brighton gaining full control of the match, their own wayward finishing and a few fine saves by Alphonse Areola keeping them from a winner.

But mostly they were reacting to, well, this season. They’re still in the relegation zone. They still haven’t won in eight games. They still have owners that many fans appear to despise. They still have a manager, Nuno Espirito Santo, in whom patience appears to be rapidly disappearing.

West Ham fans are losing patience with Nuno Espirito Santo (Jordan Pettitt/Getty Images)

So in that context, a point isn’t anything to get excited about. You don’t expect a man to thank you for handing him a small cup of water if you’ve been punching him in the face.

Before the game, a video was played on the big screen to remember the West Ham fans and people associated with the club who died in 2025. It was pretty touching and well put together. The fans present were then asked to turn on the lights on their phone, as an added tribute to those who had passed. But the sombre mood was spoiled rather when they played, at ear-splitting volume, the late-90s techno hit Sandstorm by Darude over the PA.

This feels like a club that can’t get anything right at the moment.

---

Stratford station, a little more than 90 minutes before kick-off. West Ham fans are trudging towards the London Stadium, and trudge is very much the word. A single voice pipes up above the shuffling: “IIIIIIIIIIIIRONS!” In happier times, that might have been a rallying cry. These are not happier times. Nobody joins in.

Dean, claret woolly hat protecting him from the cold December night, gives The Athletic a curious look when asked who’s more to blame for the team’s current plight: the owners or the manager. “The owners, mate. It’s the owners.” It’s a little like he’s been asked whether the reason a car isn’t moving is because of the engine being on fire or the radio not working.

To an extent, Nuno is protected because of the magnitude of hatred towards David Sullivan and the rest of the West Ham hierarchy. There were protests against the ownership in September, October and November, and you would think there will be more to come. The fans recognise that you could fuse together Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola and Carlo Ancelotti to form some sort of super manager, and they still wouldn’t get results unless things change upstairs.

Which is not to say people are happy with Nuno. Dean puffs his cheeks out when pressed on the manager. “It isn’t really his fault, but he picks some weird teams.” His friend Jason is of a similar mind. “I feel a bit sorry for him, but things aren’t getting better. Unless something big changes, we’re going down.”

An unscientific survey of other West Ham fans suggests they think Nuno is playing a bad hand badly. He’s working with a strange squad cobbled together to suit three previous contrasting managers, morale within the team seems to be at an all-time low, and in the stands it’s even worse.

And yet team selection is sometimes eccentric. He seems to be making tactical blunders, such as removing Wilson against Brighton, which meant West Ham had no attacking focal point for the final third of the game and thus invited pressure. There is a perception — almost certainly unfair — that he isn’t engaged in the job. Some doubt whether he should have even taken the job without the backroom staff he had at previous clubs.

Callum Wilson reacts to being substituted (Paul Harding/Getty Images)

There remains some patience because of the situation above him and the fact that only David Moyes has really made any sense of West Ham in the past decade or so, but it feels like that is receding.

“Whatever he was going to do, it was going to take a while,” says another fan, Ben, “but now what we need is something quite urgent. And I’m just not sure that is going to happen.”

---

Nobody was expecting Nuno to turn West Ham into Champions League contenders. They might have expected a tighter defence, though: one of the reasons you appoint Nuno is to make things more solid, but he has been involved in one West Ham clean sheet this season, the problem being that he was Nottingham Forest manager at the time, with Graham Potter’s Hammers winning 3-0 at the City Ground back in September. In the 14 games he’s been in his current job, West Ham haven’t kept the opposition out once.

He doesn’t particularly have the tools he did at Forest. There, he had a settled, solid back four. Here, not so much. There, he had Morgan Gibbs-White to create from No 10. Here, he has that in theory, but Lucas Paqueta has been off the pace for months.

There, he had lightning-fast wingers for counter-attacks. Here, he has the inconsistent Crysencio Summerville and not many other sources of real pace. There, he had a goalscoring target man in Chris Wood. Here, he has to deal with the perennial West Ham No 9 curse, some ancient hoodoo that decrees no decent centre-forward will cross the threshold.

But if a manager’s job is to make the best of what’s available to him, Nuno isn’t doing that job. Things are bad, and there isn’t much to suggest they’re going to get better any time soon.

If the levels of blame can be plotted on a moving graph, like the sort that track opinion polls throughout an election campaign, the ‘blame Nuno’ line is getting closer to the ‘blame the owners’ line.

West Ham’s next two games are against two of Nuno’s former clubs, Wolves and Forest. More pertinent than who used to manage them is that they’re two of the other current bottom four. If results don’t come against them, the lines on that graph might come close to meeting.