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Another one gone, more millions thrown down the drain, the Pellegrini legacy continues to hang over West Ham United.

Manuel Pellegrini was manager for around 18 months, in that time we spent over £170m and that plunge into the transfer market - by far the most dramatic spending spree in our history - haunts us to this day and is one of the main reasons that our current manager David Moyes is so handicapped.




Felipe Anderson has returned to Lazio, he cost circa £36m and we have got about £2m back. This added to the sale in January last year of Sebastien Haller for £22m to Ajax, having cost £45m from Entracht Frankfurt.

The two flagship signings of Pellegrini’s reign gone and on paper that’s a loss of £57m. Of course the deals are not always as they seem, we have avoided paying Lazio the final instalment on the original deal of around £10m, and then there’s the £4m wages we won’t be paying the Brazilian.

Haller’s deal too has seen us bargain away the Ajax contract and get two instalments upfront, about £10m with a bank loan.

All this suggests that our cash flow is a nightmare, we seem to need cash from almost any source these days to avoid being financially embarrassed. Last season we paid 91 per cent of our income in wages and that is not healthy.

All I see these days on various twitter accounts of fans' sites is people begging for the board to spend on improving our squad for Europe, the completed Said Benrahma deal and the Jesse Lingard loan were the only arrivals of any consequence in the January window. And whatever happened to the £20m we were told Moyes had at his disposal back then?

It is surprising the penny, or lack of them, hasn’t dropped for our fans still screaming for £40m deals. We don’t have the money, Covid has not helped but the lavish spending by Pellegrini has holed our finances way below the water line.

And our owners now seem frightened to go down that road again, unwilling as they always seem to sanction such extravagance again.

Moyes will have a plan and a budget, otherwise he would not have signed a new contract. But the figures are way short of what some of our fans expect.

Club sources continually blame Pellegrini for all this, and they are right, but somewhere along the line the board must take responsibility. They signed off the deals, they wrote the cheques. The buck stops in the boardroom.




But Pellegrini should not have been given free reign, his mate the director of football Mario Husillas likewise. And that is David Sullivan’s fault, in my book. The excuse for such latitude was that the fans were calling for a big name and a director of football. And for Sullivan to back away from transfer deals. (You knew it would be all our fault in the end, didn’t you?)

So Sullivan chose a big name. The wrong big name. I take no pride is saying I didn’t want Pellegrini in the first place, and wrote on KUMB accordingly.

There were too many stories about Pellegrini’s spell at Manchester City to make me confident he would be a success at West Ham. He was on his way out a year before he was finally moved on by City, and went to China for the massive pay day.

We persuaded him to return with promises of riches to spend and he brought with him a small army of his South American mates. This was a pay day too good to be true, you could sense was the feeling.

The first season saw us finish 10th, which was OK. But the second campaign was an unfolding shambles.

Pellegrini’s tenure in control saw 15 players signed for the first team squad. The success rate is alarming. Pablo Fornals is the obvious exception to the rule, a very fine young player who we will sell one day at a profit. The rest, though, not so, which is continually our problem.

Issa Diop and Lukasz Fabianski’s moves were already well advanced before Pellegrini arrived, they were Sullivan deals and they have been a success. But the alarm bells were surely already ringing.

Sullivan admitted in a Talksport interview in September 2020 that he had to “bully” Pellegrini to agree to those deals; you may recall the Chilean wanted to install the dreadful Roberto as our number one ‘keeper.

Sullivan also admitted he wished he had blocked some of Pellegrini’s deals. But he’d given him free reign and opted not to go back on that. Fabian Balbuena and Ryan Fredericks have been OK signings, but the rest....

Andriy Yarmolenko, Lucas Perez, Carlos Sanchez, Xande Silva, Roberto, Jack Wilshere, Albian Ajeti and then Sami Nasri were just not good enough - or fit enough, in Yarmolenko’s defence.




Sullivan added: “We chased dreams over the past few years and bought a pile of players who unfortunately have not improved the club. I left it to the previous regime for two years and they didn’t buy well.”

Moyes came in after Slaven Bilic and saved us from the drop, but the board let him go to appoint Pellegrini, a decision now they must seriously regret.

The money that has been spent is terrifying. With expensive contracts and transfer fees, plus no doubt agents’ cuts, the Anderson and Haller deals have probably cost us £100m on the face of it.

And that brings us to the current situation. We are seeing decent mid-range players being snapped up by other Premier League clubs, in particular Leicester.

Moyes seems desperately to be hanging onto whatever money he has to buy the striker we need. It’s noticeable that goalkeeper Seth Johnstone, a long term target and a client of Sullivan’s agent pal Will Salthouse, is now interesting Arsenal. Does that suggest that Salthouse more than anyone in his line of work, knows the score now on our finances?

The situation is so bad it is hard to see a way out of it. We need cash injections but it won’t come from this board. We need to sell, but Sullivan’s price is too high.

It was on the back of this sort of situation that 'GSB Out' was formed, where Hammers United got their strength in numbers from. Everybody can see what needs to be done, but the fear in the back of so many minds is that we will sell Declan Rice to generate any real money.

Terrible I know, there would be uproar amongst the fan base, but one last question for you all: When, in their entire football careers, have Sullivan and David Gold turned down a fee for a player of over £60m? It is just not in their DNA.

But it still does not let Pellegrini off the hook. His legacy will be one of failure, of maybe the club being taken for a ride. Over to you David Moyes, a few more miracles now please.

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