I will admit that I balked and scoffed at the media when they said there would be a mass exodus from West Ham of our best players when we were relegated from the Premier League.
I honestly believed that there would be a couple of exits after the initial 10 out of contract players left. I actually hoped that they would stick to the principle stated on the official website that they were going to retain the younger players and a squad that could get us back into the Premier League. How wrong could I have been?So far we have saved over £10 million on wages and gained £18 million in transfer fees. Even then, we have not cleared our debts (apparently still over £30 million) and we can expect only loan signings. We now have the financial clout and the appeal of a first division side except for maybe 3 or 4 "name" players we could sell. This puts into perspective what a monumentally poor job the board has made in running West Ham United, and they have the audacity the try and placate the fans by halving their wages. Yet they have no qualms about embarrassing the fans time after time after time.
From now on, the fans have to put up with most of our exciting players having gone, loan players going back to their clubs as better players, youth team players being sold as soon as they become any good and substandard players to fill out the rest of the squad. West Ham has effectively become a feeder club to the larger clubs. The board, for years, has shown that they
have no ambition so why would any player sign for such a club, short of
being not good enough to regularly get into their current team's first team line-up?
I have come to realise that perhaps the most important people in the West Ham set-up are not, Terence Brown, Glenn Roeder or any of the players. The biggest revenue stream that this club has, and what we are famed for, is our youth academy. Run by Tony Carr and coached by Kevin Keen. Without this set-up, this club would have collapsed years ago. There would have been no Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard, Joe Cole or Glenn Johnson to sell, and those four players amount to over £40million of profit to the club.
Tony Carr must be the most successful director of a youth team academy outside of Manchester United and we must hope that the club value him as their saving grace for all of their errors. Even if he is not a Hammers fan, it must break his heart to know that any successful player that he and Kevin Keen nurture and make into professional footballers, are highly unlikely to stay at the club. They will never really see the fruits of their labour.
There will be none of their players who will stay at the club long enough to be classed as legends, no homegrown talent to stay any longer than their 24th birthday. But it leaves the fans with no heroes and a bunch of players that to us will always be journeymen.
Instead of wanting their players to become successful and maybe play for their country, many West Ham fans would rather that if they were any good, the rest of the football world never hear's of them, because if they are good and the football world knows about them, they are as good as gone. Our longest serving players must now be Steve Lomas and Ian Pearce, both of whom are decent enough players (for 1st division anyway) but who are hardly
coveted by Premiership clubs or the media and in Lomas' case, not by the KUMB regulars. Neither are from our youth team set up.
Sadder still is the fact that many kids choose West Ham not only because the competition is so fierce at Manchester United's and the other youth academies, but because they must know West Ham's youth set up is the next best thing and that if they become any good, it is not going to be long before one of the top clubs come in for them and they are sold by West Ham. It is very likely that they were never local and never supported West Ham United anyway. Being a West Ham fan makes no difference. Tony Cottee was sold as soon as we finished our highest ever league position and he is West Ham through and through.
When the club talked of retaining youth and stating that that was the way forward, I had visions of Paul Hart at Nottingham Forest doing such a good job with the young players they have in their youth team. Players that have grown up together and worked with each other for years, such as the 5 or 6 Manchester United players that have helped them win many Premier League titles and much more. But no. At West Ham we are destined to sell any good players in order to constantly keep our head above water because of poor management by the club as a whole.
Would it not be the way forward for the club to save on transfer fees, create some sense of unity between the players and for the club and also keep some form of cap on players wages, by retaining the younger players brought up through the club? No, because the club has no ambition and seem happy enough to run purely a business. We know that the next youth team players will not be sold to bolster the squad, they will be sold to either pay off more debts or to rebuild the East stand. At what point are we actually going to see such players being retained? I would say we would be lucky to see it happen in 10-15 years, or whenever the loans and ground re-developments have been paid for.
So I would like for the board to realise that we know exactly how the business of West Ham is to be run. To tick over and put no investment into the team so that we maintain a yo-yo existence between the Nationwide and Premier League (if we are lucky) and continually falter with each cup defeat to lower league opposition. Any modicum of success is to be met with the selling of any assets (good players) and replacing them with more substandard players. It is what has been going on for a long time and because most West Ham fans are so undemanding, that is how it will probably continue whilst the current hierarchy at the club is in charge.
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