Dress it up all you like, but our great club is being led into financial Armageddon by this board. The question now surely is are we seeing the beginning of the end of Sullivanism?
Shock waves resounded through a stunned fan base at the weekend, even though they had been warned constantly that we were in a financial mess, when the long awaited accounts were revealed.Undoubtedly they were far worse than expected, and many fans who don’t take too much interests in the politics of West Ham - and why should they? - were stunned. Our financial mess revealed to the whole football world at virtually the last moment, late afternoon on Friday, the last working day legally they had to be published.
Shocked, embarrassed, distressed, open to ridicule; this is not the way we expect West Ham to be run. And the situation certainly concentrated a few minds.
Of course those accounts were wrapped up in financial and legalese words, and released long after Nuno Espirito Sancho’s press conference ahead of the Liverpool game, suggested a desire to avoid public scrutiny.
There are some who may say that the board have all this under control, they had a plan A and B and even agreement from shareholders to throw money at the crisis... but only after the season ends. Relegation had been factored into the deliberations and WH Holdings Ltd and their Strategic Report - so that was ok, move on now, nothing to see here.
But the ordinary punter out there sees it differently. They trust the shareholders not to get into this mess. There’s an emotional attachment, football is not like any other business to be tossed, shredded and re-financed in the City. Football clubs are community, they have legacy going back over 100 years, families, granddads, fathers, sons and daughters - from the docks to wastelands of Stratford. People feel badly let down.
You own the shares, but it’s our club, we own it and have nurtured it for decades. How dare you run it into the ground, David Sullivan.
Now the model you have chosen is at breaking point. It failed at Birmingham when the council there wouldn’t let you rent the soon-to-be Commonwealth Games stadium. You sold the club to a dodgy Hong Kong-based businessman and used the money to buy West Ham.
Your model is to rent, then loan the club cash at high interest rates, then borrow vast sums to keep the ship on course without spending your own money. We don’t own our stadium, no other Premier League club is run by this medal. You buy and sell players and depend on Sky money to stay afloat. Rinse and repeat and here we are £104m in debt year on year, and with over £300m in debt to service.
And then you have the nerve to throw an expression into your report... ”liquidity shortfall” in the summer of 2026. That’s "can’t pay the frigging bills" to you and me.
Then we get another gem... ”severe but plausible scenario”... that’s "relegation" to the rest of us. No mention of a fire sale, but that’s more than plausible now, isn’t it? We have half-a-dozen players worth selling. Jarrod Bowen, ‘Jimmy’ Summerville, Matty Fernandes, Malick Diouf and Soungoutou Magassa. The rest ? Well, we’ll see there.
We’ve already told the rest of football that’s the position we are in. And we are fighting a relegation battle. But Sullivan has previous for this. Remember him putting Declan Rice up for sale within hours of us winning the Conference League trophy? That was almost three years ago now, some things don’t change.
So it seems our billionaire shareholders will only put money in if we get relegated, when it was quite conceivable for a cash injection in the last window. The rules, it seems, would have allowed that. Or a share issue, but no, folk on that board don’t want to see their share valuation or their overall control of the club decrease. Rather we sink into the Championship.
Now Sullivan and the board are being hammered by the media. George Simms in the Observer hit a nerve. And there was even an attempt by the usual grifting mouthpiece to devalue that article, something about it being pre-written. Only someone who is not a journalist and knows nothing of Sunday paper deadlines would come up with such nonsense.
George asked: “You have to question what Sullivan gets out of maintaining control of West Ham, loathed by fans and unwilling to change. There is little to suggest that Sullivan and Karren Brady have the understanding or inclination to begin a sustainable reconstructure of their crumbling club.
“They are products of a footballing world long dead, railing against a game which has moved beyond their quaint days of favoured agents and unpragmatic pragmatism."
There is no humility, no emotion, no expression of genuine care or sorry from the board. They blame no European football, fewer games on TV. But the people they have employed in key roles, the long list of expensive, inadequate players bought, that’s the reason.
And the buck stops at Sullivan. Some who would say that if they’d given David Moyes a contract to reward that European triumph rather than one they knew he would refuse that ruled him out player selection and signings, things may have been a bit different. Everton are currently eighth in the Premier League.
Yes, Moyes’ league record had raised concerns and other managers in the Premier League would have been sacked for that run. But when it all went pear-shaped we were sixth in the top flight and heading for the quarter-finals in Europe again. That’s how outsiders see us, and that assessment won’t go away.
It’s the core to their being no European football or money now. The real reasons for this current shambles is the decisions over the past couple of years by Sullivan and the board. We are now paying the wages of three managers.
To old timers like me, that bring back memories of when I worked for a living a few decades ago, and witnessed the shambolic decline of Manchester City in the late 1990s. They had five managers in a season, three permanent and two caretakers.
They were, at one time, paying four managers at once and signing a host of inadequate players. They were a lovable circus like us then. And they ended up with two relegations and playing Macclesfield as their local derby. That was way before their current incarnation, of course.
And we are heading that way. Full time CEO Brady will, by the end of this season, have taken £18m in wages from the club. Sullivan (and his late partner David Gold) picked up over £20m in interest payments on their loans to the club. I believe we paid £20m in interest in these accounts to outside lenders.
The figures in the accounts are horrific. The overall debt is £360m. Revenue is down 16 per cent, wages up nine per cent, player purchases £133m, sales £44m, transfer fees owed £196m, wages are 77 per cent of income, turnover is down, broadcasting down, match day revenue down, retail down. It goes on. Ten per cent of our revenue goes on servicing our debt.
And somewhere in there we are playing football. We did OK at Liverpool, but if you can’t defend set-pieces you are dead in this league.
Thankfully the results went our way at the weekend with Spurs and Nottingham Forest losing. With Forest at Manchester City on Wednesday and us at Fulham, there is a god given chance to climb out of the bottom three with a victory.
But we know it should not have come to this. There is a stench of failure hanging over our owners and board. Their incompetence decisions have us where we are, turning round a £57m profit the previous season into a £104.3m loss last time around. Takes some doing, that.
No amount of clever words and bland explanations can wipe away this stench of failure. You have to wonder how Sullivan and Brady live with all this.
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