So this horrible, heartbreaking season goes to the death. One last chance at the London Stadium for West Ham to save their Premier League lives.
Watching Spurs fighting for their lives at Chelsea, seven minutes of injury time and they lose. The anguish goes on, we have to beat Leeds on Sunday and David Moyes’ Everton have to win at Spurs. It’s as painful and, frankly, unlikely as that.After the shambles at Newcastle when Nuno Espirito Santo got his tactics and team selection so badly wrong it looked like we were dead. It’s been like that ever since Nuno walked through the door. He’s been in charge now for 34 games, winning just eight.
It’s been dreadful to watch, and it’s still got one game to go to avoid the seventh relegation in our history and to avoid the financial Armageddon that will follow, a fire sale of anybody and everybody, a shocking debt built up by David Sullivan and his board that defies words. The incompetence that has us in this situation is on him.
You must wonder how Sullivan will be received by West Ham fans on Sunday when this dismal, disastrous season finally crumbles to dust.
It’s odds on, I’m sure you all can see, that we are probably destined for the Championship, it’s out of our hands . Five of the six relegations we have suffered have been in my lifetime and one - so far - has been the responsibility of Sullivan. One so far in 15 years from the Premier League to add to the two he masterminded in his tenure as owner, with the late David Gold, from their days owning Birmingham City.
Karren Brady, who has done a runner before the shit hits the fan - literally - has been there for the duration, she’s made a fortune on the back of Sullivanism but at least she managed to find a husband at Birmingham, so it’s not all bad is it.
Three relegations on his CV, maybe two with us by the time the dust settles on Sunday. We all live in hope, pray for the miracle that has been beyond us so far. You’ll struggle to find an owner/chairman in football who has been in charge of clubs with three demotions from the top flight. I’m sure some clever dick out there will try to find comparisons, I’ll wait.
But it’s repeat, serial offending. Sullivan runs on Sky money, pay day loans over and over again, short-term policies, no forward planning, just keep the club ticking over with outside money. He spent £700,000 to buy Birmingham out of administration and then sold the club to a dodgy Hong Kong businessman for £82m. You can just hear Del Boy singing “Lovely jubbly“ can’t you.
Of course there was all the porn and mucky magazines, crappy newspapers, call lines and God knows what else. But any regular readers of my nonsense knows what I think of all that malarkey.
Then with Gold he spends the money from the Birmingham sale on buying West Ham for, eventually, about £80m. There was around £25m in loans to the club at laughable interest rates, and the pair took out over £23m in interest eventually, when Daniel Kretinsky bought into the club.
So if you want to be really nasty, you could say Sullivan has invested diddly squat of his own money into the club, just used the profits from the sale of Birmingham. Now there are those who rate that as goods business, and it probably does if you are just knocking out (sorry) porn, but when it’s a football club that’s a different story.
There’s community, legacy, love and care. There’s more to it than turning over a few shares. To him it’s just business. To use it’s something entirely different. This guy has sold our Upton Park home, and then seen it flipped for a £20m profit. We are now at a rented stadium which almost everyone hates for a variety of reasons.
Our landlords would gladly see the back of us and the ridiculous deal that Tory peer Brady negotiated with the then Tory leader of London, who was about to launch a bid to become Tory party leader and prime minister and didn’t want for a second the costs of an Olympic Stadium hanging round his neck.
There had been some Tory party donations from Sullivan and Gold too. You can see why I’m just a little pissed off with these people!
Sullivan has never seen West Ham United as anything more than an investment. I recall reading an article about him boasting that sits in his kitchen in his pants in the morning dealing with his broker for the folding money. You can see him doing that with a favoured agent and a possible transfer deal.
In the week when we celebrate winning the European Cup Winners Cup back in 1965 and the play-off victory at Wembley in 2005, the only time we’ve played in a ‘final’ at Wembley since 1980, we could confront the shattering, financially, ruin from the top flight. The fire sale of virtually all the first team, and the lies about world class stadium and world class team go up in smoke.
This relegation seems far worse, potentially far more damaging than the previous six. My old fella watched us go down in 1932, William White was chairman and Syd King the manager. We lost the last seven on the trot.
It was 1978 the next time, Reg Pratt the chairman and John Lyall the boss. Liverpool put us out of our misery that season. We needed to win that last day match to say up but lost 2-0. Trevor Brooking, Billy Bonds, Alan Devonshire, Alvin Martin and Bryan 'Pop' Robson were in the side that day and I watched it with a scouse mate in the Chicken Run, when you could do such things. It ended 20 years in the top flight.
It happened again in 1989, again it was Liverpool who finished us off and Lyall was sacked soon after. Bonds was manager the next time, in 1992 and Martin Cearns was the chairman. In 2003 it was Terry Brown as chairman and Brooking as caretaker manager when we went down at Birmingham with 42 points. Joe Cole, David James and Paolo Di Canio played that day, Michael Carrick was injured. We lost one of the last 11, that being at Bolton to big Sam, and that was the difference.
And now we get to Sullivan’s era. In 2011, a shambolic season under Avram Grant ended with 3-2 defeat at Wigan when we had been 2-0 ahead. Grant was sacked in the corridor and told to find his own way home, a nice classy touch from Brady that, but Scott Parker refused to let that happen and Grant was spared the indignity of hitching a lift.
I recall getting back Manchester Piccadilly that day and the biggest cheer from right around the station came when Grant’s sacking was announced.
And here we are again under Sullivan’s cheapskate reign. Another relegation staring us in the face , after three managers in one season. A nightmare from the start. They’ll be another fire sale, more transfers for Sullivan to get his hands on and who knows what in the future.
Almost three years to the week that we won a European trophy in Prague under David Moyes, Sullivan announced Declan Rice would be sold within 24 hours of the final whistle. Since then Sullivan and the board have squandered the platform that had been created to progress the club.
We are £104m in debt, have another predicted £80m loss to come, we owe approaching £200m in unpaid transfer fees and the £105m Rice fee has been criminally wasted. Sullivan has employed nine managers in 16 years and is constantly blamed for transfer interference, using the same agent mates while we are light-years behind the progress made by smaller clubs like Brighton, Bournemouth, Brentford and Crystal Palace in development.
Clubs who are smarter, have serious professional expertise in the background, make intelligent investment in players who have been scouted, assessed and bought.
We may well have spent pushing £400m in transfers over the recent years, but it’s not relevant, it’s what you buy and why. We have employed and sacked a director of football, we have an interim CEO. The commercial director has gone and the financial director is retiring. Sometimes you can see why!
Sullivan has faced a season-long campaign from fans to get him out, 'No more BS' is the call, but we seem to get more rather than less of that, considering the tittle tattle pushed out by the board to the grifters who spin the narrative to the fans.
The claim is we have no proper home, a inadequate training ground, and no direction for the club, its identity and soul as been sacrificed. And that's on you Sully. There have been several relegation near misses, and we have been sold a dream that is little more than a nightmare. And the majority of fans despise you for it.
Four relegations in 60 years at Upton Park have been followed by two in 23 years, and Sullivan is responsible for one, he must pray not another. Since Moyes left in 2024, we have won just 20 of 76 league matches. That’s the sum total of Nuno Espirito Santo, Graham Potter and Julen Lopetegui’s efforts.
And Moyes - effectively forced out by Sullivan with a derisory contract offer the Scot was bound to reject because it removed him from transfer business - wanted to sign Harry Maguire, Scott McTominey, Ashley Barnes and Amadou Onana but was blocked on them all. They might have made a difference, don’t you think?
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We will all be there on Sunday, 62,000 desperate for a victory. A few miles across north London another 60,00 plus desperate souls will have prayers of their own. That they don’t lose to Everton. Can we rely on our boss Moyes for a helping hand?
I believe so, Moyes will never allow them to be on the beach already.
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