Penny for those thoughts now Jarrod Bowen. Some might say you agreed to a new contract to stay at West Ham to help the fight for an immediate return to the Premier League. Now someone has moved the goalposts.
Some might say you’ve been mugged, just slightly, now that the change of ownership you expected with Daniel Kretinsky taking control of the club isn’t going to happen as you were assured.
That flight to Prague, those confidence-boosting talks with Kretinsky and his mate Jiri Svarc, that reassuring interview for the fans on the club’s website. All for nothing, it seems.
Those goalposts have been moved by joint chair Vanessa Gold now she’s been offered, and accepted, £150m for her 25 per cent stake in the club from Amanda Staveley rather than the agreed deal for £90m for 16 per cent from Kretinsky.
Some might say that Vanessa is not going to turn down £150m. They may also say Bowen has got to live with it, regardless of whether he approves, or whatever he was told by Kretinsky, no doubt about transfers and a serious blitz to get straight back into the top flight.
He might also question how we have got to this stage. How long has Vanessa Gold known about the potential new deal? I mean, Staveley has been on the scene one way or another since before Bowen’s trip to Prague. Had Kretinsky foreseen what was going to happen?
Either way, Bowen could be forgiven for being a touched miffed. That’s already been suggested by the Kretinsky camp, who have also claimed the Czech sees Gold’s actions as “destabilising.” It’s certainly not helped the build-up to the new season.
Vanessa Gold’s own version was that “other alternatives that we had discussed could not be brought into fruition.” I'd love to know what that really meant.
It’s even been suggested that the Staveley deal was leaked to give Kretinsky the ‘hurry up’ over his own dealings with Gold. He doesn’t say much, but the words from his spokesman certainly carried that sentiment he was annoyed.
There are many who feel Kretinsky has brought this on himself, being slow to complete the deal with Gold, initially struck on 12 June, although the ‘pre-emption’—under which existing shareholders have the option to buy the shares instead—had just been concluded when Staveley marched in with her bid on Saturday.
Now we are being told that the same process will swing into operation for the latest bid and that could take another couple of months.
But Kretinsky has still been embarrassingly caught with his eyes off the ball—in full public gaze—and is left with a stark choice: buy his proportional percentage, around 36% of Gold’s 25.1%, which would cost him another £50m. And there are two rounds of this battering.
But will he? I doubt Kretinsky enjoys being pushed around, or bounced into shelling out more money. But he has constantly said he doesn’t want to become the majority shareholder. Yet he has to do something or Staveley will walk all over him. She could buy Gold’s 25.1% and then turn her attention to David Sullivan’s 38%. Nobody should forget his part in all this.
Suggestions recently that he was still ‘involved’ in the club were quickly shouted down. Twice in a fortnight. Nobody, though, had suggested he was involved any more in the day-to-day running of the club, although his two sons are still on the board.
But I’m sure you will find it hard to believe he has known nothing about all this. In fact, Staveley’s offer to Gold has inflated the share price, which will also mean Sullivan’s shares are worth more too. He has seen them drop in value since relegation and he could easily sit on them to see if West Ham do get promotion, therefore restoring his holding to Premier League level.
Whatever! He could find himself as queen/king maker if Staveley and Kretinsky are still battling for control of the club.
All that could be for the future, or quickly if the deal gathers pace. But what Kretinsky can’t now avoid is the fact that he has been hit by the swirling media circus that surrounds Staveley in such situations.
She is a fixer, the blonde front-of-house representing groups wanting to buy into football clubs. Liverpool, Manchester City and more recently Newcastle have been her targets. She is reputed to have bid for Spurs last season.
She fronts bids, negotiates and advises over deals, drawing on wealth from the US, Middle East and Far East. The move for West Ham comes with support from a US company, Ashland Forest Capital Partners, believed to be Chicago based.
The PR campaign has gathered pace over the weekend, much of it anti-Kretinsky, playing on fans' frustration over a so-far dreadful window. Half-a-dozen first team squad players have left, three more including Niclas Fullkrug and Jean-Clair Todibo are soon to follow with Academy star Freddie Potts, to the shock of fans, likely to join Bruges for £10m. None of these players have been replaced.
At this stage it’s hard to take sides in all this. The unedifying image is very rich people fighting over share prices, control of a great club, with little or no regard for the fans, 50,000 of whom have renewed their season tickets, many in the belief that the Sullivan era was over.
On one side you have Kretinsky, a multi-billionaire with a reputation for buying failing companies, and with that added claim that he may have had to deal with Putin a while back. Pipelines and all that.
As for Staveley, there’s always the glare of the spotlight, the media, PR fanfare and with that reality that she was instrumental in Saudi money taking over Newcastle. That was to the shock of the rest of the Premier League, who initially refused to ratify the deal.
It is alleged that it took a phone call from Riyadh to a top politician in the Tory government of the time to get that decision changed.
For both sides in this situation, it is the stadium and the land around it in Stratford that is the real prize. It is also suggested that part of Staveley’s consortium are financiers of the Collosseum NBA franchise arena, costing £1billion, that is proposed on the Olympic site.
We are told that Staveley has the backing and the finances to take West Ham to a higher level. Kretinsky would likely say the same, but at slower pace without the circus we’ve experienced this weekend.
This all could drag on for two months. Not the right way to start this crucial season, is it?
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