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There are few sentences in football more likely to produce simultaneous excitement and suspicion than: “The new owner has a plan...”

At West Ham, plans have historically enjoyed roughly the same life expectancy as a January signing. They arrive with considerable optimism, are accompanied by impressive vocabulary about ambition, sustainability and moving to the next level, and are generally missing by Easter.




So when Daniel Kretinsky increased his stake in West Ham to 46 per cent and became the club's largest shareholder, there was naturally a brief outbreak of hope. Here, perhaps, was a man with a plan. Then everyone remembered they supported West Ham.

Kretinsky has been involved since 2021, when he bought his original 27 per cent stake, so he has had plenty of time to discover what he has actually bought. He is a Czech billionaire with interests in energy, infrastructure, media and other industries in which the business plan presumably survives longer than a football season.

Previous chair David Sullivan retains around 40 per cent, so this is not a clean sweep of the boardroom, but Kretinsky is now the largest shareholder and is expected to take a more active role.

That is significant because he has inherited a club which managed the remarkable feat of finishing sixth in the Premier League, qualifying for Europe, winning a major European trophy and then getting relegated, all while giving the impression that the long-term strategy was being kept in a locked filing cabinet to which nobody had the key.

West Ham have spent 13 consecutive seasons in the Premier League before finally finding the trapdoor. The club has suffered enormous financial losses, endured repeated arguments over recruitment and structure, and somehow made the phrase “long-term strategy” sound like something whispered by a man trying to sell you a timeshare.

Kretinsky has therefore inherited not a blank sheet of paper but a manuscript on which several people have been writing simultaneously, occasionally using crayons. His first task is to establish who is actually holding the pen.


The revolutionary concept of letting football people run football



The modern football club is supposed to have a sporting structure in which the manager manages, recruitment recruits, the sporting director oversees the football operation and the owner supplies the money and strategic direction without attempting to pick the team from the directors' box.

This is not revolutionary. It is how a great many successful clubs operate. At West Ham, however, the idea has sometimes seemed to occupy the same position as the Loch Ness Monster: frequently discussed, occasionally sighted and never entirely convincing.

Kretinsky appears to favour a more conventional model, with greater expertise and clearer responsibility inside the football operation. Reports of his plans have centred on strengthening recruitment and bringing in experienced executives. If that develops into a structure in which scouting, analytics, recruitment, the academy and first-team management are genuinely coordinated, it would represent a substantial change.

The important word is responsibility. An owner can spend as much as he likes, but if everyone at the club has a slightly different idea of what the money is supposed to achieve, the result is merely an expensive form of confusion.

Kretinsky's greatest temptation will be to become involved precisely because he can. You spend an enormous amount of money buying a football club, watch a few matches and eventually find yourself wondering why the manager continues to select a left-back who couldn't cross a road without a satnav.

This is how owners become managers without ever intending to. If Kretinsky really wants to change West Ham, one of the most useful things he can do may be to appoint good football people and then leave them alone.


First, get back up



There is, of course, a small administrative matter to deal with first. West Ham need to return to the Premier League.

Promotion from the Championship is hardly automatic, however much money is sitting in the bank. The division has a tiresome habit of ignoring reputations and making established clubs discover the precise meaning of the word “scrap”. For West Ham, promotion is therefore the immediate objective. But the more interesting question is what happens afterwards.

There would be little point in spending a season getting back into the Premier League only to resume the old cycle of expensive recruitment, vague planning and annual anxiety over which end of the table is becoming uncomfortably close.

Kretinsky presumably wants a club capable of staying in the Premier League without regarding 17th place as a triumph of strategic management. That requires more than money. It requires a coherent football operation and the discipline to stick with it.


The London Stadium problem



Then there is the stadium. The London Stadium has given West Ham more seats, more revenue and considerably more room in which supporters can discuss whether they can actually see the pitch. It has also never entirely escaped the feeling that the club moved into somebody else's house and has been trying to convince itself that it owns the furniture.

Upton Park was cramped, inconvenient and probably violated several principles of modern crowd management. But it was unmistakably West Ham. The London Stadium is commercially valuable, and it is not going anywhere. Kretinsky therefore has to make it feel like a home rather than simply an asset.

That cannot be achieved by corporate hospitality alone. The supporters need to feel that the stadium belongs to them, and that the club has an identity beyond the size of its annual turnover.
This is partly a football problem and partly a cultural one, which makes it rather more difficult than buying a player.


And Sullivan is still there



There is also the small matter of David Sullivan.

Kretinsky's increased stake changes the balance of power, but Sullivan retains around 40 per cent. This is not the clean break with the past that some supporters might have imagined. The old regime has not disappeared; it has simply acquired a new centre of gravity.

The danger is that the ownership structure becomes another source of West Ham drama. The club has had enough boardroom intrigue to fill several seasons of Succession. What it needs now is clarity: somebody has to decide what West Ham are trying to become and create a structure capable of delivering it.


What does Kretinsky actually want?



We cannot know all of that yet, because Kretinsky has not published a manifesto, mercifully, but the broad outline is fairly clear. He appears to want a valuable, sustainable Premier League club, professionally run, with stronger recruitment, a better football structure and an academy capable of contributing to the first team.

He presumably wants commercial growth as well, because billionaires are rarely celebrated for their belief that money should remain where they found it. None of this is especially romantic. But supporters are not shareholders in an energy company. They want to win football matches.

They want ambition that can be seen on the pitch rather than in a PowerPoint presentation. They want players who understand what the shirt means and a club whose decisions appear to have some connection with one another.

Most of all, they want to know that somebody is actually in charge. That may be Kretinsky's greatest opportunity.


A rare chance to start again



Relegation has done something that West Ham have spent years avoiding: it has removed the camouflage.

The club needs promotion, a rebuilt squad and a more coherent football operation. The stadium remains an unresolved part of the club's identity, while the ownership structure has changed without quite becoming simple.

That is an unpleasant position to inherit, but it is also an unusually good moment in which to make fundamental changes. Kretinsky can spend his time trying to disguise the cracks, or he can use relegation as the point at which West Ham genuinely changes direction.

The second option would require patience, because there will be defeats, transfer-window hysteria, players who fail to score and at least one supporter announcing that he has finally had enough, usually while renewing his season ticket.

None of that matters very much. What matters is whether the club underneath the noise is becoming better organised, more coherent and more difficult to derail. That is the real test of Kretinsky. Not how much he spends. Not how impressive the next signing looks on YouTube. Not how many times the word “ambition” appears in the club's next statement.

The test is whether, five years from now, West Ham are still having the same arguments about who is running the football club, how players are recruited and what the plan actually is.

If they are, Kretinsky will have bought a football club without changing it. If they aren't, he may have done something rather more difficult. He may have turned West Ham into a club that knows what it is doing.

For West Ham supporters, that would be almost unbearably exotic. Which is probably why we should start worrying.

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