Who do you think you are kidding Mr Sullivan if you think we want this deal done?
“David Sullivan likes to talk,” five words uttered as a short but somewhat poignant answer by the current West Ham manager Slaven Bilic to a question in a club press conference about Sullivan’s claims Bilic was offered Renato Sanchez and Grzegorz Krychowiak before the transfer window shut this summer as additions to his playing squad. Maybe unsurprisingly Bilic hasn’t been the only person to have had something to say about Sullivan this summer. What might have started out as a polite orderly queue turned into an almighty scramble as people jostled for position – mostly it has to be said in Portugal where more than a few noses had been pushed out of joint by the West Ham co-owner. I suspect the only person to say something nice about David Sullivan this summer was actually David Sullivan himself as he stared longingly into the mirror at his reflection and a la Kojak circa 1970s, gave himself a little wink and said “Who loves ya baby.” (One for the kids there ladies and gentleman). What has been said has been far from complimentary – Take the words of Sporting Club de Portugal Director Nuno Saraiva who stated in a Facebook post that Sullivan was amongst other things a “lying parasite.” Saraiva strongly rebutted Sullivan’s claims that West Ham had made an offer for their Portuguese international William Carvalho. I suspect Saraiva nearly choked on his morning cornflakes when Sullivan then made further claims that the Portuguese giants had returned on deadline day stating that they were prepared to now accept the original offer for their player which according to them had never arrived with the club in the first instance. Since that time it’s fair to say that the row has escalated just a little bit on both sides with Sullivan boldly stating his intentions to take legal action against Saraiva. Sporting’s President Bruno de Carvalho then stood with a 20 litre jerry can in hand and proceeded to pour even more fuel onto what was now becoming a towering inferno by stating that West Ham fans call Sullivan one of the “dildo brother’s.” Yes ladies and gentleman if you somehow managed to miss that during this summer’s transfer window you did read that right – David Sullivan – one half of the dildo brother’s. Bubbles may not be the only thing being blown at the stadium of London this season. Even West Ham manager Bilic admitted to being amused by the quote and felt no inclining towards hiding his mirth from his employers.
Sporting asked for proof of an official bid by West Ham for their player and so David Sullivan released what is claimed to be a set of emails sent to Sporting offering the sum of 25 million euros for a player with a release clause believed to be set at 38 million euros. If that wasn’t seemingly rank amateurish enough, the email finishes with the line ‘We wish to conclude this ASAP or we’ll be borrowing aplayer from PSG’ (sic). As a West Ham fan you’d have to hope that these emails were mocked up and fictitious because quite frankly they give the air of having been written by a small poorly educated child and certainly not the co owner of a Premier League football club. Had they genuinely been received and read by anyone at Sporting they could easily be forgiven for thinking that they had been sent by an 8 year old with nothing better to do in their summer holidays and access to their parent’s laptop for ten minutes.
So who to believe in this story and maybe more importantly should more spotlight be thrown onto West Ham’s co-owner David Sullivan and the way he operates within his multitude of roles at West Ham United Football Club and his distinct lack of business acumen when it comes to striking a deal for the club? If you are a fan of any other club other than West Ham would you want David Sullivan as your de facto Director of Football? I seriously doubt it especially if those emails are genuine and the success of perceived lack of it during recent transfer windows since he and David Gold took ownership.
However let’s start by looking at the Sporting President Bruno de Carvalho the other main protagonist in the Carvalho story from the summer. For those of you who aren’t
familiar with him he is probably best known in Portuguese football for being to my knowledge the only club President who has sat on the bench during a game alongside the coaching staff and substitutes as if this was perfectly normal behaviour. This wasn’t just for one game however, this was for an entire season or possibly even two. He has finally stopped doing it now but I became so used to the spectacle that it just became normal after a while. To put it into context though it’s unedifying a sight as Alan Pardew doing his infamous celebration dance on the touchline of Wembley after his then Crystal Palace side had scored in the FA Cup final. de Carvalho is probably most famous for his alleged sacking of the now Watford boss Marco Silva four days after leading them to success in the Taça da Portugal for his failure to wear an official club suit though exactly how true that is you’d surmise only Silva and the club will ever actually know. It is though as you can tell fair to suggest that de Carvalho isn’t your run of the mill club President. Yet don’t let these two examples fool you into thinking that de Carvalho runs the club in anywhere near the same way that Sullivan appears to run West Ham. Sure you can tag him as being a slightly oddball figure but when it comes to transfer dealings it wouldn’t be remiss of me to suggest that he would give Spurs’ Daniel Levy a run for his money in the pain in the arse to deal with stakes.
It’s probably worth noting that Sporting are listed as a public company on the Euronext exchange and I mention this because concluded transfers whether buying or selling by the Portuguese club have to be announced under regulation to the stock exchange so the figures quoted in the media can be given as a more accurate representation than compared to those figures given to deals concluded by West Ham. This in turn is important when giving consideration to whether Sporting would have returned to West Ham on the last day of a transfer window to accept a bid for their player of 13 million euros less than what the release clause fee is in his contract. We often see the tag undisclosed fee used in transfers in the English market. This will be used for example where one club has paid well over the odds for a player and doesn’t want to admit it in public or maybe the complete opposite whereby a club has sold an asset well below his actual market value. It’s a lovely way to hide things from the fans quite frankly yet isn’t a luxury afforded to publicly listed football clubs. Whilst incredibly rare here there are examples in the English game however, for example Manchester United who have to do the same with the New York stock exchange.
So whilst the Carvalho transfer never materialised, one deal that did go ahead on transfer deadline day (well for all intents and purposes and not without its subsequent problems) was for the Sporting skipper Adrien Silva to Leicester City who joined the club in a deal that was valued at £27 million with the initial payment due of £18.3 million. The subsequent problem for the player and Leicester is that the deal was concluded 14 seconds after the deadline passed which has left the player in limbo and having to appeal to F.I.F.A in an attempt to get the players registration sorted to enable him to play. How true the following claims are I don’t know because I wasn’t party to the negotiations but it has been claimed by sources at the English club that the holdup was due in part to de Carlvaho’s insistence over part of the deal which was worth 200,000 euros. Now this might seem paltry to a Premier League club, but given the precarious financial nature of Portuguese football, every penny – or euro in this case really does count. I think the important part to consider here when looking at any claims Sullivan is making about Sporting on transfer deadline day wanting to accept their alleged bid for Carvalho is that the initial payment for Silva was 18.3 million pounds sterling. If Sullivan’s emails are genuine then West Ham offered a down payment of 8.333 million euros by way of comparison for a player I repeat who not only had a release fee of 38 million euros in his contract but for whom the total offer was 13 million euros less than his asking price. de Carvalho is a shrewd negotiator who will extract the best deal for his club. If the transfer of Silva to Leicester doesn’t prove that then the transfers of Islam Slimani to the same club twelve months earlier and João Mário to Italian giants Internazionale will surely only add weight to de Carvalho’s claims at the end of the day that Sullivan aka one half of the dildo brother’s is to put it another way talking out of his backside. Oh and for reference when Sporting sold Mario last summer to Inter for a fee of 45 million euros it made the player the most expensive Portuguese player ever sold by a Portuguese club. Are we really going to believe Sullivan’s claims when taking all of this into consideration?
That fee of 45 million euros was added to by the club record fee of £30 million that Leicester parted with for the Algerian striker Slimani, a deal that took the Midlands club around three months to get over the line as de Carvalho refused to be moved from the clubs asking price. Maybe it would be worth asking Leicester’s hierarchy whether or not they think de Carvalho would have contacted Sullivan on the final day of the transfer window to allegedly accept a deal for a figure significantly less than the value placed upon him by Sporting.
One envisages that the easiest way for Sullivan to back up his claims would have been to provide evidence of Sporting’s contact with West Ham saying they were willing to accept the bid for Carvalho. It has been claimed by certain parties that the emails leaked to the English press were sent to agents said to have links with the Portuguese international but given the names in the email have been redacted this cannot be confirmed or denied. Surely if you were genuinely bidding for a player you send the bid to the club especially if you didn’t want to be accused of tapping up a player. Unless the selling club agrees permission for you to talk to their player then anything else would be considered an illegal approach. OK every club seemingly does it, there’s no secret that it probably goes on in 99.9% of transfers conducted using a raft of ways but the fact remains that it is for now still an illegal approach.
Going back to the threats from Sullivan to sue Saraiva it’s worth noting that Sullivan has previous form for pulling the same stunt after threatening to sue the then Crystal Palace
owner Simon Jordan over comments he made over Karren Brady. Maybe someone should tell Sullivan that simply trumpeting about threatening legal action and then letting it all die down without moving it on doesn’t mean that people won’t remember in the months and years to come especially living in a digital age where google can recall reporting of such claims from years past in the fraction of a second.
For me part of the problem with Sullivan lies in the fact that he seems like the type of man who would end up paying full price for a DFS sofa. Whilst I can’t knock the fact that he’s made an awful lot of money during his lifetime through various means (mostly porn), his dealings in terms of running a football club can be best described as … well quite frankly a little bit shit. Some fans will no doubt argue the opposite of this opinion and they’re entitled to that opinion. I don’t exactly know why you’d hold that opinion but still…
It’s been said for example in some quarters recently that Sullivan and co-owner David Gold have stopped West Ham from continuing to be a selling club as if it was the pair that had made the real difference. One could easily argue however that apart from the now departed Dimitri Payet there really hasn’t been a wealth of talent for other clubs to come circling over like vultures, so can the point be argued to be really valid? I think a couple of seasons back the interest from clubs like Liverpool for Winston Reid was genuine enough before he signed a new contract but anything else for any other player has seemingly just been paper talk.
Whilst de Carvalho was swelling his clubs coffers over in Portugal last summer, Sullivan by comparison was behind some truly awful transfer deals – one’s moreover which were costing the clubs coffers a pretty penny or two. Let’s compare the previous summer which coincided with the move to the London Stadium and throw Bilic’s words back into the mix where we began “David Sullivan likes to talk.” The summer of 2016 was lorded by Sullivan as the beginning of an era which will see West Ham challenging for Champions League football and where marquee signings were promised. Sullivan failed with bids for Michy Batshuayi, Alexandre Lacazette and Christian Benteke. When AC Milan accepted his bid for Carlos Bacca the player flatly turned the move down. However all was not lost for Sullivan who did a deal with reigning Italian league champions Juventus for their forward Simone Zaza, a player who spent the latter part of his summer being ridiculed around the world for his bizarre penalty miss playing for Italy against Germany at Euro 2016.
The Italian striker played only a bit part for Juventus the previous season having signed from Sassuolo; a club that prior to the 2013/14 season had never played in Italy’s top flight of Serie A. His goal record in Italy was hardly prolific giving him a return of a goal in every three games during his time at both Sassuolo and Juventus. Given the list of names in the pecking order above the Italian striker at Juventus they were probably rubbing their hands together at the chance of selling him onto a Premier League club and a deal was struck whereby an initial loan fee of £5 million would be added to by a fee of a further £20 million once the player had completed a certain number of appearances for the Hammers. Now given the players poor penalty at Euro 2016 had been part of the reason his national team had crashed out of the tournament and the absolute hammering he’d taken with meme’s galore on social media it would be fair to suggest Zaza’s confidence might not have been at its greatest ebb when he joined the club. Poor old Simone had become a laughing stock around the world and if you’ve never seen the penalty miss in question I would suggest you take two minutes out of your busy day and google it to see why. A season long loan deal with an option to buy would have allowed the player time to hopefully find his feet and prove his worth in a new country and potentially win himself a permanent deal. It’s very rare a player hits the ground running a la Payet in their first season in the Premier League and hundreds of players have taken a season or more to adjust to the pace of the English game. So taking that into account and these are quite obvious factors here, why did Sullivan agree to such a poorly structured deal that would ultimately cost West Ham £5 million for 11 appearances? A five year old asked to perform due diligence on the deal could have surely predicted that Zaza would need at least a season to adjust to playing in a new league especially with his confidence low after a disastrous summer. Yet here we have a deal which including the players wages which were said to be around the £70,000 a week mark saw the Hammers end up paying over half a million pounds per performance in which the striker scored a grand total of 0 goals before Bilic was forced to stop selecting the player because of the deal struck with Juventus to buy the player outright after a ridiculously low number of games. As I said surely the sensible option would surely have been to agree a loan fee for a season long loan with an option to buy especially given that the player had only made a total of 19 appearances prior to signing for Juventus.
Sure everyone is allowed to make mistakes in life, after all no one is perfect whatever some may think of themselves. However most mistakes aren’t costing millions over and over and the Zaza experiment gone wrong is just one in a long back catalogue of disasters all of which to my mind stem from David Sullivan.
Whilst Hammers fans won’t forgive me for saying so surely a huge part of the blame for the fiasco which saw Dimitri Payet leave the club in the winter transfer window has to be laid at the door of Sullivan. During the summer before his departure in such acrimonious circumstances we are lead to believe that the player made it very clear to the clubs owners that he wasn’t happy and wanted to return to his native France. Sullivan rather than show any degree of empathy with Payet responded by giving him a £1 million loyalty bonus in the September and told the player he was going nowhere. So again to reiterate the point, the player asked to return home and not for the loyalty bonus.
Now before you read this please bear in mind I know that Payet ended up engineering his move away from the club but also factor into account that West Ham didn’t have to sell the player in the January window. As examples we subsequently have seen Southampton and Liverpool turn down offers for Vigril van Dijk and Philippe Countinho off the back of inflated TV deals for all Premier League clubs.
In the case of Payet we are lead to believe that he didn’t want to leave Olympique de Marseille to come to West Ham in the first place and apparently he accepted the move because the French side were in huge financial difficulties knowing that for the club the offer would be too great to turn down. This may surprise some but not everything in life comes down to money in terms of what they can earn as a player as a reason for moving clubs. If true then Payet sacrificed himself for the good of Marseille at that time. Anyway he accepts the deal as we know and his wife and young family come over to a new country. On the pitch everything is going perfectly but off the pitch things don’t go so well and his family struggle to adapt to their new surroundings. They return to France in the summer for Euro 2016 and in doing so he sees first hand that his family are instantly happier to be back close to family and friends and the emotional pressure starts to ramp up on the player. This culminated in the tears we saw when he scored the winning goal in France’s opening game against Romania. With every day that passes the player finds himself more in a crux and he decides that for the sake of his family he will ask the club for a move back to France. However back in London David Sullivan has been telling anyone that will listen that he is going to bring marquee signings to West Ham, after all here’s a man that suddenly has thousands of extra season tickets that need selling in a shiny brand new stadium. Just one problem none of them want to come to the Hammers and so the club set about ensuring the season to come will be all about their star player who unbeknown to them is about to come knocking on the bosses door and admit he isn’t happy and for the sake of his family wants to move back to France. The board however dismiss the notion straight out of hand knowing that they’ll be lynched by the fans having failed to sign a single one of their big name targets if they let their star player leave however unhappy he may be. So they throw even more money at him, having already given the player a new contract back in the February before Euro 2016 and offer him a £1 million loyalty bonus and tell him to get on with things and that leaving is out of the question. Why give an unhappy player more money? Well now they have ammunition to throw at the player should things really turn sour. They can point to the fact that they made Payet the highest paid player in the clubs history, that they’ve given him a million pounds on top of that and question how dare he repay them with such bad behaviour if he steps out of line which as we know he ultimately ended up doing. As we saw the fans became irate at the player and Sullivan and co had a perfectly managed get out clause making them to appear to be the innocent party in the situation. Then they clawed back the bonus by firstly fining Payet for his behaviour and then by getting the player to waive certain parts of his contract to earn his move back to the club which let us not forget, he never wanted to leave in the first instance. To prove a point this wasn’t about money for him he even took a pay cut in order to get the deal through with Marseille who at this juncture had managed to find a new owner who was prepared to financially back the previously stricken club.
Now I get the fact that having made the move from the Boyleyn Ground that it was important to sell season tickets and how key Payet was to become to the branding of the club and as a statement that bigger things are to come for the Hammers. However had Sullivan managed to pull off any of his targeted signings of marquee players they maybe wouldn’t have needed to. Similarly had they not taken the club away from its spiritual home and now finding themselves needing to fill thousands of extra seats, they maybe could have taken a very different stance with the player and showed a degree of empathy to his personal situation. Given how great a season the player had just had his market value would have been sky high. So maybe Marseille couldn’t have afforded him but a club with the financial resources of say PSG over in France could easily have and a compromise could maybe have been reached. As I say not everything can be solved by throwing money at a situation. Did the club take extra steps with the player’s family to ensure they became more settled? From what the player claims the club certainly made assurances that he was about to be joined by a raft of talent which would propel West Ham forward onto bigger and better things which were then not backed up. Did anyone show a degree of empathy for the player’s situation seeing his family in such turmoil and anguish as they struggled with life in London every day? Having branded the club around the player they really were in a no win situation but the manner could have been handled far more professionally than it ended up being. Fans have families, fans realise that life isn’t all about money and can show empathy towards someone they love and respect. Yes it would have hurt had the club sold him in the winter window but had they made the situation known to fans early on and said ‘look Dimi give us until January and if you still feel this way then we will look at the situation again then’ would they have reacted the way that they did? Would the player have had to engineer his move away from the club in the way that he did? Let’s not forget that Sullivan and co could quite easily have said to the player you’re not going anywhere, we are going to let you rot away in the reserves but they didn’t – they cashed in on the player! Stories were continually leaked to the national press during this time stirring up shit and at the end of it all Payet became a figure of hate to pretty much all West Ham fans and the board managed to somehow come out of it smelling of roses and without anyone pointing the finger of blame in their direction for the mistakes they made in the handling of the situation back in the summer when the player returned in pre-season. With such hatred being displayed towards the player it was also easy to forget that especially with things not going well on the pitch that the board had failed to deliver in its promises to bring in marquee signings during the summer transfer window. Another Sullivan smokescreen perfectly executed for his own ineptitude.
Let’s look at some of the other bits of business Sullivan conducted through the summer of 2016. André Ayew the Ghanaian forward was brought in for a then club record fee of £20.5 million from Swansea City just 12 months after the Welsh club brought him in on a free transfer from Ligue 1 Marseille. His 36 appearances for the Swans saw him register 12 goals giving him a ratio of a goal every three games in his first Premier League season though 4 goals in the last 3 games of the season slightly skews those stats. Yet the main point being is that Swansea will net £20.5 million for a player over the four years of his West Ham contract which represents a great bit of business for a player whose first season at West Ham was blighted by injury and for whom they paid nothing for.
Alvaro Arbeloa joined Ayew and topped up his pension nicely before retiring from the game totally at the end of the season having started only one game and made two substitute appearances before falling out with Slaven Bilic. If reports are correct that he was signed to a £65,000 a week contract then the club would have shelled out over an incredible £3 million in wages on the former Real Madrid player.
Sofiane Feghouli who was brought in on a free transfer from Valencia was reportedly the second highest paid player at the club last season yet started only 11 times and made a further 10 appearances from the subs bench for the Hammers. One does wonder in the case of Feghouli that had his wages not been as high as they were then maybe the club would have looked to have kept him on longer term rather than ship him off to Turkish club Galatasaray in the summer for £3.87 million as they looked to lower the clubs wage bill. The reason the deal took so long to get over the line with Galatasaray was the great contract he’d been given with the Hammers and having to find a huge compromise with all parties which partly explains the hit taken on the transfer fee received which should have been considerably higher for a player who had a great reputation at Valencia.
Jonathan Calleri (- yes the names keep on coming) was another player said to earn in excess of £50,000 a week during his season long loan yet managed to contribute a grand total of 1 goal in 4 starts and 12 substitute appearances.
The winter transfer window which was dominated by the Dimitri Payet issues saw the club go back into the transfer market whereby Sullivan splashed £8 million on 33 year old Portuguese defender José Fonte who is reportedly being paid in the region of £75,000 a week and will have little or no resale value to the club when his contract expires. He was joined by Scottish International Robert Snodgrass for a fee of £7 million who now finds himself on loan at Championship side Aston Villa. Despite not finding the back of the net with West Ham Snodgrass oddly remained Hull City’s top scorer in the Premier League at the end of the season having only played half the season for them. For me I wonder if it was one of those transfers where West Ham looked to take a potential relegation rivals best player off their hands to strengthen their own position in their battle to avoid the drop. Anyway neither player can be argued to have set the world alight with their performances since joining the Hammers.
Norwegian international Håvard Nordtveit came and went again within twelve months having mostly been played out of position for every one of his 11 starts and 5 substitute appearances whilst reportedly earning somewhere between £40,000 – £50,000 per week. Now I know that these aren’t the largest sums in comparison to what some Premier League clubs pay the players on their books but for each example given the players in the main barely started for the club and certainly made little or no impact yet collectively took home in excess of £10 million in wages during their time with the Hammers.
On the rare occasion Nordveit started for the Hammers in his preferred position as a defensive midfielder he did win some warm reviews from pundits so you have to wonder why the club let one of the smaller wage earners go in the summer and so early on as they failed to land their supposed target in William Carvalho. Mind you I guess his sale can be considered one of those rare successes for Sullivan. Having signed on a free alongside the free transfer of Ashley Fletcher from Manchester United both players left in the summer for a reported combined fee in the region of £15 million. Darren Randolph was also a free transfer originally from Birmingham City and Boro are believed to have paid £5 million for him.
Of all the signings for West Ham last season only Manuel Lanzini (who turned his initial loan move into a permanent one for a fee of £9.4 million) represented anything near value for money in terms of the outlay on transfer fees and wages. That’s not to say that West Ham don’t sometimes manage to get things right. Payet looked a world beater in his first season (£10.7 million – Marseille). Pedro Obiang (£4.3 million – Sampdoria), Angelo Ogbonna (£8 million – Juventus) and Michail Antonio (£7 million – Nottingham Forest) have all brought quality to the team and look excellent value but for the success of these four and Lanzini to boot we are joined by many other names over the seasons such as Nikica Jelavic (£2.8 million – Hull City) who leave the club as quickly as they’d arrived in the door.
Onto this summer’s transfer dealings and five new names have come into the club. The four main players being; Joe Hart on loan from Manchester City who at the time of writing remains England’s first choice goalkeeper. Javier Hernández (£16 million from Bayer Leverkusen), Marko Arnautović (for a club record fee which could rise to £25 million from Stoke City) and Pablo Zabaleta (released from Manchester City). On paper you would think that all four look good signings but do they really represent good deals for the London club or again is it a case that Sullivan is a man who likes to think he can broker a good deal but in reality nothing could be further from the truth?
Let’s start with Javier Hernández who apparently a host of clubs were linked with over the summer. I’m not sure how many clubs make up a so called host or who they were really because it seemed whoever they were – all went quiet as soon as the Mexicans wage demands were made known to potential suitors, all that is apart from West Ham. Now I haven’t heard a single West Ham fan question yet as to why West Ham paid a fee of £16 million for a player who had a release clause in his contract with the Bundesliga side of £13 million. So why the extra fee of £3 million paid? Sullivan really needs to get a hang of this release clause malarkey surely and soon. Secondly how have the club ended up agreeing to his wage demands of £140,000 a week which smashes the Hammers pay ceiling and will no doubt lead to a host of existing players knocking on the door of the club demanding their wages be increased at the same time? I’d be interested to know exactly how much the Mexican was earning at the German club given his last known reported salary was given as $5 million per season which at the time equated to around £73,000 a week. If similar at the German outfit then the player has managed to nearly double his salary in the process of the move which for a forward nearing the age of 30 who made his reputation as an impact substitute is great for him – fo r the club maybe not so much. Once again it doesn’t seem to me at least to have been the greatest bit of business. I have heard and read many fans saying that Hernández should be given the starting role as the main striker this season with Andy Carroll (when fit – yes I know this is rare) coming on as an impact substitute but I for one would remind fans that it’s the Mexican who during his time at Manchester United forged his reputation mainly as that impact substitute. His record in the Bundesliga last season it should be noted wasn’t exactly great though it’s worth taking into account that the player was said to be going through personal problems for a large part of the season which effected performances. Yet his tally for the season only brought about a total of 12 goals in the Bundesliga, 7 of which came post January 2017 before his return to the Premier League. While I don’t doubt his quality as a goal poacher, the new top earner at the club doesn’t really bring a reputation for much else let’s be fair. But again I come back to that question, how were West Ham made to pay £3 million over the odds of his release fee when they seemingly were in a one horse race?
I still find it staggering that Sullivan has made the poor man’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic – Marko Arnautović the clubs potential record signing. Arnautović let’s not forget turned down the opportunity to join West Ham before deciding to sign for Stoke City. He reminds me of one of those girls who won’t date you during the times you drove a clapped out Ford Escort but as soon as she sees you in the Mercedes years later she can’t wait to get to know you better and would drop her knickers for you in a heartbeat. Whilst we have seen glimpses of the players quality since his arrival in England his consistency in games is woefully lacking and his temperament is surely questionable as the sending off for elbowing an opponent in the game away to Southampton will testify already this season. I’ve got to say that with Ayew looking like he’s getting back to full fitness I’d be looking to play the Ghanaian over Arnautović and the potential fee of £25 million for me really doesn’t hold any sort of value in it at all. Sure he will bring the odd moment of skill to a game and every ten games will score a wonder goal that gets the headline writers pounding away at their keyboards at the end of 90 minutes but a week later he will go back to being missing again or worse appearing and then receiving his marching orders. Given the player is 28 years of age and that he signed a five year contract I’d argue again that with no resale value and his lack of consistency that Stoke must have seen Sullivan coming a mile off – perhaps it’s that stupid fucking Russian hat he wears that gave it away. Should you really be looking to sign a player that turned you down originally to go to Stoke City? No offence to Stoke City by which is to say really and truthfully – every offence to Stoke City, but this whole Stokealona thing was a complete crock of fanatical shite wasn’t it. That’s a statement by the way, not a question.
Now I’m sorry but did anyone at west ham actually think to watch Joe Hart’s performances at Torino last season or was he as I suspect brought in simply because for some bizarre unknown reason he remains England’s number one.? Where is the due diligence on all these signings? These are players seemingly brought in simply on ageing reputations alone or on whims of fancy. Hart’s spell at Torino though not a complete disaster could hardly be labelled as a success. Italian newspaper La Stampa maybe summed up Hart’s season best in just one sentence following a man of the match performance from his replacement Salvatore Sirigu when they suggested the keeper was “almost as decisive in one game as Hart was in an entire year.”
I wonder if Sullivan performs his role at West Ham as a de facto Sporting Director by the use of a Panini Sticker book, from watching MOTD and from memory of players who once happened to have a half decent game against his side over the past four or five seasons. When a player turns you down to go to mid table side like Stoke City should you really go back in for him down the line? I wonder how many other Premier League clubs would have been prepared to pay potentially £25 million for Arnautović or even if the price wasn’t that high, whether or not they would have chosen to make him their clubs all-time record purchase. Personally I think the answer would be none and with the amount of money being spent on these acquisitions is it fair to claim Sullivan as being negligent in his duties. He seems to treat the club like a play thing and his judgement on players can be questioned over and over again. How much does he listen to the Director of player recruitment Tony Henry? If you listen to Henry in interviews he certainly sounds like he and his team are doing the diligence on players so where do things seem to go so wrong from the preparation work to those who actually end up being signed?
Rumours persist over the future of manager Slaven Bilic with the club having been linked to the likes of Rafa Benitez at Newcastle United, Napoli’s Maurizio Sarri and Zenit St Petersburg’s Roberto Mancini. Sullivan claims that West Ham agreed a deal with the Spaniard Benitez in 2015 and was just two hours away from appointing him as the club manager before losing out to Real Madrid. During a summer at Newcastle which has seen the speculation heighten over Rafa’s position at the club in the North East his name continues to be linked with the Hammers every time they lose a competitive game. Firstly Sullivan and Gold don’t have a history of sacking their club managers be it during their tenure at Birmingham City or latterly at West Ham. Previous manager Sam Allardyce whose relationship with the owners was severely strained by the time of his departure saw out his contract in full and unless West Ham find themselves in a really precarious position, with relegation a real possibility, you would envisage Bilic following in Big Sam’s footsteps and a new man being employed in the summer. It has been hinted by several journalists that the source of the stories linking Rafa with the West Ham job has been the Spaniard’s agent as he looked to influence Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley whilst the transfer window was open for more money to use on signings. In fact I think Rafa has even openly admitted as much since since the closure of the window. At the time you never saw Sullivan or Gold rubbishing the links though they now claim to back Bilic as their manager. Call me sceptical, maybe Rafa was two hours away from becoming West Ham manager but it was just as likely that through his agent he used the London club to get Real Madrid to act quicker in getting him into the Spanish club. If reports are correct the compensation due to Newcastle to hire Benitez is around the £6 million mark and that’s before you factor in the cost of his annual wages and one presumes managers get some sort of signing on bonus for coming to a club in the same way players do. I don’t personally see Sullivan or Gold parting with that sort of money, not in a million years. Mind you having said that they will potentially pay £25 million for Arnautović so I could be wrong.
Napoli’s coach Sarri has seen his stock continue to rise whilst in charge of the Italian side who are now rated as one of the best in all of European football to watch. Who says? Well Pep Guardiola for one. Many Serie A pundits and experts see this season as Napoli’s best chance to win the Scudetto and wrestle away the dominance of Juventus. They’ve won all seven of their opening domestic games and head the table so the chance of Sarri coming to London for me really is fantasy football time and let’s face it why would you leave a club on the rise in your domestic league and potentially in Europe to come to a side who still sit in the bottom three of the Premier League? We keep on seeing stories about the ex-Manchester City boss Mancini coming to West Ham as well. This being Mancini whose Zenit sit four points clear of the Russian league, who remain undefeated in 11 games this season winning 8 and drawing 3. The club backed their manager throughout the summer with the players he wanted to bring in. English media reports suggest he is unhappy in his role in Russia and would be interested in the Hammers job. The Italian is on a three year contract Zenit and again you just cannot see West Ham paying a compensation fee to bring Mancini in as manager. If they were truly serious they could have let Bilic go in the summer for comparative peanuts in terms of his compensation to what it would cost the club to bring Mancini or Benitez in as a replacement.
Personally I think the smart money on Bilic’s replacement would be with current Fulham boss Slaviša Jokanović on whom West Ham have been keeping a close eye on over the past twelve months or so. Being linked with glamorous names for both managers and players alike seems to be a Sullivan speciality without the majority of so called bids, deals or interests ever coming to fruition. Sullivan is like the ring leader at a circus, he can whip up the crowd trying to look like the main act but everyone knows that ultimately he’s just the guy in the funny hat.
In an interview given to Talksport during this summer’s transfer window Sullivan stated how the club was aiming to win three trophies after their summer spending spree. Now he didn’t say that the club was aiming to win the treble in those words but it amounts to exactly the same thing. If you’re aiming to win three trophies then you’re aiming to win the treble are you not? This man’s ego is so large that it gets in the way of his tongue. Or maybe his brain is so small that…no never mind you get the point. So if the claims of marquee signings last summer weren’t bad enough when they failed to materialise, a year later he goes on record that the Hammers are aiming to win every competition they take part in. Now I’m all for ambition don’t get me wrong but 11th place last season papered over what was a frankly diabolical season for West Ham with problems mounting on and off the pitch. Despite Karren Brady saying that the board has presided over the most successful stadium migration in the history of football it was in reality quite frankly one huge fucking mess, much of which could have been foreseen and appropriate steps taken before situations arose especially in the case of the London Stadium. With the club forced to play all their first three Premier League games away from home at the start of this season they found themselves bottom on 0 points and at the time of writing still occupy the relegation places after six games which included a 3-2 loss to arch rivals Tottenham Hotspur.
Sullivan wasn’t done there with the talking though either stating that Hernandez could be the best player West Ham have ever signed. I’m not trying to be funny here but the little Mexican has made a career as a goal poacher and not a single one of his goals during his time in the Premier League has come from outside of the 18 yard box. He forged his career at Manchester United as a super sub and never quite made the same impact when he started games for them. He never really got a look in at Real Madrid and had an average season at Bayer Leverkusen last season. Again I want to know David Sullivan, how did you end up having to spend an extra £3 million to get the player that every other club was put off by because of his wage demands? You almost set him up to fail when you add such hype that isn’t warranted. Sure he has the ability to find the net and utilised in the right way then potentially he will get the club goals. He may even be the first player since Tony Cottee to score 20 in a season for the Hammers but there’s also a chance that he won’t get near that figure and he certainly won’t become in my opinion the best player West Ham have ever signed. I’d love to see him make the same impact that Payet made in his first season at West Ham but he doesn’t possess the ability to ghost pass defenders, jinx his way into the box and coolly slot home and he certainly has never knocked a free kick in effortlessly from 25 yards.
There will be fans of West Ham that will point to the fact that Sullivan and Gold are lifelong fans of the club too but that’s not a pre-requisite for success or a reason to not question the poor decisions that are taken season after season by the pair. Fans should be asking why the club is over paying for players, questioning why they fail in their attempts to sign the likes of Olivier Giroud from Arsenal or Kelechi Iheanacho from Manchester City to name just two of a hatful the club had been linked with during this summer’s window. At one stage during the summer we were told the latter fell through because City wanted to insert a buy back clause into the deal which would see them able to buy the player for around the same money West Ham would have had to pay yet it’s claimed that the deal with Leicester City for whom he ultimately signed to, has a clause which would see City have to spend £50 million if they wanted to buy the player back. At just 20 years of age here was a player that could have been the real future for West Ham and should he ever hit the heights he is expected to, even if they did lose him back to City it would have been severely softened by the £50 million had City wanted to take the player back. Logically it would also have meant he had managed to be a huge success on the pitch. Whilst I appreciate much of what’s written here is taking what has been written in the media at face value, I do tend to put a lot more faith in it that than I would ever do from something that has come out of the mouth of David Sullivan.
One good thing that seemingly arose from a series of meetings with representatives of online West Ham fan sites and blogs with Karren Brady was that the club was prepared to take on board some of the issues the paying public had with the new stadium. What I found interesting was that those there at one of the recent meetings were apparently told what the clubs budget was for the forthcoming seasons summer transfer window but were asked not to reveal the figure as they didn’t want other clubs driving up prices on the players they wish to purchase which seems fair enough until you consider Sullivan likes to add £3 million to deals himself anyway given his distinct lack of anything resembling a negotiating skill. I’m pretty sure that the clubs budget has remained under wraps as requested but I have heard a few murmurings that the clubs summer spend was nowhere near what they were lead to believe it would be and may have been as much as under £20 million as to what they had been quoted in the meeting. Perhaps they will pay the £6 million buyout clause for Rafa after all or maybe all the people were given an unrealistic fee knowing the influence they had with their readers and followers of West Ham and that there was a chance they’d relay the message in part to other fans who would buy into it and renew their season tickets without actually knowing who was coming in. The signing of a well-known name in Pablo Zabaletta would certainly have given great indications of what was to come but in hindsight let’s not forget he was a free signing and a player who many believe has lost the pace which saw him make such a stellar name during his time at Manchester City. Yes Hart for now is England’s number one but come the end of the season West Ham will either have to make Adrian the number one keeper again or go back into the market as they won’t be able to afford Hart’s wages which we believe are presently being heavily subsidised by his parent club. Given his lack of decent performances in the past 18 months you’d imagine that City didn’t bother to put a clause in that says he cannot play against City in either game this season and that actually the complete opposite would apply in his case.
So what have we really learned through all of this? Well if you’re David Sullivan – always have an excuse to hand and someone to blame other than yourself when things start to go wrong. If you don’t manage to tie a deal up for William Carvalho then point the finger at Sporting and say that they didn’t give you enough time to complete a medical. When a club accuses you of lying then shout moral outrage from the rooftops to anyone who will listen and threaten to get your legal team involved – that will surely make things go away. I’m sure no away fans visiting the London Staidum will remind you about being one of the dildo brother’s during the season. I say that, maybe the inflatable penis being thrown around by the Huddersfield fans was purely coincidence but then again…
Make sure that the press knows that Bilic could have had other players such as Renato Sanches and Grzegorz Krychowiak this summer even though your own manager claims this isn’t true so that if you spend another season near the relegation zone then it wasn’t your fault because you brought the four players your manager wanted more than any others even though Carvalho may have been the one he really, really wanted out of the lot. We have learned that if leaked emails are genuine that part of Sullivan’s psyche and DNA is still very much of the primary school playground; If you don’t let me play I’m going to tell my mum on you and then get a player on loan from PSG oh and I don’t care if you lent me a tenner last week I’m only going to give you £4.37 back and if you tell everyone about it I will shout liar, liar pants on fire really loudly to anyone and everyone that will listen and you wouldn’t dare call me a liar because I have this cool Russian hat and everyone thinks I’m the mutts nuts…
We’ve learned that at Sporting Bruno de Carvalho is a man who will let his club captain potentially end up unable to play football for four months in a World Cup year just to ensure the clubs balance sheet was 200,000 euros better off. We’ve discovered Leicester have twice encountered that he is a hard man to strike a deal with and that he is able to really get the best price for his players – in fact so much so that he achieves Portuguese transfer records for his star players which makes a mockery of any claims he would have accepted a bid of 13 million euros less than his club wanted for William.
Oddly what you may not have learned is that I’m in the strange and probably very unique situation of following both Sporting and West Ham though it’s probably quite obvious I don’t have any time for David Sullivan and the West Ham board. Oddly I didn’t have any time for Bruno de Carvlaho either but he did go up in my estimation after the dildo brother’s comment. I find him to be quite egotistical in quite the same manner as David Sullivan, but the one thing I do trust is that in the boardroom he does a far better job of impersonating Daniel Levy and managing to get the best deals done for Sporting especially when compared to Sullivan at West Ham. Take Islam Slimani as an example; Sporting paid £275,000 for the players services who would go onto score 48 times in 82 matches which works out at £5,729.17 per goal. They then sold him for a profit in the region of just under £30 million. His replacement the Dutch striker Bas Dost came in for a fee which will rise to 12 million euros but he has already scored 38 times in 38 games for the club. Imagine that a ratio of a goal a game. The last time any West Ham player reached 20 goals in a season was the 1986/87 season – Hernandez wasn’t even born then!
So I leave you to make your own decisions on who was telling the truth in the William Carvalho transfer debacle. Whichever side of the fence you fall on I would implore West Ham fan’s at the very least to consider whether West Ham should consider hiring a proper Director of football at the club and leave the transfer dealings to someone who knows what they’re doing at the end of the day!
Two nil & we f**ked it up 