History will not be kind to West Ham when this terrible year is chronicled, a decline that has shocked as much as angered our fan base.
We entered 2024 in sixth place in the Premier League and in a European quarter final. We are a couple of weeks away from 2025, Europe is a distant memory and we are 14th. So far this calendar year, following the win over Wolves, we have played 42 games, won only 11 and are about to be, maybe on our third manager in 12 months.
And from those 42 games, 14 have seen us concede three or more in a game. No wonder the natives are angry, no wonder they want to see the back of hapless Julen Lopetegui. We lack identity, direction and there is more fight in our dressing room than there is on the pitch.
Nobody, surely, can believe beating a team second from bottom of the Premier League, a match frankly we could have easily lost and conceded two penalties, justifies the manager keeping his job. But it seems he is going to be able to limp on.
Bournemouth next, then Brighton and Southampton before matches with Liverpool and Manchester City. Lopetegui has seemingly lost the dressing room, where dissent is rife with players - it is alleged - telling the club they want away if the manager stays.
What a way to end a terrible year, one - regardless of what you think of David Moyes - had us in Europe and in the top six. Those that make the decisions must take the rap for this embarrassing and costly fall from grace.
When Saturday brought the shocking news of Michail Antonio’s horror car crash, seemingly at last our fuming fan base was united in anxiety for one of our European heroes, a player who has given life and soul to this club for a decade.
Cut from the wreckage of his Ferrari, with multiple injuries, and transported to a London hospital. I think it’s fair to say that many feared for his life when they saw pictures of the wreckage. Time stood still for us all in a harrowing afternoon until we heard that he was alive, at least, but with his career in serious doubt. For many it just about summed up West Ham’s year.
On Monday we ended up having to beat a poor Wolves team to avoid a manager being axed, there and then. The fact he is still at the club says everything about a board who seem unable to make a collective decision.
Wed were awful at times against Wolves. Lopetegui looked like one of those Sunday morning managers in a mac, shouting instructions everyone ignored.
Yes, we won. Yes we banked on the Moyes' old hands of Jarrod Bowen and Tomas Soucek for the goals that get us out of the mire, does that suggest he’s safe? Surely there’s more to it than that.
The nerve-wracking night at Stratford saw us force a 2-1 win over a committed Wolves, a side we should have swept aside. Does that give Lopetegui a reprieve? Who knows, we’ve gone from a calm squad under Moyes to this one, full of egos and open dissent.
From a European last eight spot to this, a year when our beloved owners have gone out of their way to antagonise the fan base it seems, in particular the young and the old, with a concessions ban and eye-watering hikes in ticket prices.
Moyes had gone, after winning just five games from 25 from 1 January to the end of the season at Manchester City, as we watched them win the title yet again. For many, Moyes - with a pragmatic style and a stubbornness over transfers that was to be his downfall - had over-achieved with the resources he had, our best manager in the Premier League era and a trophy to match.
Three seasons in Europe, like it or not, you may have hated how it was achieved but the football industry looked on in disbelief as the Scot was drummed out of Stratford by a vindictive hate campaign.
This time last year we beat Spurs on 7 December, were on a run of one defeat in eight and had recently beaten Arsenal, Olympiacos, and secured top spot in our Europa League group.
The cracks were beginning to appear though. There were awful defeats at Fulham and Liverpool before Arsenal (again) and Manchester United were beaten before the turn of the year. Sixth place was assured with that amazing defensive display to win at Arsenal on 28 December. Turnover, said the club accounts, was £236m, the second largest figure in the club’s history. Rude health, anyone?
But the beginning of 2024 was a growing disaster. We’d been told Moyes had been offered a new contract around November time, he claimed later that “it wasn’t a very good one” which probably meant it was for a head coach with no control over transfers. Moyes was never going to agree to that, and anyway David Sullivan withdrew the offer a few weeks later.
The campaign against Moyes was growing to a crescendo, the howling and the abuse from the claret and boozers got to the point that we were told one of the club’s board, likely a sibling, had made sure Sullivan knew of the growing discontent.
The club’s ageing and small squad was stretched, 12 goals were shipped in three games against Manchester United, Arsenal and Nottingham Forest followed by four at Newcastle and two fives at Crystal Palace and Chelsea. There was no coming back from that for Moyes, even if ninth spot was achieved.
The blame for that ageing squad was put at his door and he must take some blame. However when you have a transfer system like ours with Sullivan and his agent pals, Moyes and the new technical director Tim Steidten all having a say, the blame should be spread accordingly.
By now the players knew their manager was going, the fans too. The desire for a more modern style of possession-based football was now too obvious to ignore.
Finding someone to do that more problematic. Moyes banned Steidten from the training ground, an old confidant of the Scot insisted the German Technical Director was “in the ear of the players, someone who had been involved in Werder Bremen’s relegation and left Bayer Leverkusen under a cloud”. You can see how Moyes and Steidten didn’t get on.
The German ultimately won the power battle at Rush Green, but failed to get his first choice successor over the line, even if he did get Ruben Amorim over on a jet plane but not to his final destination.
Steidten's reputation has gone from being miracle worker to now being branded a fraud, and that’s some of the private words coming out of Rush Green.
The supposed amazing summer transfer tally has started to unravel in all directions. The board are concerned by the money spent on old players, young players who can’t get a game and injury prone ones many feel should not have been bought the first place.
And with all this going on, Sullivan goes for the cheap option of a coach out of work and set up by his favourite agent. The end product of that is that Lopetegui had been singly unimpressive and there is mutiny in the dressing room, with two of our players having seriously unimpressive altercations with Lopetegui at half time in matches.
Leaks about the way the Spanish coach treats players, humiliating them in public, and with - we are told - five who want out if the manager is retained.
And there’s plenty of suggestions that the boardroom is also split, with Sullivan and Daniel Kretinsky at odds, and with ‘Vanessa from lingerie’ trying to flog her late father’s shares but seemingly willing to vote in the way her dad would.
And here lies the crux of this assessment of our troubled year. It is the job of the people who run our club , when a manager leaves, for whatever reason, to maintain what has been achieved and improve on it. And that has clearly not happened.
The end product is that we have declined at an alarming speed, from sixth to the edge of a relegation fight, no European football and a fractured fan base and squad. Well done everybody, you have done a great job. Your self interest, incompetence and basic inability to run a Premier League club will not be forgiven or forgotten.
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