**Relegation may not be that bad for West Ham United, it could be exactly what the team needs to reconnect with the fans.**
When you think of the threat of relegation you immediately think of the bad things. The financial losses, a half empty London Stadium every week, all our best players leaving etc.
However, for a club and a team that’s in a mess like West Ham United are at the moment, which is crazy considering we won a European trophy just over two years ago. Relegation would actually have some real positives.
As much as the fans protest about the board, we’ve had some good times under the current ownership and while they are the problem in the big picture, I don’t think it’s the biggest problem at the club right in this moment. The biggest problem at West Ham United right now is the playing squad. It isn’t good enough, it isn’t talented enough and it isn’t hungry enough.
It’s everyone’s fault – the owners, the managers and the recruitment staff and even the players are all to blame for the horrific squad we’ve built at West Ham. It’s lazy, it’s old, it’s slow. It needs a clear out, and the easiest way to do that is to get relegated so they all want to leave and we can rebuild.
The problem with this would be financial losses, we’d have to sell a lot of players at a cut-price and we’d also probably lose the very few players in the squad we’d love to keep, but would it be worth the sacrifice?
If we went down players like Jarrod Bowen, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Lucas Paquetá, Crysencio Summerville and El Hadji Malick Diouf would immediately look for a way out of the club.
The idea of club legend and everyone’s favourite player Jarrod Bowen leaving breaks my heart, but if him leaving meant all the other players like Guido Rodriguez, Max Kilman, Jean-Clair Todibo, Alphonse Areola, Edson Alvarez and Nicolas Fullkrug left you’d have to admit you’d definitely consider it.
Getting rid of all those players would gut the squad of a lot of what’s wrong with it and it would give us the chance to both sign some younger and hungrier players to get us out of the Championship, and also promote some youngsters from the academy and give them more game time.
Imagine how connected the fans would be to a team consisting of George Earthy, Kaelan Casey, Matheus Fernandes, Lewis Orford, Freddie Potts, Soungoutou Magassa, Callum Marshall, Luis Guilherme, and Ollie Scarles with even more youngsters like Golambeckis, Landers, Kante and Fearon breaking through.
Not only would the youngsters make us feel more connected to the team, keeping senior players like Tomas Soucek, Kyle Walker-Peters, Callum Wilson, Konstantinos Mavropanos and even James Ward-Prowse and Mads Hermansen who do care about playing for this club around would be good to see.
Obviously this is completely disregarding the clubs finances, the idea of us being relegated must be a disaster to the ownership. We’re in the top 15 in European football for most money spent over the past five years, relegation could be a financial disaster for David Sullivan and co. But selfishly, as fans, maybe it won’t be as bad as first feared, it could be the reset the football team needs.
I’d love for us to be able to completely sort out his squad without something as terrible as relegation being the reason for it, but under this ownership we can’t do that in a summer while playing in the Premier League. And who knows, maybe getting relegated could force the owners to sell and then many Hammers fans would certainly think its worth it.