28 December 2009, a key date in the history of our club, was our final Premier League match before David Sullivan became the majority shareholder in West Ham United.
We played, as luck would have it, away at White Hart Lane that day, against Tottenham Hotspur, losing 0-2 to goals from Luka Modric and, of course - who else? - Jermain Defoe.
Spurs had Harry Redknapp in the dugout and a certain Daniel Levy in the Chairman's seat. Redknapp has long since departed from the game, while Levy remains as one of just two Chairman of Premier League clubs to outlast Mr Sullivan’s tenure at West Ham United. The other being the current Chair of Manchester City, who may be waiting a while before he can sell up to somebody else with more money than him.
David Sullivan is enjoying a second stint as a football club Chairman and it’s fair to say in the modern era, nobody has outlasted him. He has vast experience in the game. Being vastly experienced however does not necessarily relate with being good, but nobody should mistake our Chairman for an idiot. He isn’t.
His previous club finished ninth in the Premier League in the season he and his co-owners acquired West Ham United; we finished that season fourth from bottom. Owned, as we were at the time by a bank that itself was in Administration. Many of us thought we were near rock bottom.
If only we knew. What’s more, we may not, yet, have reached it.
That January though was Mr Sullivan's first transfer window at our club. He and his fellow shareholders had set the scene in an emotional press conference, telling the world how poor we were, how much debt the club had and that had he and his co-directors not really been West Ham United supporters, they wouldn’t have touched us with a barge pole.
It’s a story they have told numerous times since, which doesn’t make it untrue - the difference being when you first arrive in a new role you can get away with blaming your predecessor for their incompetence. Fifteen years in and it becomes a harder sell, even if it is relatively true. People might just ask, "well, who’s fault is that"?
Other than for a brief sojourn when the club appointed a Technical Director to oversee transfers, expand the club's analytic and data systems and generally trying to professionalise a core activity in any club, the transfer of playing personnel have largely been in the control of David Sullivan.
That’s not to say that no manager has been consulted, or even that no manager has ever got to make a decision, but by virtue of being the person that signs the cheques rather than Czechs, David Sullivan has had the casting vote.
This summer has seen our Chairman in an ultra- cautious mode following last summer’s frankly disastrous window and subsequent on-pitch performance from Juan Lopetegui's decisions. He was, of course, appointed by David Sullivan, so at an absolute minimum the Chairman was at least partially responsible, as were the since departed Technical Director and Lopetegui.
Some £109million was invested in players last summer and a further £34million of liability accepted by the obligation to buy Jean-Clair Todibo this summer. Chuck in a few airfares, secretarial services and postage and lets call that a round £150million.
No problem, I hear you say. We needed players, most of them cost money, certainly anybody young and decent and not all of them have turned out to be duds. That, of course, is all true. Not all of them have been duds, but a few have, as they were the previous summer, the one before that, and that, and every window going back to his first with us.
Naturally that is true of every club, whether or not the signings are in the exclusive domain of the first team manager, a DoF or an owner. It’s hard to think though of another club that struggles in quite the way we do - and that surely comes down to judgement and/or lack of budget. Again, it’s not unreasonable for somebody to ask, "who’s fault is that"?
A trawl through Transfermakt shows since his arrival David Sullivan has written cheques on behalf of West Ham United that total £530million more than the total of cheques received back from player sales. That number includes the £105million record fee we received for Declan Rice.
Were it not for that, frankly, stroke of luck, the cupboard would truly be bare. Now, of course we have a squad of players for that £530million, but in truth we had a squad of players the day he arrived at the club. Is today's squad really that much better than the one the club had when he arrived in January 2010?
Parker; Noble; Collison; Gabbidon; Tomkins; Upson; (C) Cole; Green... four or five of them, at least, would fancy their chances in a head-to-head match up with today’s squad.
The Chairman would of course remind you of the successes. Demba Ba I recall was a player he claimed to have “personally scouted”, something that astonished the 100 or so Hammers supporters listening to him talk on this matter. My personal astonishment was that he considered this example as a success.
Demba Ba scored seven goals for us but played just 13 matches, two of them as a substitute. So yes, I remember Demba although we should, perhaps, have signed him in September.
Transfermarkt has him down as costing €3million and being sold for £800k, so in the blink of an eye, over €2million was spent on 13 appearances, 14 years ago. Move the years forward and we saw the likes of Felipe Anderson come and go, and all that changed in exchange for his 73 appearances was his value dropped by €35million. Roughly £500k-per-game plus, of course, his wages.
Javier Hernadez, another big-name signing who ended up costing €10million net fees, plus wages, for his 17-goal contribution. To be fair, a decent strike rate of goals to games, but all the while, the cash is getting burnt with no profitable resale of an ageing player, 29 when he arrived, 31 when he departed.
Sebastien Haller, another player who arrived for a big fee but who departed 54 appearances and 14 goals later for €28million less than we paid for him. That’s another half a million Euros per appearance, plus wages, simply gone up in smoke, never to be seen again. Half a million here, half a million there; sooner or later it’s serious money.
I could go on, but you get the idea. We spend a lot more on players than we get money back for which, in the absence of any fresh investment in the club means, eventually, we have less to spend on new players.
This of course brings me to this window where, as soon as he could, our Chairman sold Mo Kudus and for a fee substantially below his rumoured release clause. Why would you do that with very nearly two full months of the transfer window being open unless of course you had to? Unless you really needed the money.
There were no legitimate signs – forget the silly videos Spurs put out when he joined them – that the player was downing tools, refusing to go anywhere else or anything else from the Isak school of loyalty and gratitude. He was sold because the Chairman needed the money. We had Todibo, who had arrived last August, to pay for., and a down payment to make for Malick Diouf.
So what’s the problem, I hear you ask? isn’t this the Tony Bloom way, the Brighton method? Well, not quite, in fact it's nothing like it. Albion have a very good track record of buying young, unknown talent off the back of very significant data analysis undertaken by what was Starlizard (now Jamestown Analytics). We have a one man band, Kyle Macaulay who, it appears, then gets ignored if the Chairman isn’t convinced.
Not quite the Brighton way. Or the Liverpool way - or anybody else’s, other than our Chairman's. He, of course, could argue that any number of clubs have left the recruitment in the hands of an experienced manager and still ended up skint - Everton, Sunderland (of old, not now) and Aston Villa (again of old, not necessarily now).
The key difference, in all of those cases is after the Chairman of each of those clubs had seen fortunes (mis)spent, by people they had appointed, they sold those clubs and allowed new money in. Mind you, had he not sadly passed away I reckon Bill Kenwright would have found a way to cling on as Chairman of Everton, even now. Arguably, despite being a long time Evertonian with a genuine passion for his club, he might have stayed too long.
Which brings me to the point of our future in a rented, soulless, hated ground that this Chairman decided to move the club to. A ground so awful that any attempts to secure naming rights, develop commercial income or even play the Women’s team games there get rebuffed. A future where the Chairman is 76, an age whereby most businesses have an obvious succession plan, an heir apparent, an obvious second in command ready to step up.
Stories are starting to emerge that we may have such an individual in the shape of one of the current Chairman's children. Now, to be very clear, I offer no adverse comment about them on a personal basis. I’ve never met them, they may be smashing lads and good luck to them in life.
However - and you knew this was coming - if their father, the Chairman who has seen off allcomers in his era, the Chairman of a club in terms of longevity who is without peer in a viciously competitive industry, one in which he is vastly experienced, is burning cash as the rate of half a billion pounds and rising - what chance does a trainee realistically have?
It’s a huge ask and one I would be staggered if all the shareholders were happy with.
It's obvious that none of the current shareholders, despite there being two billionaires on the Board, want to fund the club out of their pockets. PSR may prevent them from buying players with their money but it doesn’t stop them investing in more analytics staff, scouts or building a decent training ground. None of that is happening either, that’s the clue. Every signal they give is they don’t want to stay in; they want to cash out, with the only sticking point being the price.
With just Lucas Paqueta remaining as a potential source of a future windfall, how much longer can this Board of Directors hang on, before - like it did for Moshiri at Everton, Lerner at Villa, and Short et al at Sunderland - they reach the point where they throw the towel in? How many more windows can our 76-year-old Chairman navigate, especially when the waters get choppy and times get tough?
Surely even he, despite his longevity, must be thinking it’s time to go - and he may have to compromise on the asking price. Let us hope it is before the train set gets passed down through the generations because if it doesn’t, the supporters may finally find out what rock bottom really is.
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