It comes to them all eventually. At Molineux, a stadium half-full but packed with unexpected cheer, Graham Potter stood on the touchline, motionless and disbelieving. He had the mid-distance stare of a manager desperately trying to remember when he was last happy in this position. “Before West Ham,” is the usual answer.
The EFL Cup had, with a degree of cruelty, pitched together two point-less Premier League clubs. As West Ham took a 2-1 lead, travelling hordes crowed at their team’s usual ineptitude: “How shit must you be, we’re winning away?”.
They knew. West Ham, a team simultaneously full of international experience yet with a chronic absence of leadership, crumpled again. At full-time, Jarrod Bowen – the only pure exception to the misery – was held back by teammates from crossing the advertising boards to argue with a supporter.
At this point you do have to remind yourself that we are still in August and two games into a new league season. The great West Ham lament – it comes around earlier every year.
WOLVERHAMPTON, ENGLAND - AUGUST 26: Jarrod Bowen of West Ham United is pulled away after clashing with West Ham supporters after the Carabao Cup second round match between Wolverhampton Wanderers and West Ham United at Molineux on August 26, 2025 in Wolverhampton, England. (Photo by James Gill - Danehouse/Getty Images)
Bowen had to be held back by teammates after rowing with West Ham fans at Molineux (Photo: Getty)
Potter will get some or all of the blame from many. He will leave this job soon or sooner, if results don’t improve quickly, which at full-time on Tuesday felt like it would be an act of mercy.
Then West Ham will face an inglorious decision: appoint the firefighter nobody wants to stave off early season relegation fears (Sean Dyche, anyone?) or risk things getting even worse but at least try to provide a little entertainment or fun. Again, it is August. These are not the choices anybody should be making while the kids are still off school.
Potter is clearly not without guilt; his record as manager here is worse than Julen Lopetegui’s, itself once a yardstick for nadir. West Ham don’t defend properly, don’t create enough chances and don’t take enough of the ones that they do create. They concede goals in clusters and open up opposition teams by infrequent appointment only.
More immediately, the answer will be to spend some money this week, provoked not by long-term planning but through being spooked by underperformance and an appalling mood amongst supporters.
But then money has always been spent. Parsimony is someone else’s gripe. Since June 2022, West Ham have spent £450m on transfer fees and sold only Declan Rice and Mohammed Kudus for significant fees (or at least more than they paid). The three central defenders in the team that conceded eight times against Sunderland and Chelsea cost more than £100m between them.
That misses the point. What defines your transfer market success is not what you spend, but how you build a squad in spending it. Few have done it more illogically than West Ham, not least because four different managers have done it.
There is no line-breaking pace other than Bowen. There is no creativity other than Lucas Paqueta. They loaned James Ward-Prowse to Nottingham Forest because he wasn’t close to the first team and a year later he is starting here. They have one potentially-useful-but-also-32-and-injury-prone striker in Nicklas Fullkrug and signed Callum Wilson, who is different to Fullkrug in that he is 33.
This summer, West Ham lost eight players from their first-team squad on free or loan deals who played a combined 111 league games last season. No money generated other than wages saved that nobody trusts to be wisely spent elsewhere. Even then, the best argument for keeping any of them was simply as bodies to fill a place in the squad.
To which we have to add: the worst stadium vibes in the Premier League. If the actual football isn’t doing enough to create an atmosphere conducive to a positive experience, sitting half a mile from the pitch doubles down that same mood. West Ham left one of the closest, earthiest atmospheres in English football for a football dystopia, like if you asked someone in 1995 to draw their nightmare vision of what the live football experience would look like in 30 years’ time. They have not won at home since February; nine years on they still lose out a little every time they play there.
LONDON, ENGLAND - AUGUST 22: A message on the screen saying ' Thank you for your support ' as Jarrod Bowen of West Ham United walks off after the Premier League match between West Ham United and Chelsea at London Stadium on August 22, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by Catherine Ivill - AMA/Getty Images)
The London Stadium is a soulless bowl of misery (Photo: Getty)
Were we having this discussion 15 years ago (NB – people were definitely having this discussion 15 years ago), there would be a little kickback when sympathising with West Ham fans. The accusation was one of entitlement, of demanding good football and good results, an implied arrogance that they were somebodies rather than anybodies. The same fumes still linger in the air every time a manager loses his job.
It’s almost all nonsense nowadays. Football supporters are quick to hope and quicker to seek reasons for hoping. If entitlement is wanting your club to function coherently while ticket prices rise to fund vast spending on disparate parts that never seem to create an actual team, long live entitlement. It’s not too much to ask and questioning when none of it happens does not equal a tantrum.
Nor should we fall into the trap of mythologising the mess. It isn’t true that there is some innate West Ham-ness that fuels anything at all. No club is predisposed particularly towards or against any behavioural pattern or destiny. It is simply the result of its own myriad decisions and the only definitive example can be set from its leaders. Fish and football clubs rot from the head down.
Running a functioning football club is a bit like gardening. You can clear out the place and spend as much as you want on expensive plants and landscaping. But if you fail to feed, water and nurture, the whole thing is still going to be entirely overgrown with weeds within a year or two, requiring almost as much money (plus extra care and attention) as at the start.
This is still the house that David Sullivan built and continues to govern. If there are lurches of managerial ethos, from Allardyce to Bilic to Moyes to Pellegrini to Moyes (again) to Lopetegui, they are on his watch. If supporters don’t trust the people buying the players, let alone the players they are buying, that is on him too.
West Ham United's Welsh Chairman David Sullivan takes his seat for the English Premier League football match between Southampton and West Ham United at St Mary's Stadium in Southampton, southern England on December 14, 2019. (Photo by Glyn KIRK / AFP) / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE. No use with unauthorized audio, video, data, fixture lists, club/league logos or 'live' services. Online in-match use limited to 120 images. An additional 40 images may be used in extra time. No video emulation. Social media in-match use limited to 120 images. An additional 40 images may be used in extra time. No use in betting publications, games or single club/league/player publications. / (Photo by GLYN KIRK/AFP via Getty Images)
Sullivan must take a hefty share of the blame for this mess (Photo: Getty)
It’s not that West Ham’s vision is broken, although it might be. It’s that nobody really knows what the vision is or how the club hopes to achieve it because it either changes so often or is so blurred as to be invisible.
You might hear buzzphrases and calls-to-arms at the appointment of every manager or when it comes round to season ticket renewal time. But well-meaning words followed by uncompelling actions usually provokes only dispiriting self-fulfillment.
West Ham might want to maximise the academy, but fans are sick of hearing about potential that never gets a proper chance in the first team. West Ham might want a British core or to recruit from Europe – they currently have an unconvincing combination of both. Are they a counter-attacking team or one that plays out slowly? Are they ever going to try some dynamism in midfield to replace Rice’s example?
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Underpinning it all was this apparent misconception that their now nine-year-old home would unlock some great secret for West Ham, as if such a thing ever exists. The London Stadium was a new idyll, a low-cost, high-value solution to create great revenue and growth. Ultimately it’s just bad football in an athletics stadium where nobody seems to be enjoying themselves.
The great damnation is the obvious potential here: a top-flight team in London with a large fanbase who won a European trophy two-and-a-half years ago. You actually have to work quite hard to extinguish all of that goodwill so quickly. West Ham have managed to do so at least twice since.
I don’t have the answers, supporters don’t have the answers and I don’t see much proof that West Ham have the answers either. It presents a football club as an entirely accidental construct, where occasional success happens via the law of averages and failure happens more often because other clubs are infinitely more smart. The response to errors is to rip things up, let someone else have a go, talk up that one individual as the key to unlocking the future and then make the same mistakes all over again.