**Despite beating Leeds 3-0 on the last day of the season, West Ham were relegated thanks to Everton’s failure to beat Spurs.**
After West Ham’s relegation was confirmed yesterday, the chat amongst the West Ham fanbase has already switched to next season. With a lot of players supposedly ‘too good for the championship’, let’s focus on who is likely to stay and who is likely to go.
A lot of the academy players are guaranteed to stay and be important members of the team and squad next season. Freddie Potts, Ezra Mayers, Oliver Scarles, Lewis Orford, and Joshua Ajala are all almost guaranteed to play a role in the second tier.
I think the first-team players who are guaranteed to stay are Mads Hermansen, Max Kilman, Kyle Walker-Peters, and Pablo Felipe. The fact that only four, if that, are guaranteed to stay says it all; a lot of our players weren’t committed enough to the club to fight out of a relegation battle.
Two players that we all want to stay are Jarrod Bowen and Tomas Soucek, two stars that have already etched their names into West Ham folklore. If they gave us a year in the Championship to get us back into the Premier League, they would confirm their status as legends.
The way both of them spoke after the Leeds match, it sounds like they are willing to do that, but words in interviews after a match like that need to be taken with a pinch of salt. If clubs playing European football come in for them, they might soon change their minds.
Rumours are suggesting the Hammers need to raise £150m from sales this summer, selling Bowen and Soucek would likely cover at least a third of that.
However, with players like Mateus Fernandes, Jean-Clair Todibo, Konstantinos Mavropanos, Valentin Castellanos, El Hadji Malick Diouf, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Crysencio Summerville, and Songoutou Magassa, we should have more than enough in sales to not have to sell our two Hammers heroes.