The former West Ham director skulked away before relegation from the Premier League was confirmed, and those left behind now face the ire of fans who feel they've been betrayed.
Well, the kids were certainly united. The players left the pitch at The London Stadium at half-time against Leeds United to the refrains of Sham 69, but throughout the second half of an almost entirely hollow 3-0 win against a team who played with stuffed donkeys under their arms, anger at the fact that it had come to this was aimed towards the elevated seats in which the directors look down on their creation like God-emperors. The kids certainly seemed united, just not in the way that David Sullivan might have hoped.
A quick riddle: Q. What’s the easiest way to make 62,000 famously passionate football supporters sound like less than half that number? A. Move their club from The Boleyn Ground to The London Stadium. It’s now been ten years since West Ham United left their ancestral home for pastures new in Stratford, and the common agreement seems to be that this move has been a dismal failure.
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The London Stadium has become another stop-off on the capital city’s tourist circuit, the easiest ground at which one could buy tickets to watch Premier League football, so long as you don’t mind the fact that one of the teams is West Ham. Season ticket prices became the cheapest in the Premier League, and regular match-day tickets were routinely available.
It shouldn’t come as a massive surprise to learn that a club whose previous record attendance was just over 43,000 would struggle to fill a new stadium that was one and a half times the capacity of that record. There’s an element of truth to the old slogan, “build it and they will come”, but that particular phrase does rather imply that what’s been built is something that its target customers want, and that it’s fit for purpose.
It was trailed as one of the deals of the century. Arsenal had built their new stadium, and had been reined in for years by the cost of doing so. Spurs were about to put themselves a billion pounds in debt to build theirs. West Ham would be getting a stadium made iconic by the 2012 Olympic Games, and they’d be paying a fraction of the interest on the loans that Spurs had to pay to get theirs built.
West Ham wouldn’t own this vast new bowl, but they’d only be paying a few million pounds a year in rent to use it, mere pocket change to a club who apparently thought nothing of spending £32.8 million on Jean-Clair Todibo, a player who refused to play against Leeds because he’d had a blistering row with head coach Nuno Espirito Santo. And even that amount drops by £2.5 million-a-year upon relegation.
Actually, is Nuno a head coach or a manager? It’s a question worth asking, because their last sporting director was Tom Steidten, who was appointed in July 2023. Steidten wasn’t exactly popular among West Ham fans or, apparently, the club’s owners, finding himself banned from the dressing room and training facilities. He was at least a technical director, but when he was sacked in January 2025 - a full year and a half ago - he wasn’t replaced, and this is the result.
To the extent that the club has had one, it’s been Britain’s pornographer-in-chief himself. It makes you wonder who on earth has been coordinating the club’s football activities. Judging by the decisions made over the time since Steidten left, and the fact that head of recruitment left for Manchester United in November 2025, the smart money is on ‘no-one.’
Managerial appointments, meanwhile, have leapt from pillar to post, from frying pan to fire. A club which had five managers between 1902 and 1989 has had six in the last decade, and one of those had two spells with the club. Since the end of the Second Coming of Moyes in 2024, the club have been treating the position as if playing a strange mixture ofPin The Tail on the Donkey andMusical Chairs.
Julen Lopetegui lasted half a season. Graham Potter was brought into the exact opposite of the sort of club at which he’d proved himself, and lasted nine months. And then came Nuno, again without the backroom staff from the club at which he’d recently proved himself, Nottingham Forest, parachuted in less than four weeks after the summer transfer window closed.
All tetchiness and falling out with the players, Nuno’s time with the club did at least see them close the gap on those above them in the table, before his world-weariness seemed to become infectious, wearing everybody down a little too much when what they really needed was somebody to bring them together. On the pitch, the team did so for a bit and almost pulled off a great escape. But they ran out of puff with three games to play and there are no medals for “almost” at the bottom of the Premier League.
While West Ham have been through this before, this time could be different. The last published financial results, for the 2024-25 season, revealed losses of £104 million, and this year’s aren’t expected to be any better. It’s been reported that the club need to raise £150 million in player sales this summer to cover what has been described as “a liquidity shortfall”, but who’s going to step in and pay that sort of money for their players, given the sort of season they’ve just had, is something of a mystery.
And then there’s Karren Brady, who slunk away from the sinking ship in April. When she left the club, she was praised for having persuaded Arsenal to part with £105 million for Declan Rice. Given where Arsenal are today and how West Ham have spent their last couple of hundred million pounds in the transfer market, such comments are already starting to age like gold top.
Did she leave in April in order to swerve the fans’ end of season unhappiness at the way in which club has been run with her on its board of directors? We’ll never know for certain, but it looked cowardly from a distance, and there’s always something humorously ironic about those would always be preaching personal responsibility sneaking away when the going gets tough. If she’d been a contestant onThe Apprentice, she’d probably have ended up having to fire herself.
And then there’s Daniel Kretinsky, the Czech gazillionaire who was made vice-chair in April upon Brady’s disappearance on the promise of extending his shareholding in the club, having first bought into the club in November 2021. Kretinsky has long been considered the club’s most likely saviour-in-waiting by a proportion of the club’s support.
But although he has expanded his stake in the club he has remained largely in the shadows, with occasional references to him not wanting to buy the club outright. Amanda Staveley has also beenlinked to a potential bid for the club, but thenSullivan has been increasing his shareholding as well, which makes the situation behind the scenes at the club look like as much of a mess as playing affairs have been this season.
So, where do they go from here? Well, “Lincoln, Bolton and Preston, for starters” is the facetious answer to this question, but there is a more serious matter at hand here. The situation regarding The London Stadium is almost but not quite intractable. The Boleyn Ground has gone and they don’t own the new place, although redevelopment is possible.
Having said that, though, given the vocal complaining from the Mayor of London about the cost to taxpayers of the club getting relegated, it doesn’t seem likely that remoulding the stadium to better suit football will be publicly-funded. It’s not near Green Street, and that does matter, but starting afresh on the ground itself would be a start.
It doesn’t seem likely that this will happening particularly soon, though. Financial losses were atrocious last season, and they’re unlikely to be in a position to do much about that next season, given their drop in revenues because of this relegation. As such, it feels as though this is more than just a drop down to a lower division, and this is something that West Ham’s supporters seem to understand better than the owners of the club themselves.
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