West Ham co chairman and chief shareholder David Sullivan has made it crystal clear that he would only sell the club to somebody like the “King of Saudi Arabia who can take it to a level we cannot ourselves hope to reach.”
He admits on the club’s official website there was “a tentative approach to buy the Club for £650m from external investors in August this year”
But he makes it clear that “the current owners, have NO DESIRE to sell the Club.”
He was delighted with the win at Swansea but says: “Three wins in a row in the Premier League is fantastic but, while we have picked up results-wise, we are not kidding ourselves as we are still a long way from playing as well as we know we can play.
That said, we are improving all the time and every win is great for the confidence of the players, the coaching staff, the manager, the supporters and the Board!
We now go to Leicester City looking to extend our unbeaten run to five matches and we have a real chance of doing just that.
Leicester are the champions and going to the King Power Stadium is never easy, but we are above them in the table and will look to exploit any weaknesses we can identify before and during our game on New Year’s Eve.
The issue isn’t the owners need to start spending all of that TV money. Sorry but you’ve got this one wrong. It’s that they need to build the walls before the roof! Stop preventing we can compete with the likes of City and United and build the club in a sustainable fashion. Remember what happened to Leeds? To make us attractive to real talented, younger players, we need a development plan over 4-5 years. Embed the change of stadium, build with quality not quantity, and apply a simple test before buying. Is the next purchase better than what I’ve already got, affordable and understands what I’m trying to achieve over the coming years at my club? If the answer to any of these is no, then walk away. By my reckoning we could have quickly ruled out most of our summer purchases this way, with only Fernandes the exception. And I include Ayew here as he ain’t a £20m player. And with the money saved, we could have looked at a permanent deal for Moses, recruited Austin and perhaps a Loftus-Cheek or even Wilshire. All would have hit the ground running, have a resale value, added value and cost little more than the money we wasted in the summer.
Agree with the principle Jimbo and tbh I think that is what the owners did they bought a lot of talented younger players that will hopefully go onto make it into the team and took a few punts with the likes of zaza and Callieri that didn’t work out, when you think we have Obiang, Fernandes, Fletcher, Lanzini, Byram, Cresswell, Oxford, Burke, Martinez, Quina, Browne, Cullen etc in 2 – 3 years hopefully many of these will establish themselves as regulars, Nordveidt, Feghouli are also under 25 so just need to buy a new leader for the midfield and if Fletcher, Martinez etc aren’t the answer a new really pacey CF the mythical 25 goal a season man and use either Oxford or Burke as right CB and find a genuine RB hopefully a World Class one that can really get up and down the wing like Cresswell on the other side and we will be a threat again to the big teams. I don’t think it is a coincidence that yesterday we played 442 and we scored a load of goals, we are more of a threat with that system, we should play the same formation against Leicester except with Obiang instead of Noble, would also be interesting to see if Ayew played right wing and Antonio played in the number 10 role if that solved the question on how to get the best out of Ayew I think as a winger that helps his defender he proved very good last season for Swansea. If Payet isn’t doing it swap him out for Feghouli or Fernandes.
So was part of the reason the summer transfer window was poor was because Del Boy was busy trying to get the 650m bid up to 800m (as he believes the club is worth) instead of buying quality players?
If he wants to keep the club, fair enough (personally, if I were owner, you’d have to pry it from my cold, dead hands), but they need to realise their limitations now and address them. We need some proper footballing personnel to take over transfers and negotiations. Get rid of Brady – the only thing she seems to do is marketing and is taking inspiration from herself I’m sure I.e. cold, soulless, classless, generic, corporate and superficial. And between the three of them I’m surprised the Olympic stadium isn’t draped in faux fur!
The chairmen need to start spending all that tv money. They can bang on about ffp, but the likes of Stoke and West Brom seem able to outspend us (or at least just buy players instead of dodgy loan deals). Please go and buy Berahino! And maybe have a word with Sir Trevor Brooking? The owners at City at least had the sense to get in the team from Barcelona to tend to all the footballing matters!
Or is this just Del Boy pitching to the Saudis?
100% agree DJ!
We are still limited by ffp. Approx. £80m of tv money is paid at the end of this season. I think that I read that the big increase to £120-140m a season is from the end of the 2017/18 season. I would guess that Stoke and West Brom have half of our wage bill.