David Gold: “We want to be here until the very end”

West Ham co-chairman David Gold has promised the club will be making headlines for all the right reasons this coming season.

An up-and-down first season on and off the pitch at the London Stadium ended with the Irons finishing 11th in the Premier League and in  an exclusive interview with Blowing Bubbles magazine, Gold said this season everything possible had been done to get everyone talking about the club in the best way possible.

He said: “I’ll be stunned if we finish 11th again. If everyone is back fit, even without the new players; if we have an average amount of injuries – so about half what we had last year – we will be challenging at the right end of the division.

“We got more attention than teams around us, and that’s got to be a positive. We know this attention means if we step out of line one bit, we get just as much coverage – that’s why we did and continue to work hard to ensure that the issues we faced last season don’t happen again.”

Schemes are already in place to ensure last season’s much-criticised empty seats are not repeated, but one seat that is definitely not going to be vacant any time soon is Gold’s own.

“This is the club we [Gold and co-owner David Sullivan] have supported all our lives, and we want to be here until the very end,” he said.

“If we thought someone was capable of helping us fulfill our dream sooner rather than later we would of course be interested … but as we speak, our plan is to do everything we can to take our club to the next level and challenge the top of the table.”