Aaron Cresswell’s hopes of landing a testimonial at West Ham look dead in the water.
Having signed a new deal at the club which will take him into his tenth year he would qualify for the game but such are the terms of the contract the club has with the stadium owners it surely can’t happen.
As pointed out by 6foot2.co.uk the primary reason is that it costs £300,000 to hire the London Stadium for a testimonial so you need to sell a lot of tickets just to break even and that risk would need to covered by the player himself.
It’s not the biggest deal in the world anyway financially as in modern days players have business managers and financial advisors to help them invest their millions to set them up for the rest of their lives.
Mark Noble attracted a sell out crowd of 35,000 at the Boleyn Ground in 2016. When Irons legend Bobby Moore received his testimonial on 16th November 1970 before terracing was abolished all he could muster was a crowd of 24,448.
Cresswell isn’t as well paid as many stars and we understand that he earns less than £50k a week at the club.
I think he’ll survive financially without a testimonial. In days gone by it was a way of supplementing an ageing players retirement fund but nowadays at this level none of them need it.
And, I understand many donate the collected funds.