Manuel Pellegrini has made it clear he has no thoughts of next season in his head as he goes for the highest placing he can get this term.

The manager – answering questions from reporters – declared firmly: “We are not looking to next season  because we need to finish this season first.

“After that we must evaluate what we have done during the whole year, start thinking about the new players.”

The boss though seems happy with this season’s progress giving a simple “maybe ” when asked if things had exceeded his expectation so far.

He said: Maybe,  because we brought in so many players expectation was high at the beginning, but it is not easy to form a club by just bringing in players, there are a lot of different things you must try to improve.

“We are trying to grow step-by-step, we must continue doing it and one of the good ways to do that is the performance of the team, get as high as you can be in the table.

We have just seen that Felipe [Anderson] is in the Brazil squad, Declan [Rice] was the best young player, after that I think also you must try to keep a style of football, so the fans can be happy when they come and see this team play.

But there is a lot of things that we miss already and we need to continue improving not just bringing in some players.

He added: “The next step is to try to bring in the most amount of young players that we can so we continue having a very good young development squad, and after that to try to reach the top six in the Premier League.

“It will not be easy. Also we need to continue improving our training ground, and having behind us the support of 60,000 fans.

He hasn’t given up on the top six declaring: “It is very difficult (to break into it)  because you have six big teams who have a lot of money to bring in good new players, and they already have strong squads also.

But Leicester did it one season and if one club can do it you must try to do it also, but there are a lot of things that you must try to improve season by season, you cannot just do it in one year.”

ClaretandHugh says:  The manager’s ‘maybe’to whether we have exceeded expectations this season is not a word that is likely to be repeated by too many fans given the events of recent campaigns. For the reality is that any season which doesn’t see the Hammers with the lingering fear of relegation surrounding them has to be an improvement on what had sadly become a norm. And after that dreadful start who could have believed we would be in a healthy mid table slot with all those anxieties out of our heads. That this has been achieved by a squad decimated by injuries for long periods is a result and one to be praised. All the indications from the boss are that there are more and hopefully better players on the way in during the summer but he’s right to point out that there is far more to it than that as he tries to change the philosophy of a club that has probably thought too small for too long.