Gonzo can’t take all the ongoing Hammers stuff too seriously.
The never ending soccer Irons circus where the seeming ringmaster David Sullivan appears to be running things is close to never ending.
Grady Diangana’s departure…the tightrope walk exercise which followed with tweets being issued from Mark Noble, dominated week one of the new season.
Then came the protests, the Newcastle defeat and a social media outburst which left many shaking their fists in anger and other shaking their heads in despair.
Once again the Irons are constantly in the news for all the wrong reasons but it happens so often sometimes you can only sit back, smile and see the funny side of a game which is far too often taken over seriously by those that call themselves real fans!
And in this video Gonzo has clearly reached that point which for anybody possessing a pulse is bound to bring at least a giggle or two.
We make ourselves an easy target and social media is probably our worst enemy, above even David Sullivan & Co. Trawl enough fan sites and you can find some bombastic comment to quote as a headline. There will always be some moron somewhere prepared to moan that Soucek is an overrated waste of money and Bowen is lazy…….we’re all entitled to a view, and on the web there are few limits and almost no need to justify your posting. And every idiot loves the minute of fame or notoriety that a nonsensical or needlessly hyperbolic quote would bring them.
If everyone that had been quoted as saying ‘if X happens, I’m never going again’ really did stay away, we’d be down to single figure season ticket holders. Too many just love to shout their metaphoric online mouths off knowing the anonymity of the web means no one can look them in the eye and tell them how dumb they look to the rational-thinking masses.
I’ve watched the clubs around us spend pretty freely and in my view, it simply doesn’t stand up. Any club bringing in four or five new first teamers is taking a huge risk anyway, but racking up an average spend of £50m each when attendances are zero and the EPL has just lost one of its biggest buyers in China has to be bonkers. We all know Abramovich has deep pockets, but Palace? Really? Their only saviour in recent years was selling Wan-Bissaka to Man Utd for £50m, which was their equivalent to our selling Declan Rice.
Most fans are just too blasé about buying and paying players. It’s apparently an insult to ‘only’ pay a squad player £20,000 a week – or, as I see it, just over £1m a year. Again, really? I’ve worked for nearly forty years and my entire retirement pot is less than nine months of Declan Rice’s wages. And he’s supposedly underpaid! Imagine how keen the club must be to offload Jack’s wages when he’s taking £5m a year out. I know as fans we all want the best, but at some stage there has to be a degree of realism creep in. Even billionaires can’t haemorrhage a wage bill of £100m a year and not notice.
We seem to forget that we spent big – and we now know, perhaps unwisely – last season, backing Pellegrini. Buying Haller, Anderson, Fornals, etc. wasn’t the sign of a Board who were reluctant to back a manager, but it just didn’t work out. So we moved on to Moyes – a thrifty pair of hands, having raided the bank account already – and to his credit, his buys seem to be much more sensible. (I have to exclude Hugill from his first time round as I have no idea what that was about). Jarrod Bowen and Tomas Soucek are both great investments and I think Moyes’ choices in his second spell have been nothing short of inspired so far. He knows every pound spent has to be maximised and the ‘canny Scotsman’ looks to have come to the fore. I’d trust him to bring in the right players at the right price – and while Tarkowski might be the right player, anything over £30m isn’t the right price.
As for the other two topics – Diangana and the takeover – I don’t really get the fuss over either. Grady was a player that no one commented on last season when Bilic took him away, so Noble’s outburst seems odd to me. I saw a few of his games for us before the loan and he looked lightweight. Only time will tell if swapping him for £18m was a mistake, but I have a sneaking suspicion that his season’s showreel will be three or four minutes of fancy footwork and not much else. I’m happy to be proved wrong as I have nothing against him, but never saw anything about that made me want to stand up and applaud.
And the takeover? In my view, fiction. And if not, bull****. So someone’s going to pay £350m for us but then, within two years, have a purpose-built new stadium ready? Alarm bells ring there. Assuming there is a design already done and ready to roll, planning permission in place and no hitches, where is it going to be? For some of us, I fear that unless it’s on the corner of Green Street and Barking Road, it ain’t gonna be good enough. Spurs spent nearly £1billion on theirs and it overran by six months – all on land they already owned or by compulsory purchase. Let’s assume the new guys build at least a 50,000 seater and the bill will be at least, say £600m. On top of the land purchase and the £350m for the club. So around a £1billion investment. But why spend the £600m when you already have a 60,000 stadium (whatever your view of it) for 90 years at a cost of £225m – under half? To put that into perspective, you could stay where we are in Stratford and give every one of our 50,000 season tickets a gift of £7,500 just to break even against the cost of a new stadium. So, you might appreciate my scepticism of the rumoured anonymous takeover.
Oh, I forgot – we’d also have to pay to get out of the lease at London Stadium, which still has 90+ years to run at £2.5m a year.
Sorry, I got carried away a bit and forgot to mention that every protest, every slagging, every pitch invasion, every horrible headline actually makes the club a less attractive investment. Who in their right mind would want to plough £350m into a venture where, if you make a sound business decision but a minority of the supporter base doesn’t agree with it, they campaign to make you sell up, no matter at what price? One man’s ‘pressure to sell’ is another man’s ‘reason not to invest’. And both need to in accord for it to happen.
Completely well reasoned and thought out statement. One that most reasonable supporters will see a lot of common sense in. Hope you’ve got your tin hat on though.
That was an interesting piece, Diamond. Maybe not everyone will agree, but you make a lot of sense to me.