For West Ham fans, this transfer-window must be a bittersweet time. Their side sits 18th in the Premiership, but has just embarked on a spending spree unprecedented in the clubs history. Financed by the mysterious new owner Eggert Magnusson, Alan Curbishley has signed Luis Boa Morte for £5m, Callum Davenport for £3m, Nigel Quashie for £1.5m, bid £10m for Ashley Young, supposedly £12m for Darren Bent and are reportedly on the verge of signing Lucas Neill for £2m.
This in itself is not cause for alarm. Magnusson appears to have the money to finance the signings, and West Ham are in need of some major reinforcements if they are to beat the drop this season. What makes for uneasy reading is the salaries that West Ham are apparently offering (all these terms have been touted by the tabloids, so must be taken with a pinch of salt) to try and entice these players to a club in a relegation battle. Young, a 21-year-old with half a Premiership campaign behind him, was reportedly offered £50,000 a week over five years, taking the total value of his deal to £20m. Bent tried to take advantage of the madness and asked for £100,000, while Neill has apparently turned his back on the 'dream-move' to Liverpool that he has hankered for all season after the promise £50,000 a week at Upton Park was more attractive than a paltry £35,000 at Anfield.
Fine, if West Ham stay up this season the policy will be deemed a success. They will be another club with an owner prepared to support a massive wage-bill, as don't forget those already at the club will also demand an increase. Next season they may even challenge for Europe with their re-jigged squad, and go some-way to paying back these transfer fees.
But what if it goes wrong? West Ham fans know only to well there is no such thing as 'too good to go down', and relegation would be a financial disaster. The playing staff would surely have to be gutted, for example one cannot imagine Neill's new found allegiance to West Ham would extend to playing in the Championship. Not only this, the club would be left with a crippling wage bill. One only has to look at Leeds, still paying £46,000-a-week to a player as average as Gary Kelly, not to mention subsidising Robbie Fowler's contract at Liverpool, to see what effect this can have. They too sit in the bottom three of their division, only they find themselves in danger of oblivion, relegation to League 1, and this a club who reached the semi-finals of the Champions League five years ago. And what about Magnusson? Will he hang around to bail out his new toy? He displayed a calculated coldness in his treatment of Alan Pardew and West Ham fans must hope he does not treat their club the same way at the first sign of trouble.
This may just be a hypothetical scenario. West Ham may stay up, in three years they might be bloody good, and Magnusson might be there lapping up the applause. But, if they flop and end up going down with the Watford, it'll be very interesting to see how long Magnusson, Neill and co hang around to get them back up again.
2 comments:
West Ham are an absolute joke and Neill is a greedy bastard
However, drastic times surely call for drastic measures. With West Ham in the somewhat dire postion they are in, it seems unlikely they could attract any decent players who might be able to arrest the slide that they are experiencing, unless they are prepared to open the cheque book. To my mind most of their purchases are fairly hillarious, most especially Neil, who is truly a shit dickhead. Nonetheless they are in the postion to be able to spend, so surely this is their only option if they wish to survive in the Premiership.There squad has proven that it is unequal to that task.
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