West Ham Proper

The club’s delayed reports for 2007-2008 make fascinating reading. It paints a fairly clear picture of the mess the club has got itself into over the last few years.

The first key statement is on the Tevez affair.

“It is clear that the original recruitment of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano and the subsequent decision to plead guilty to the charges of breaches of rules, on legal advice, have had extremely damaging financial repercussions for West Ham United.”

Not half. A cost of £31.8m according to these reports, though some of that is creative accounting as that headline figure is to be spread over a number of years. But what’s interesting is that the club are now admitting that a key mistake was pleading guilty to the original FA charge. I always thought that this was the single biggest error – it was read by everybody as an admission of guilt whereas the club admit here that it was taken under legal advice.

Without going over the minutai of the Tevez affair, I have always felt that the club were guilty of little more than a minor technical offence, and that had they fought the charge in the first place the long-term ramifications would never have occured. Easy with hindsight I know, but the acceptance of guilt was essentially a plea-bargain with the FA that has spectacularly backfired, not just financially but in terms of the standing of West Ham in the footballing world. Whoever provided the ‘legal advice’ on that occasion did us no favours.

The next bombshell – our wages in 2007-2008 were £63.3m, having more than doubled in just two years. Estimated to be the 6th highest in the country! This is the true legacy of Eggert Magnusson that I believe I was the first person to write about – satisfying to see it officially documented now in print, because I took some fearsome stick at the time for suggesting that ‘Eggy’ might not be the messiah others believed him to be. The key factor – the crippling purchase of key players on wages that the club were never likely to be able to sustain.

“Poor investment decisions will impact adversely on a club‟s league performance and ultimately its financial results. By way of example, West Ham United purchased three high profile players in 2007/08 at a combined cost of £20m with total annual wages in excess of £12m. Those players made 36 starting appearances between them in the season.”

Take your pick of any three of Bellamy, Ljungberg, Dyer and Parker. There’s an element of hindsight here again – had Dyer and Bellamy stayed fit and shot us into Europe that season nobody would be complaining too much. And there’s no doubt that we paid top dollar for the top prospects available in this country – that is the sort of investment that many fans spent decades begging for. Nobody in their right mind could say hand-on-heart that they’d prefer it if we’d bought Marlon King rather than Craig Bellamy. In short, these were great signings, but unfortunately ones that we could never hope to sustain.

There’s a teaser for the next set of reports to try and allay the worst fears that is interesting…

“Since the year end the club has generated £30.1m in sale proceeds (net of significant realisation costs) and invested a further £18.4m in new players, net proceeds of £11.7m. This programme of player trading has achieved two objectives. Firstly, the size of the paying squad has been reduced from in excess of 30 at the end of the 2007/08 season and secondly a number of high earning but underperforming players have been replaced by players on lower wages but with greater potential.”

There’s the project in a nutshell. Profits in the transfer market, generating a smaller squad, with younger players with more potential. It’s a strategy that I fully support, as you’ll know if you’ve read anything I’ve written over the past two years or more.

Nobody expected this statement to be pretty reading, and it isn’t. It’s basically an attempt to produce a set of reports with all the worst financial news in one punch. The next set of reports will show the club trying to fight its way out of the corner. Critics will use it as a stick to beat the club with, and who can blame them – it makes pretty hideous reading. But the alternative view is that it just shows what a tremendous job the club is doing to keep its nose above water in the circumstances. And debatably even swim against the tide.

Whenever I look at these documents I always have the same emotional response. They remind me that supporting a club doesn’t depend on the financial results. That they would have to board up the stadium to keep us from supporting the club that we, for some strange reason, adore. The finances are, in the end, a sideshow.