Summerville goes: Greek Bloke to stay?

So Jimmy Summerville has finally left us this way. Somehow the Kretinsky regime has got us cheering on selling our best players, basically because we’re getting over the odds for them. Jimmy was set to move to Roma for £50m before Al-Hilal stepped in with a £60m offer. It’s a strange career move for a 24-year-old, but perhaps the reported £1000-an-hour wages helped. That’s £145m in the bank for the club from selling Fernandes and Summerville.

Summerville had a great World Cup and a cracking last half of the season for WHU. But he is very injury-prone and missed half of his initial season with injury while taking a long time to get up to speed in 2025-26. However he very nearly kept us up and I’ll remember his fine body swerve before scoring at Fulham, plus vital goals at Spurs and Burnley. He had a good goal disallowed against Forest and was very unlucky hitting the bar against Brentford. Good luck in Saudi Jimmy, though they might not play the Communards much there.

Meanwhile Dinos Mavropanos has been offered a new contract and the chance of staying a year to hopefully take WHU up. It would be a filip to keep him, so let’s hope Kretinsky can do a Bowen and impress the Greek Bloke.

FRIENDLY FIRE

Of course players now need to be bought, though looking at the pre-season friendlies there are a lot of young players who might fancy getting games in the Championship namely Orford, Earthy, Golambeckis, Potts, Scarles, Magassa, Mayers, Kante and Marshall. Might forgotten man James Ward-Prowse be retained for his dead-balls? And could Kilman recover his confidence in the Championship? We’ve even seen Maxwel Cornet playing in the friendly at Stevenage, as viewed by Chris Packham. Nuno has to assess what we now have very carefully.

Another good thing is that now Karren Brady has departed the relationship between the club and London Stadium LLP seems to be improving. It has to with the stadium losing them £19m a year. Chair Lyn Garner has suggested painting the seats claret and blue in order to make the stadium “less sterile” and playing women’s games there which West Ham would fund and seems a good idea. Though playing more away games early on to facilitate September concerts is a non-starter.

Overall we’ve got the cash the club wanted by selling just two players, Bowen is staying and the club seems to be making progress off the field. Now the Hammers just need to sign some players.

Massive: The Miracle of Prague by Pete May is available from Biteback Publishing, price 12.99.

Jarrod Bowen's on hire

It’s a huge boost to West Ham’s promotion hopes that Jarrod Bowen is staying at the club. Even more significantly it’s a sign that Daniel Kretinsky is taking a hands-on interest in running the club after years of David Sullivan blunders. Jarrod flew to Prague to talk to Kretinsky and director Jiri Svarc and said, “the ambition that I got from them, certainly in terms of the direction the club wants to move in, it interests me a lot.” Bowen has signed a revised contract which reportedly gives him the option of leaving if West Ham don't gain promotion, so it's all down to next season.

Bowen will have been helped by the fact that wife Danni Dyer is a Hammers’ fan, as is father-in-law Danny Dyer, now a sex symbol on Rivals. Danny presumably had a few words with young Jarrod about how to be a top geezer. Interestingly Bowen mentions happiness as being one of his priorities and he’s probably concluded that one season at a mid-level Premier League club couldn't match being a lifelong hero at West Ham for showing such loyalty. His winner in Prague cemented the bond between captain and fans and Jarrod mentions he will be a fan himself when he retires — there’s a space next to us in the Billy Bonds stand if he’s interested.

JARROD MARCHES ON

Despite the lack of signings we’re seeing signs the club is finally being run properly. Fifty thousand season tickets sold is phenomenal for a relegated club. We got £20m more cash than expected for Mateus Fernandes. A new head of player recruitment has been appointed in Nils Koppen and Rui Pedro Silva has come in as Nuno’s assistant having worked with him at several previous clubs.

The best thing about Bowen staying is that it might encourage other players to remain loyal, hopefully including the Greek Bloke who scored in the friendly at Southend. Summerville will go as will Todibo and probably Wan-Bissaka, but we stand a chance of keeping most of the squad intact. A 46-game marathon is coming up and with Jarrod still an Iron the club feels a lot more united. 

Massive: The Miracle of Prague by Pete May is available from Biteback Publishing, price 12.99.

The West Ham Syndrome and my part in it

Here's some more podcast banter while we wait for West Ham to unveil a plethora of new signings. Enjoyed chatting to Max and Andrew on the West Ham Syndrome about the books what I wrote. Click on the link to sample. 

Draft includer: West Ham's greatest relegation XI

Good fun as always to appear on the Stop! Hammer Time podcast. This time we had a version of the US Draft system, with four managers — myself, Jim Grant, Steve Law and Trevor Drane — picking sides of players relegated with West Ham. The four managers took it in turns to select four really high-quality sides. Trevor Brooking went first of course, but West Ham have also managed to relegate players like Bonds, Devonshire, Martin, Di Canio, McAvennie, Carrick, Cole, Johnson, Bowen, Parkes, Dicks, Lampard Senior and many other brilliant players. Five relegations and a lot of mismanagement has gone into that achievement. Still we enjoyed doing it and to find out our selections click on the link.

Fernandes off to Spurs for £85 million

So Mateus Fernandes is leaving for Spurs for £85 million. No-one likes selling players but West Ham have got the price they wanted. A shame it’s Spurs, but this is a pretty good deal. Fernandes is a really good player, but he’s also been relegated in successive seasons and is not the finished article yet. He’s still prone to giving away dangerous free-kicks outside his own box and needs to improve his finishing, witness the chance that was saved by Raya against Arsenal. 

He’s certainly got brilliant potential and really prospered when Paqueta left and he was the main creator in the side, but I’d put his current value at about £60 million. We paid £38 million for him year ago and sold him for £85 million so that’s a tidy gain of £47 million. It’s not often West Ham make that kind of profit so let’s give poor old Graham Potter a bit of credit for signing him. 

Not all will be happy. As my pal Lisa says we should stop selling players to Spurs as they keep breaking them, as in Mo Kudus. All we can hope is that Fernandes can achieve a hat-trick of relegations with Tottenham.

Much will depend on how West Ham spend the money this summer. Jimmy Summerville is likely to go too and will get a good price following his fine World Cup. Todibo will definitely go and possibly Wan-Bissaka, though please not Jarrod Bowen. We’ve got to hope that with a new director of football appointed soon and no interference from David Sullivan, recruitment might become less scattergun. So far Disasi has returned to Chelsea, Traore has been released and the kid from Caracas Kieber Lamadrid has signed for around £1 million. 

Off the pitch things are improving. Boyle Sports is continuing with its sponsorship and the club is consulting over a new badge, a shrewd PR move after Sullivan and Brady dumped the Boleyn Castle and plonked “London” on the crest. But we now need players. It’s not long till the August kick-off and with money in the bank the Hammers have to start a serious rebuild.

Kretinsky in control

Well, it's got to be good news that David Sullivan is being edged out at West Ham. Daniel Kretinsky is buying more shares from the Gold family, which would take his stake up to 43 per cent through 1890 Holdings, which is part of EP. 

The club statement claims the board did not know the extent of the allegations against Sullivan — which he denies — until Monday's Panorama was broadcast. That statement from Kretinsky and Vanessa Gold says the right things: “We were deeply concerned by the revelations made by The Times and Panorama this week and our thoughts go out to those women who have fought so hard to make their voices heard. Any abuse of power is abhorrent, and it takes great courage and determination to speak up against it."

On a football level it seems encouraging that Kretinsky wants to, "stabilise West Ham United, retain as many of our key players as possible and, under the management of Nuno Espírito Santo, secure an immediate return to the Premier League." There is an encouraging line on finance, reading: "As the largest shareholder, group EP will be able to provide the additional financing the club needs."

Importantly all the shareholders, Kretinsky, Vanessa Gold and minority shareholders Tripp Smith, Daniel Harris and Terry Brown, have all said they will vote together, effectively sidelining Sullivan. We do have to remember that Kretinsky is an unknown quantity and gives very little away in public. But he does seem to be professional in his dealings, has never been a pornographer and must have surely despaired over the way West Ham has been run in recent years. There is still a risk David Sullivan could exert a "pre-emptive right" to buy some of the Gold shares to match Kretinsky's share, according to the Times. Yet he must surely realise that his time at West Ham is up. Sponsors will be horrified at what has gone on and the new powers want to unite fans and club and now say they are not going to be forced to sell players. There just might be some hope for the future.

Time for Sully to sell-up

Apart from Panorama's programme on our ex-co-chairman and front-page headlines for all the wrong reasons, plus relegation, no permanent chief executive, no director of football, a £104m loss last year and a likely fire sale, all is going well at West Ham. 

Now comes the news that after FA safeguarding concerns about an historical allegation, Sullivan has not been allowed to have contact with the women's side or youth teams for the past three years. Sullivan denies all the claims, made from the time when he was running the Sunday Sport. My first thought, beyond sympathy for the women involved, is what must the club sponsors and co-owner Daniel Kretinsky make of all this? Boyle Sports has already expressed concern and it comes to something when a gambling company is having ethical doubts.

Martin Samuel has a good summary of the situation in the Times. Sullivan's position is surely untenable after all this and also because he is being ridiculed every game by the fanbase. But the problem is that he still owns 38.8per cent of the club. Daniel Kretinsky is still in the process of trying to up his stake in the club to 40 per cent by buying shares from the Gold family. Sullivan is being investigated by the Football Regulator and it could force him to see his shares, though this might be difficult as he has not been charged by the police with any criminal offence. Otherwise Kretinsky or someone else has to make Sully an offer he can't refuse. Though there's still the risk that he might want to pass on his shares on to his sons.

As Samuel writes, we really do need to hear from the Sphinx, aka Daniel Kretinsky. My hunch is that he is after buying the London Stadium and the land around it and doing some lucrative redevelopments. But how interested is he in the football team and will he put money money into getting WHU promoted? If David Sullivan does sell-up and the Hammers get a new owner then we might at least be entitled to a little optimism.