Simon Jordan: West Ham owners have succeeded but ‘lucked out’ with David Moyes
The West Ham owners “lucked out” in successfully achieving the position they said they would when the club moved grounds, says Simon Jordan.
Owners David Sullivan and David Gold, as well as vice-chair Karren Brady, were extremely unpopular when they moved the Hammers from Upton Park to the then-Olympic Stadium, and were subjected to furious fan protests while the club struggled.
Ex-Crystal Palace chairman Jordan has reluctantly credited them with reaching the position they promised at the time, but believes they were fortunate in “stumbling back across” David Moyes, who they’d previously let go, with the job the Scot has done since key to the Irons’ current position.
Speaking on talkSPORT this morning (Thursday 17 March, 11.10am) host Sam Matterface asked: “How much credit do you give Karren Brady, David Sullivan and David Gold for getting them into this position?”
“A lot more than I’d like to,” replied Jordan.
He went on: “I’m a staunch critical observer of David Sullivan and David Gold, primarily because of my own experiences with them, so I’m never going to part of an advocacy for them.
“But you have to say what’s fair. What’s fair is that they made themselves an object of ridicule when they talked about achieving this. People felt they were sold a pup.
“Whether you can say they lucked out by getting [Moyes] back, and a sequence of unintended consequences have worked out well for them, they’ve engineered a position where they are where they said they’d be.
“A lot of that has been the stumbling back across David Moyes, because they had him in their camp. And let’s be clear, West Ham fans didn’t want him.”
Accident or design?
It certainly feels like those at the top of the club have benefited from a few factors falling into place for them.
But the fact remains that the club are challenging towards the top of the Premier League and are still, at least until tonight’s second leg with Sevilla, in Europe.
It’s a far cry from just over two years ago, when The Guardian’s Jacob Steinberg wrote: “The vice-chair’s vision was “a world-class stadium with a world-class team” and it is not an exaggeration to say that West Ham have failed woefully on both counts”.
Fan protests were common place up to that point, as the team performed badly, with a vicious cycle between the two appearing to exacerbate each other.
The arrival of Covid-19 soon after is another key consideration, as it forced fans to stay away.
Whether Moyes would have had the time and space to do the job he has managed to do with his players, with angry protests aimed at the directors’ box every week is impossible to judge.
But it can’t be entirely coincidence that the mood among the supporters, and the product on the pitch, was completely different when they were eventually able to return.
There is clearly no way the leadership could have planned for such a sequence of events, and the fact they let Moyes go once anyway is a matter of fact, so it does appear that a major slice of luck fell into their lap.
In other West Ham news, Ally McCoist and Alan Brazil disagreed live on talkSPORT in a debate about the Hammers manager.
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