West Ham owners’ transfer business doesn’t sit right with Simon Jordan
West Ham failed to sign any new players in January, despite trying until the deadline, and the owners of the club have come under fire as a consequence.
Surprisingly, the Hammers made a £50million bid for Leeds United midfielder Kalvin Phillips and were also sizing up a move for his teammate Raphinha [The Sun].
Simon Jordan, the former owner of Crystal Palace, knows all about the inner workings of a football club during a transfer window and he isn’t convinced by the strategy of the Irons board.
“The make-up of West Ham is changing,” Jordan said on talkSPORT, “You’ve now got very significant other shareholder in the business that I think will end up owning West Ham at some point.
“The bottom line is, I think it’s very easy to make flash for cash offers that look good on paper.
“It’s easy to go after transactions when the difficulty of completing them is almost off the charts, you’d have to break someone’s arm off to get them to do the deal.
“I don’t think it’s right to paint them in the light everyone paints them in. If you sat down with Sullivan and said, ‘bet your house on these deals being done?’ They would have said, ‘don’t know about that son!’ Then why are you going after them?”
Ambition or a waste of time?
Have David Gold, David Sullivan and Daniel Kretinsky gotten too big for their boots since the Hammers qualified for Europe last season?
Some fans will be delighted that the club is aiming high for these kind of players but if there was never any chance of a deal happening in January, it wasn’t worth the hassle.
All this did was take away time from the owners in getting someone who would genuinely be interested in a move.
The huge effort that went into submitting an offer for Phillips could have been focused on adding that much-needed striker cover to David Moyes’ squad.
Whether these decisions come back to haunt the Hammers in the future may well be a deciding factor on whether the owners keep the faith of the fans on their side.
They are willing to throw the money around, but they need to focus that attention on the right targets in future windows.
In other West Ham news, this rock star has given his thoughts ahead of the Irons trip to Kidderminster in the FA Cup.