West Ham nearly goners....

Ive known much more of Ham in lower leagues, so they seek their level again. Did they run out of cash,

this Olympic stadium have anything to do with it?

Kind of like the West Ham Team that Glen Roeder took down. They too were full of class players.

Would be worth their while to steal Warnock from us - Whatever the price. (And if West Ham offered QPR 5 million pounds for Warnock, I presume we'd take it)

Sorry Jay just cant see them getting two wins and if they do they have to rely on others.
As my area is nearly all west ham and spurs supporters, your right in that they generally have no qualms with QPR though.

Moore, Hurst and Peters...
Can scoff at them over the years

Can be made at them for stealing Parkes and Goddard

Can want to get some of their left over players

But they're a glamour attraction for QPR...and Rob Abbott did score on his debut

I met up with Parkesy in his sports shop in 1980. Just missed him, Alan devonshire & Paul Goddard together. Shame as I liked both of them and that West ham side. was a good team. Phil's a legend. Still have the West Ham coffee mug he gave me!

For clever business men, them 2 decisions appointing Grant and then not replacing him in time are shockers.

Step forward, Mr. Neil Warnock

TELEGRAPH/Duncan White

West Ham United's years of shambolic mismanagement have left club on the brink of 'Armageddon'

It is a sunny day in Docklands in early September 2006 and Carlos Tévez is in a Canary Wharf hotel speaking at a press conference ahead of Argentina’s friendly with Brazil at the Emirates.

The world’s media is in attendance but the questions are not about the upcoming clash of South America’s great football nations but about West Ham United.

The signing of Tévez, and his compatriot Javier Mascherano, was a remarkable coup. With West Ham having only been denied the FA Cup the previous season by Steven Gerrard’s heroics, these spectacular signings appeared to presage a redevelopment of this most traditional of clubs, a modernisation to reflect that of the steel and glass regeneration of the docks outside.

Two months later and Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, the Icelandic billionaire, bought the club and the talk was of getting into the Champions League.

Five years on and West Ham’s players will walk out on to the pitch of the DW stadium knowing that they must beat Wigan to retain even a chance of staying in the Premier League.

If they fail, then David Sullivan, the co-owner, believes it will take up to £40 million in loans just to keep the club in business.

“The fans should know this club is in a worse financial position than any other in the country,” he said this week.

In the past he has described the prospect of relegation as “absolutely horrendous – like Armageddon.” Well, it was a terrible film.

The roots of this crisis can be traced back to that sunny day in September five years ago. The disastrous twists and turns of the Tévez affair have been well documented: West Ham are literally still paying for it (there are apparently two further instalments of the £21 million compensation to Sheffield United to come).

The accounts show that in the last four years, West Ham paid £51.1 million in “exceptional items” – that means compensation and legal fees, the majority of which related to the Tévez case.

That’s effectively three seasons' worth of match day revenue poured down the drain.

Yet it was in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf and the City of London that West Ham’s true undoing was hatched. The global economic collapse was particularly destructive in Iceland and Gudmundsson went bust and with that, West Ham were pushed to the precipice.

In 2006, West Ham made a profit. The team which Alan Pardew led first to promotion then to the FA Cup final had finished ninth. The wage bill was £30.9 million.

Two years later that wage bill had more than doubled to £63.3 million. In the 2008-09 season, according to Deloitte, they had the eighth highest wage bill in the Premier League. They have made a loss every year since 2006.

The financial crash would have always hurt West Ham but the Icelandic owners placed them in a recklessly precarious position. The chairman, Eggert Magnusson, reportedly operated without a budget.

It has been estimated that Freddie Ljungberg and Kieron Dyer together cost the club close to £34 million in total. Again, to put that in context, that’s pretty much how much West Ham make from filling Upton Park for two full seasons. Two full seasons spent on two players.

Within two years, West Ham had been distorted from a profit making club into what David Gold described as a “car crash” when he and Sullivan took over.

There have been some impressive efforts to staunch the flow of cash out of West Ham. The wage bill had been reduced to £50 million last season and, at the end of this campaign Dyer and Matthew Upson are out of contract.

If Scott Parker is also sold then the three highest earners will be off the wage bill and £10 million a year will be saved.

With the Olympic stadium allowing the eventual sale of Upton Park (and bringing higher match-day revenue), there was some hope that the club could be brought back into line.

The problem is that further cuts were needed just to get fit for Premier League purpose and start addressing some of the club’s debt (some £35 million of loans are due for repayment in August).

With roughly 60 per cent of the club’s revenue coming from TV rights, relegation will mean completely gutting the place. The £48 million over four years in parachute payments would take the edge off losing the Sky money but there will have to be a drastic cut in wages.

Whoever is in charge will have to oversee a wholesale restructuring of the squad. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. When Lee Dixon paid a recent visit to the training ground he described what he saw as “a total shambles”.

“Players were arguing with each other, others weren’t trying, some were sulking,” he said. Avram Grant was appointed by these owners but has then been undermined by first their pursuit of Martin O’Neill and then some of their public statements.

Even so, if the players are no longer working for him, then that is a dismal failure. The game at the DW stadium should give a clear indication.

Relegation-fear muddies the mind. Whether they are relegated or manage to cling on, the club have to break out of the cycle of costly short term-ism. The likes of Benni McCarthy and Robbie Keane are typical of this kind of signing, brought in under the misguided impression that they will keep the club up.

Magnusson’s excesses were unforgivable but West Ham’s transfer policy remains erratic. All of which points to a lack of understanding to what kind of a club West Ham want to be. The fear of demotion has stopped them thinking of what kind of club they want to be in two, five or 10 years time.

Who is in charge of transfer policy? At the moment a significant number of deals are done through the agent Barry Silkman. While a friend of Sullivan he does not work for the club and several of the deals he has been party to, including the appointment of Grant, have clearly not come off.

They need to appoint someone to run the club’s football strategy, to work alongside Karren Brady, the chief executive, Tony Carr the academy director and whoever is coach next season.

They need someone to bring stability and vision to the club.

Ultimately, once weaned off the highly-paid mercenaries, West Ham have to get back to what they have always done best.

When the players emerge from the tunnel at Upton Park they run across a slogan that announces this club as the academy of football. West Ham needs to make good on that again.

www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/8513965/West-Ham-Uniteds-years-of-shambolic-mismanagement-have-left-club-on-the-brink-of-Armageddon.html