Amidst of all the angst between the chairmen and the fans, the move to the Olympic stadium and the implications of such to our football culture, our ‘axiom’ of the academy of football and a lot more, this transfer rumour is the epitome of everything wrong going on at West Ham.
We’ve had many assurances from our chairmen about this Olympic Stadium move, that it will take us to the next level, that we will have a lot more money to be playing around with and so on and so forth.
We’ve dealt with all of the things that they have got wrong so far, we’re getting over the crowd trouble issue, we’ve gotten over the fact that we were linked with absolutely everybody and anybody and in fact received Simone Zaza. We are still dealing with this whole standing issue and are still not receiving enough security and policing for matches, even though West Ham have been reached out to regarding this matter and they are not willing to pay extra to solve a failing service, which is, in fact, putting us in danger.
Business moves are for all to see on Twitter, now in modern times it is expected that some news is going to be leaked out, but it shouldn’t be from the chairmen or their sons. We even have dictations on what formations or what players are going to play. The chairmen have taken us to another level, but is this a level we are happy to be on?
The crux of why this article is being written isn’t because of all of these things, these things we’ve been dealing with we’ve been dealing with for months now, no the reason why this article had to be started is because of the recent transfer rumour linking us to Chelsea’s youth player, Ruben Loftus-Cheek.
Now this rumour could be fake, this rumour could be true, but how are the ‘Academy of Football’ linked with a fierce London rival’s youth player? We have our own youth players we need to develop! This is another mantra of the club that the chairmen are slowly but surely killing off. We’ve got players on loan that are excelling outside of our first team, and we want to sign rival players that have been given the chance of first team minutes, to be chosen over our own players? How I as a fan can see that Josh Cullen deserves a chance to play in the first team over Loftus-Cheek is baffling. He was excelling in our youth set-up, he held his own during our inaugural home match against Juventus and I really thought the move away to Bradford City would be the making of Cullen. If the mantra is now not to develop our own players but develop a rival’s, how does that move make sense? That is perhaps the most unsettling culture killing of West Ham of late.
Homesickness, that can be dealt with, the Chelsea game really did feel like the cure to that. Standing up, the wheels are in motion for safe standing as per David Gold and after a while, people will know where to sit and to stand. But undermining our own academy? West Ham’s very cornerstone? The soul of the club is hanging on by a thread.
