West Ham United are a club who have come very far in the last couple of years, getting back into the Premiership after relegation and by the looks of things we will be staying in the Premiership; but if we do stay up what can we expect to help prevent us suffering from “second season syndrome”? Would we be busy in changing the team completely or try to stick with what we have got?
I think that the way that we build the team in the summer transfer window depends entirely on the manager who is leading us, and it is not certain that it will be Sam Allardyce. It has been well documented that his contract runs out at the end of the season and there have been calls from many West Ham supporters for his time at the Hammers to end.
Although the transfer policy regarding players who we bring in is unclear, our policy for the players that we keep will be the same whoever we bring in. This policy will be to keep hold of all of our main players; the likes of Winston Reid and Mohamed Diame are players who will undoubtedly be looked at due to their performances this season, but if we are to drive on then it is vital that we keep hold of our big name players.
One man, who has been talked about lately, Andy Carroll, could end up getting a permanent transfer to the Irons in my opinion, but this would only be if Sam Allardyce was to stay on as manager. I can’t see any other manager who would come to us, wanting to spend what would probably be the majority of his budget on a player, who is undoubtedly very good, but was out for a while with injuries and hasn’t scored that many goals.
We have been linked with other players such as Wigan Athletic’s Maynor Figueroa and I think he is a player who could fit into many systems and play at a good level, and I’m sure that whoever the gaffer is this summer we can expect the side to be strengthened, in order to make sure that we continue to strengthen our status as a good Premier League team.
Whether it is Sam Allardyce or another manager, we can expect for the side to be strengthened, but it would be in very different ways depending on who. I can’t see us signing a new team full of players, as we don’t need to do that and QPR have already proved that this doesn’t really help for a second season in the Premier League. In my opinion we will sign four or five players with the majority of them being starting players, we will do everything possible to keep our main players and we will probably let a couple of squad players go in order to raise funds for the team. It won’t be a window of dramatic change but it will be one that allows us to strengthen our team ahead of the new season.
Lets look at the obvious. If we stay up then it’s odds on we will have Allardyce for another year.
It’s also unbelievably unlikely that we will keep Carroll. He’s just too expensive and the return he offers isn’t enough.
In so many ways the second season is so much harder than the first. Therefore consolidation has to be the first priority of the management,
The huge debt still exists and we can’t expect the summer transfer kitty to be all that impressive.
Result: We will try and hang on to what we have and try to land a decent striker. Don’t expect much more this summer.
Personally i agree with a lot of what the author is saying. I think we will probably try to keep Andy but that depends largely on whether he wants to stay imho…assuming we stay up and Sam will continue to be our manager (which is likely at this point). There are quite a few players that we could look out for in the summer to strengthen deficient positions like LB (figueroa, Marcos Alonso which are out of contract or Olsson for a few million). We could probably use a proper right winger too. Other then that we are in a decent position and a lot of our players could function as back-ups even if they are not quite first XI quality.
I know we should stay at U.P. and then the olympricks would be fucked along with larry and barry hearn…