This was once the team that was too good to go down. Now West Ham are crashing headfirst into the reality that a hierarchy with all the financial muscle they needed to at least be the best of the rest are too bad to stay up. There might be 17 games left this season but it is hard to shake the sense that Tuesday night’s 2-1 defeat to Nottingham Forest was the night in which their fate was sealed.
A seven point gap to safety has been bridged before, but not by teams like this. It isn’t just that the players are largely not up to the level, or that Nuno Espirito Santo has not really proven himself to be a coach able to make them more than the sum of their parts. On the pitch it was bad, West Ham struggling to find a gear beyond counter attack and hope against an opponent hopelessly uncomfortable in the role of possession dominant aggressors.
Off the field it looks even worse.
The London Stadium was never the most hospitable of grounds in the best of times. Most of the time you could hardly blame supporters who saw the mercury drop below 30 and concluded that this was a night for blankets, a roaring fire and avoiding that whipping wind around the ground. This, though, was an early season six pointer, one where Murillo’s early Nottingham Forest own goal promised salvation. It could not, however, fill a ground where the attendance looked to be perhaps 10,000 short of the near-capacity 62,429 attendance the club declared. Nor could it make those who did come, some of whom held up placards protesting the ownership, believe that they might hold on.
CBS Sports analyst Nigel Reo-Coker, who captained the club to an FA Cup final knows better than most how “amazing” a united West Ham can feel like, albeit one in their previous home, the Boleyn Ground. This was not that. “Up 1-0 in a massive relegation fight and it didn’t feel like it,” he said. “If you want to be more critical you have to look at the players. They have to give the fans something to believe in. How do you get the fans to believe in your when you are playing like you don’t have believe? You can see when a team believes in itself when the odds are against them. I can’t see that in West Ham.”
How it all went wrong
Such a challenging environment is all the more remarkable given the heights West Ham scaled so recently. Their supporters might never have taken to the London Stadium but in the summer of 2023 those who moved them from Upton Park could at least make the case for having delivered on their promises. The Conference League was the first major honor in 43 years for one of England’s grand old clubs. Declan Rice might have departed but, no matter what Arsenal fans sing, West Ham had got a very fair price for an academy graduate.
Their coffers swelled, the financial results for the 2023-24 season, the most recent on record, painted a rosy picture of a debt free club that had generated a sizeable profit to be reinvested in the squad. You could even argue that David Sullivan and his fellow owners had seen the direction of travel post-Conference League with David Moyes, a ninth placed league finish papering over some cracks that a new man was tasked with addressing. And then another. And another. Nuno himself didn’t offer much to suggest there won’t be another after defeat. “It’s not about me now,” he said when asked if he believed he would be given more time to turn things around. “It’s about how we react.”
The most generous assessment of Nuno’s impact since Graham Potter left is that West Ham have not been quite as egregiously bad. From 0.6 points per game in their first five they are now at 0.69. Their non-penalty expected goal (npxG) difference per game has gone from -0.73 to -0.47, mostly due to a smidgen of improvement in attack. This is a form of improvement in much the same way that rising from 19th to 18th in the table might be. It is just nowhere near enough.
Improvement, though, is not something that has come through recruitment of the playing staff. Tim Steidten, formerly of Bayer Leverkusen and appointed as a technical director at a club desperately in need of a more modern structure, fell out with Moyes and Julen Lopetegui. In a prime example of the tail wagging the dog, Potter’s long-term ally Kyle Macaulay followed as head of recruitment. The role was admittedly more limited and may have delivered some rare successes in El Hadji Malick Diouf and Matheus Fernandes. There is however one quite significant problem with the head coach picking the man to build a squad for the future. He might get sacked, as Potter did less than four weeks after the window closed.
“it’s the squad,” said Reo-Coker of the biggest problems at West Ham. “The squad hasn’t been good enough. That’s what a lot of people have criticised them for, what I criticised them for in the summer. It’s not dynamic enough for the Premier League. The recruitment is why West Ham are where they are.”
And so West Ham, who two years on from the almost pure profit of the Rice sale were having to sell Mohamed Kudus to fund business elsewhere, must buy their way out of trouble, backing a manager who can only last so long if results do not improve. The Hammers have held talks over a move for Adama Traore, who Nuno coached at Wolves. The head coach pushed for the two signings that have been made so far too, attacking midfielder Pablo joining from Portuguese side Gil Vicente off the back of a shooting streak that is surely unsustainably hot, eight non-penalty goals off 3.4 npxG.
He arrived at the same time as $34 million Taty Castellanos, the 58th striker signed in 16 years since Sullivan and David Gold bought the club. His debut was promising enough, nabbing himself a couple of scoring opportunities even if his defining contribution was being adjudged offside when Cryscencio Summerville thought he had doubled West Ham’s lead in the second half. Unsurprisingly for a player with 16 minutes of football since Christmas, Castellanos seemed to fade as the game wore on. The bench, however, offered few senior options to positively impact the game. Striker No.57 was nowhere to be seen.
“I don’t know,” said Nuno when asked if Callum Wilson had left the club. He has been in talks with the hierarchy over terminating his contract. “Since I arrived I’ve been very honest and very correct with all the players.” Nuno declined to say if there had been a space in the squad for Wilson, who has looked limited as a starter since arriving in the summer, but proved to be a useful option off the bench for Newcastle last season.
Nuno still believes
With few options to change things on the bench, West Ham’s early lead looked precarious even against a Forest side who seemed to want nothing less than to be given the ball on their travels. For much of this game it was hard to tell exactly how much credit should be given to the West Ham defense for limiting Forest to long shots (which should have had greater pressure on them) versus how much the game was a reflection of a stuttering attack.
Still, Forest were not a team to wallow in their troubles. Nuno had imbued them with spirit in abundance on their remarkable ride up the Premier League last season. “When you watch that game back, Forest look way more together than West Ham,” said Reo-Coker. “They look more fragmented. Even without a good performance in the first half, you felt there was another gear for Forest to get to.”
TruMedia
That came after Nicolas Dominguez’s header somehow had the height and curve to beat Kyle Walker-Peters at the backline. Forest continued to probe though there was some contention in their eventual breakthrough, VAR ruling that Alphonse Areola had clattered Morgan Gibbs-White off a deep free kick, handing the Forest playmaker a penalty that he converted. There is some irony that West Ham were the masters of set pieces years ago, entire European campaigns fuelled on the indefensibility of Kurt Zouma and Craig Dawson at corners. Now, as in so many other aspects of the game, West Ham look to be a team who have been left behind.
Nuno, who raged over a penalty that Tomas Soucek labelled a “joke”, still believes they can catch up. “It’s not over. There’s a lot of football to be played, a seven point gap. Everyone will naturally rule us out but we don’t allow this feeling to go inside the dressing room.”
What happens next?
Count this column among those who are ruling them out. There is one simple reason for that. Who are the three teams worse than West Ham in this division? Forest evidently aren’t one of them and perhaps nor are Wolverhampton Wanderers, who picked up their first league win of the season when the Hammers came to Molineux. Wolves have almost certainly left themselves too much ground to make up and Burnley look to be a level below the rest, but who else? Sunderland have an inferior npxG difference to West Ham. They also have 30 points.
Tuesday was the day to draw Forest right into the mix, to get the sort of result that might have an owner as combustible as Evangelos Marinakis doing something silly such as sacking survival specialist Sean Dyche. With defeat the writing seems to be on the wall.
On the bright side, relegation to the Championship does mean the halving of rent on their London Stadium at a cost of $3.4 million to the capital’s taxpayer. There could be additional charges incurred however given that the deal is for West Ham to rent the stadium for 25 days a year and clubs in the second tier would play 23 home league games plus any play off and cup fixtures. Ultimately those savings would be negligible compared to a halving of broadcast revenue and major hit to commercial income. Player sales would plug a gap, but given the standard of performances of so many this season it is fair to ask what price a squad replete with many 28 and over stars — Lucas Paqueta and Jarrod Bowen the most notable — might get.
Unless something radical changes, filling out the London Stadium in the second tier next season could be as great a challenge as survival in the first this. West Ham’s fanbase is sizeable and passionate. Back in the days of Leagues Europa and Conference it made E20 the most electrifying place in London on Thursday nights. Can it rouse itself for Preston North End in mid-December 2026?
If not then there is cause for even more alarm than just over relegation. If Tuesday night is what 2026 holds for West Ham then the fear isn’t just that they get relegated. It ought to be that the spiral doesn’t stop there.
