Pundit explains what could make David Sullivan sell West Ham
Much has been made over David Sullivan’s West Ham ownership in recent times.
West Ham fans have been sent an update on what David Sullivan’s stance is likely to be when it comes to his ownership of the club. It has been a turbulent time for the Hammers, who had a disastrous season of last, only making it to 43 points.
The Iron kept faith with Graham Potter but sacked him just a couple of months into the season after a forgettable start to the season. Nuno Espirito Santo has now been charged with turning things around, but it could take time.
Plenty of pundits have pointed towards the poor standard of the squad, and Jamie Redknapp was one of them, saying in September: “If I’m Sunderland, Burnley, Leeds, I’m looking at West Ham and thinking, ‘they’re the ones, they’re the weakest team in the Premier League we’re going to catch.
“That squad isn’t good enough. They haven’t got enough good players. That midfield just couldn’t get near, they didn’t have the legs to get around. They need to get someone with real legs.”
Many West Ham fans have voiced frustration at the club’s ownership due to the poor squad planning that has contributed to the club’s current predicament. But a takeover might be hard to come by, according to former Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan.
“Sullivan has the hide of a rhinoceros,” he said on TalkSport. “And the only thing that will take David Sullivan out of the door is the right amount of money. And David Sullivan is the arbiter of that.”
Asked about what might get Sullivan to sell up, he added: “If you were constantly put under pressure? Sure. But football clubs are more often bought than sold. Which means someone comes knocking on your door or they’re in distress situations.
“And I suppose the fans will say, ‘Well, we’ll create distress. We’ll create distress by the very nature of not spending the kind of money that we would ordinarily spend.’ And we will create the distress that creates the downward pressure.”
The financial side of a West Ham takeover
TBR Football’s Adam Williams has spoken about West Ham’s ownership situation recently. He said: “David Sullivan claims he rejected a £650m offer for full control of the club from Red Bull back in 2016. A while later, Karren Brady said that they had turned down approaches at £850m.
“And over the last few years, enterprise values of clubs as assessed by third parties like Forbes or Football Benchmark have gone up and up. By my calculations, elite clubs have a CAGR of about 10 per cent, according to these analyses. That stands for ‘compound annual growth rate’. Basically, clubs appreciate in value by 10 per cent every year on average.
“If that’s held true at West Ham, £650m in 2016 becomes around £1.5bn today. To me, that seems a little toppy, but I’d be very surprised if Sullivan enteWest Ham must secure 'blindingly obvious' Arsenal loan - opinionrtained any bids for the club that didn’t value it at least £1bn. The Kretinsky deal in 2021 is a decent yardstick, but the caveat there is that it is for a minority stake and is a pretty passive investment. It’s hard to see what the mechanics of any full takeover of West Ham would be given that they don’t have a single majority shareholder.
“There will probably be some mechanism whereby other shareholders can be compelled to sell if certain conditions are met, but we’re not going to be privy to those. I also think we need to make a distinction between price and value, because barely any club owners are actually making any money on a day-to-day basis. You can keep selling to the next guy, but at the end of the chain, these clubs are going to have to become profitable for there to be any real ‘value’ there.”
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