English football is awash with supposed ‘club DNAs’ these days but few can match West Ham for earnestness.
- Published before West Ham 1-1 Tottenham
This is a club that calls itself ‘The Academy of Football’ and the slogan, printed crudely between the two dugouts at the London Stadium, does not appear to be ironic.
It isn’t uncommon to hear older West Ham fans claim that it was they who won the 1966 World Cup, a reference to Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst, and Martin Peters all coming through the West Ham academy and bringing dazzling attacking football to the Boleyn Ground.
Ever since, the club’s history has been tied to a noble, mist-eyed idea of football played the ‘right way’, played ‘our way’.
As is always the case with these things, nostalgia – particularly for a time few are old enough to remember – tends to amplify just how exciting the football really was, although we do have enough 21st century evidence (the Slaven Bilic and Dmitri Payet era stands out) to tell us that West Ham fans are happier when their team harps back to that 1960s ideal.
The urge has only grown stronger since the move to the new stadium, which remains by far the worst place in the country to watch football. The shallow bowl shape and running track create a physical and psychological distance that tends towards idle distraction.
It takes something seriously special for any match-goer to squint their eyes and engage.
It’s through this lens that we must analyse the baffling decisions made by the West Ham boardroom over the last 12 months. We know the club want to play attacking football. We know the fans need it to connect with their history and connect with their present plight of football in Stratford.
And yet in Julen Lopetegui and Graham Potter, West Ham have (twice) sought to progress from David Moyes by hiring someone infamous for their inability to coach goalscoring teams.
Before he joined in the summer, Lopetegui’s La Liga record (for Sevilla and Real Madrid) was 181 goals in 131 games, or 1.38 goals per game, which is fewer than Moyes’s 1.47 as West Ham manager.
Nobody should have been surprised by the turgid, tedious football he brought, nor the 24 goals in 20 games.
Potter, meanwhile, is practically a carbon copy: a man whose career is defined by neatly choreographed possession football, by sideways passing and nothingness in the final third. His Premier League record at the time of writing (at Brighton, Chelsea, and West Ham) is 170 goals in 156 matches, or 1.01 goals per game, significantly fewer than Moyes or Lopetegui.
What seems to have happened here is the West Ham board have confused stale possession with progressive attacking football, the kind of tactical mistake that was commonplace about 15 years ago but really should not be clogging up boardroom discussions in 2025.
But it did, and here we are, Potter’s West Ham looking even worse in front of goal than his Brighton, scoring just 15 goals in 14 matches.
The issues run even deeper, however. Under Potter, West Ham have no discernible style to speak of, the football ambling and futile as they drift towards summer. Whether that’s his fault or not is up for debate.
Either Potter has failed to implement his system and it is already too late for his ideas to take hold, suggesting another change will come around autumn this year, or it just isn’t possible to make bold tactical changes at a team floating helplessly in mid-table.
Niclas Füllkrug’s angry rant - which simultaneously backed the manager by suggesting the players weren’t following instructions and undermined the manager by breaking rank, for which he was dropped – offers no clues.
All we can say for sure is that West Ham is not a happy place. They have spiralled towards crisis ever since Moyes’s departure and, self-evidently, need a big summer.
Just as a jumping-off point, Potter needs a reliable number nine - that ever-elusive figure at West Ham - as well as upgrades at left-back, centre-back, and central midfield.
But even if Potter’s ideal wish list was fulfilled the club are potentially left in the wilderness. The ceiling on what they can do was already hit two years ago by Moyes.
Where do they go from here?
West Ham are trapped in limbo and stuck with a manager whose tactical principles are not in keeping with the fast-transitions now in vogue across the Premier League’s middle class.
Buying yet another new striker won’t bring back the glory days, and Potter, if history is anything to go by, won’t either.
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