David Gold has made it clear who calls the shots on managers at West Ham with an admission over Manuel Pellegrini and David Moyes.
Moyes replaced Slaven Bilic at West Ham in 2017 but was let go by the Hammers despite helping to keep the club up.
West Ham went in a different direction, paying big money to bring former Man City title-winning boss Pellegrini to the London Stadium and embarking on a spending spree.
After a decent first season in which West Ham finished 10th, Pellegrini struggled and was sacked at the turn of the year to 2020.
West Ham’s owners turned back to Moyes who oversaw a memorable two years of rapid progress resulting in back-to-back European football campaigns.
That progress in the Premier League has hit a wall over the last year. West Ham have won just 13 of their last 43 league games after the 3-1 defeat to Arsenal on Boxing Day evening.
As a result Moyes is a man under serious pressure to keep his job.
The Sot has been publicly backed by the majority stakeholder David Sullivan via Hammers News.
Co-owner Sullivan spoke to Hammers News to give Moyes his full backing.
Website Claret and Hugh has long maintained that Moyes effectively has to get to 20 points by the halfway stage of the season to stave off pressure on his job. If true that now means two wins are required from the next three games.
With Daniel Kretinsky now the second biggest stakeholder at West Ham ahead of David Gold, many believe any decision over Moyes’ future would be done by committee.
But as majority stakeholder Sullivan would surely have the biggest influence – or at least a deciding vote.
Now Gold has made it clear who calls the shots on managers at West Ham with an admission over Pellegrini and Moyes.
Speaking in an newly added chapter of his autobiography, Gold reveals he did not want to replace Moyes with Pellegrini.
That was before Kretinsky was on board.
But it shows that Sullivan’s majority holding means he is very much the man who has the final say on managers at West Ham.
“Certainly bringing in Manuel Pellegrini and his team was a hugely ambitious move, one that ultimately didn’t pay off but that was not through lack of financial support on our part,” Gold say in his updated autobiography.
“Manuel was a top-class manager, with a proven track record and a Premier League title to boot. As you can imagine, his services came at a price and beyond that, he brought in his entire team, right down to his own director of football, Mario Husillos.
“I had reservations about bringing in Manuel Pellegrini. Not because I didn’t like him but because I was a big fan of David Moyes and felt he deserved the chance to take us forward.
“But everyone was very excited about the opportunity to bring in Pellegrini and fulfilling our promise to bring in a world class manager.
“We gave him everything he asked for and backed him to the tune of £100m in the transfer market. Our critics would have you believe that we made promises we haven’t delivered and yet here we are, bringing in a world-class manager, to a world-class stadium and giving him the funds to begin to build a world-class team.
“Now I’m not saying that a £100m war chest is going to win us the Premier League, but when you look at what other clubs in the Premier League spent that year, it should have seen us make great strides forward. And while I’m certainly not looking to cast blame or analyse mistakes, I don’t think the failure to progress was down to a lack of ambition or investment on our part. But once again, the banners were out in force and the ‘Gold, Sullivan & Brady Out’ bandwagon continued to gather momentum as we struggled at the wrong end of the table.”
As previously reported on Hammers News, Pellegrini was the 12th highest paid boss in world football during his time at West Ham with a salary of £8million per year.
And according to France Football he picked up a cool £2million golden handshake after being axed.
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