Wakey Wakey - Rise N’ Shine Hammers

Time moves on even if statues don’t move… unfortunately, the Hammers are statues. As time passes, it’s becoming further and further apparent that West Ham’s inevitable ‘top targets' are slipping through their fingers for cheap fees.

It was reported a while back that the Hammers had scouted two lists in the event of relegation. One would be targets staying up, the other about relegation. Seeing as the latter occurred, that presumed list was in preparation for no money coming into the club from an owner, aka David Sullivan, as well as anticipating us struggling to make player sales.

However, seeing as Daniel Kretinsky has taken over, he personally injected what is thought to be £90m and the £85m from Mateus Fernandes meant that the supposed “£200 million that needed to be raised” suddenly became just a mere £25m which would be easily achievable given the ‘assets’ the club have at their disposal.

The idea of deliberately avoiding certain free agent signings suggests that money is available to spend, and Kretinsky is confident that we can do that, as he confirmed via interviews.

The ultimatum here is did West Ham underestimate the ‘power’ that they hold? Ideas of nobodies on a cheap fee have now changed to still potentially spending ‘Premier League-like fees’ despite being in a different league.

Letting players such as Martin Adeline go, who was supposedly our ‘top Fernandes replacement’ is now off to Hamburg SV for a mere €6m fee, something simply has to be in the water! Targets of better calibre… well, hopefully.

The same can be said for Manchester City’s Sverre Nypan whom the Hammers were said to be interested in taking on loan, has instead joined Lommel SK.

Slow or planned? Something is going on behind the scenes undoubtedly but reinforcements have to be made otherwise, there’ll be a whole lot of losing, off the pitch and on it! Tick tock West Ham!