West Ham United - Promoted, Broke & Average!

Been busy the past few months but finally managed to get back into playing again, it always takes me a long time to find a club I enjoy playing with and opted for West Ham United. They’re easily the most likely of the three that have been promoted to stay up but still I would not say the squad is any more than average, they have a couple of standout stars and some decent young talent, but other than that there isn’t much to shout about, even worse they have given me no transfer budget and around £30,000 free in the wages and I would say at least four players need to be bought in!
I’ve actually now completed two full seasons so the updates will be quick, after that I’ll do monthly ones with more in depth analysis, I had planned on just playing the game and not posting on the forums which is why I’m already two seasons deep but will be continuing this!

SUMMER MOVEMENT

Like I said, I wasn’t particularly given a helping hand from the board with regards to finances, West Ham are a couple of bodies short particularly in defence and I had to look to the free agent market. First to join was Asier Del Horno, most will remember from Chelsea and definitely not a long term solution but he will be the starting LB this season along with Jonathan, who joins on loan from Inter Milan for the season who will be the RB. After the full backs were signed the squad was pretty much at the best I could do with it, I bought in Craig Gordon, John Mensah and James McFadden to add depth before Aliaksandr Hleb joined for 6 months in January with a couple of youngsters.

Decided to free a bit of the wage budget up, Gary O’neil and Ricardo Vaz Te left in deals totalling £5,00,000 but I didn’t see much of that, Guy Demel also left for Cardiff before I gave Frederic Piquionne away to Tours FC due with him being around 5th choice and only a lot of money.





PERFORMANCE

It was a difficult and frustrating season to the point where I did almost quit, I could have done a lot more if I had been given a bit of money to play with but unfortunately the squad simply was not good enough to compete with most of the teams, fortunately we managed to put a streak together towards the end of the season and beat the drop, finishing the season with 38 points, averaging a point a game. Thankfully I was able to keep the club in the Premiership and keep the board happy, we made a profit over the year leaving the club in a better financial state and with players like Kevin Nolan, James Tomkins and Mohamed Diame hopefully I can build on to a positive second season!





Normally when I take over a lower premiership side I can have a bit of a cup run but unfortunately there was no positives to take from this year’s cups, I got through the 2nd and 3rd round of the League Cup against lower opposition but then fell to Everton, I decided to rest a group of players for upcoming premiership games when we played Shrewsbury in the F.A. Cup, which as you can see didn’t go too well! But if losing out in the cups resulted in us staying up, I’m happy.

Decent first season mate staying up especially with the lack of funds !

A good start, now time to build your finances, good luck.

That's certainly the plan! The main aim was to remain in the premiership to retain the revenue that would bring in, hopefully we can continue to build and bring in a couple of players to improve the squad!

Yeah it was very frustrating, had I been given the funds I would have loved to have bought in a goalkeeper, left back, right mid and striker, but unfortunately I couldn't! Hopefully a couple more will be able to be bought in now.

Nice one again, now to build.

Looks like you have a bit of cash now too.

As I said in the previous update I have also completed my second season, after a frustrating first season in which we just avoided relegation I had hoped that I would now be given a bit of funds to bring in some players to make an impact in the second season. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case, the club received all the TV Revenue financial boosts among other things but it looks like the club’s debt was so large they could still only afford to give me a transfer budget of £500,000 and increase the wage budget to give me around £50,000 available.

I did manage to line up a couple of bosman moves earlier in the season, Miralem Sulejmani from Ajax and David Ospina from OGC Nice, with those two lined up it was important we didn’t go down as the two of them took around £55,000 of the wage budget between them. Thankfully we didn’t and the two proved to be key players in this season. I didn’t renew the contract of a number of players but may have done if we’d gone down, this meant that Jaaskelainen, Hleb, McFadden, Del Horno and O’Brien all left on free transfers with a number of youngsters as well as Matty Taylor, who was sold to the newly promoted Sheffield Wednesday.

I had a number of positions to fill in the squad and had to rely on free transfers and loans once again, Djamel Mesbah, Alberto Paloschi, Billy Sharp, Mario Santana and Marcus Olsson all joined on loan deals for the season, three of which in Sharp, Santana and Olsson I had to pay 0% of their wages, which allowed me to have some purely for backup for nothing. Marco Motta also joined to fill the right back void with Raphael Speigel being the only other noteworthy departure.







The season did go better than the first but not dramatically, Carlton Cole was without doubt the stand out player he scored 18 league goals in 35 appearances and without him we would have surely gone down, he earned himself a contract extension due to this. In January we did make a couple of movements, Joe Cole was a free agent so I decided to bring him in for the run in, as well as left back Jose Angel on loan from Roma, I then cancelled Mesbah’s deal as he wasn’t performing well enough. Swansea were after Modibo Maiga and with him only getting 3 goals so far I decided to negotiate a £2,500,000 deal, after he left we only had the rest of the day to bring in replacements, with the wage budget being able to be adjusted I could afford Nathan Redmond and Ji Dong-Won, Redmond was without doubt the stand out signing, at just £2,800,000 he’ll prove to be a real bargain in the coming seasons.

We had a decent run in to the season, a 6-1 horror defeat against Wigan left me fearing the worst but after that we only lost one of the final six to finish with 42 points. The cup’s went as bad as they had in the previous season also failing to make any impact on either, the most exciting news at the end of the season was that I received a message saying the clubs debts have now been paid off, leaving me expecting a more generous budget next season and hopefully the ability to improve further! I have a couple of bosman moves already lines up which will hopefully make an impact.

After a promising end to the season including a message saying the clubs debts have finally been paid off I was looking forward to this summer window and hoping for a budget where I can make some real changes. Thankfully that is exactly what happened, I was given around £18M transfer budget and an increase in the wages and immediately started to restructure.

I already had some changes ready to be made before the budget was given, I let Mark Noble leave for £4.3M to Sheffield Wednesday after he only made 5 league appearances last season, eight players were also released and Marco Motta was sold to Udinese for £1.9M after joining on a free the previous season. I bought in Seamus Moseley and James Ward-Prowse to begin with, they are two players who have potential to be leading premier league players in the future and I will look to loan out this season. I had some bosman moves already lined up as well and these are players that I think will make a real difference this season, first of all Ezequiel Cirigliano joins from River Plate a quality player at just 22, Filip Djuricic who I signed with the intention of him being a leading attacking midfielder however since then I managed to line up a huge move for Shaktar’s Brazilian playmaker Wilian who signed on a free and became the highest paid player at the club, finally I bought in Lacina Traore from Anzhi, who I’m hoping will prove to be a top goal scorer.





A large amount of youngsters were loaned out across the summer but other notable departures were Alou Diarra, who I finally got off the books after he was sitting in reserves on £60k, Miralem Sulejmani who joins Reading on loan, I didn’t see him challenging either Wilian or Djuricic as well as Craig Gordon, who was sold to Arsenal for £750k. One of the biggest summer departures has to be Kevin Nolan, he has been an important player for me but at 32 I am trying to take the squad in a different direction and the fact I could still get £5M for him made it a no brainer, Ji Dong-Won had only been at the club 6 months but after failing to score a single goal I sold him to West Brom making a £1.7M profit in the process. Jack Collison, David Ospina and Matt Jarvis also all departed in deals toalling around £14M which gave me total sales of £30.5M.





As you can probably tell from the amount of players which have left I have bought in a lot of players as well, after the bosman moves the first major arrivals were Scott Sinclair and Fabio, both joining on permanent deals totalling £7.6M, I’m hoping the two of them will form a good partnership on the left of the field. After bringing in a number of English players I decided I wanted to focus more on this and bought in Carl Jenkinson from Arsenal, Ben Amos from Manchester United, Wilfried Zaha from Crystal Palace, Will Hughes from Derby and Jack Butland from Birmingham, as well as John Guidetti on loan from Man City as back up. After all these changes I spent only £2M more than my sales totalled, this has left me with around £10M in the bank in case I need to bring anyone in in the new year.







I now have ten English players in my senior squad, which is quite a lot for any side and six of which would be in my ideal starting 11. I would be interested in seeing how far I can go with a side made up mainly of English players, and with the likes of Zaha, Hughes, Ward-Prowse, Ravel Morrison and Leo Chambers ready to come through this is something I will look to build on. Granted Scott Sinclair is not a left midfielder at the moment but I am currently training him to be one which I am hoping won't take too long, but if things don't go as expected I finally have strength in depth to alter things about.

great signings mate ! Heres hoping for a solid season

Will Hughes is a great signing.

Hopefully you can build on last couple of seasons and have a good season with a decent cup run.

Good to see someone going outside the top four in the Prem aswell.