WHU have taken a realistic view of their position, and it wiill keep them in the League. Just.

In a very nice symmetry, Arsenal have beaten West Ham Un twice as many times as WHAM have beaten Arsenal.  74 to Arsenal and 37 to them with another 41 drawn.

If we look back at the last ten league games between the two sides, which take us from 9 December 2019 onwards, we have one West Ham win and two draws.  The rest of the results are rather obvious.  Now that one WHAM victory was on 28 December 2023, and I think this is important to note since before that moment Arsenal were second as now, and WHAM were 7th.

But there was a magnitude of difference between the sides, both in the 10 points extra that Arsenal had gained thus far in the season, and also in the goal difference.   Arsenal had scored five more goals than West Ham and conceded 14 fewer, making Arsenal’s goal difference 19 better than WHAMs after just 18 games.

And yet Arsenal lost at home 0-2 to West Ham.

Now part of the cause of this defeat was undoubtedly psychological given that WHAM had just beaten Arsenal on 1 Nov 2023 in a league game that ended Arsenal 0 West Ham 2.  

And yet what we all have to remember (and that includes the Arsenal team) is that in the last two games between the sides West Ham lost at home 0-6 to Arsenal in the League on 11 February last year and then lost 2-5 at home to Arsenal on 30 November 2024.

So this will give Arsenal some hope while West Ham will be trying to block those events out of their minds.  And that might be difficult because in the last eight games they have only won one, and have had a 0-5 thrashing by Liverpool   Although to be fair their last two games have been two defeats by just one goal so maybe they are learning.  A bit.

And this in turn raises the issue of the very strange way in which the fixtures have been clumped together this season.   Villa’s last two games have both been away, and both been against London clubs.   So three away games all in a row, all against teams from the same city.  And the first two have been lost.   I am not trying to make excuses for West Ham in advance, but this is not the sort of balance league fixtures are supposed to bring.   (Those defaets were against Chelsea and Brentford 2-1 and 0-1 respectively.)

So pulling all this together in the last 18 league games between the two clubs West Ham have won two.  And across the last two games Arsenal have scored a total of 11 goals.

So what has gone wrong with West Ham?   They moved out of their cramped ground to a great sparking new environment which they didn’t have to pay for, with the aim of their owners (as far as I can say although I might be wrong) being to get much bigger crowds, put decent runs together, go up the league table and sell the club.

Sadly for them one thing went wrong.   They didn’t go up the league.

The average position of West Ham since they returned to the Premier League in 2005 having come sixth that season in the Championship (and thus winning through via the playoffs) is 10.7 in the Premier League.  In short a typical mid-table club.

Now in the last three seasons, their profile has been upgraded by journalists possibly because of the improved facilities for the journos, compared with the old Upton Park ground, with boozing and dining facilities that were built to Olympic standards, not those of football.   And just as interest was sagging the club went and won the Europa Conferece League – very much a third tier concern, but talked up by the club and the media because it was the club’s first trophy since the Intertoto Cup in 2000.  And indeed both competitions were run at the same sort of level.

But instead of boosting the club’s profile, it confirmed the club as the winner of third-tier competitions, living in a ground worthy of a much bigger and much more successful organisation, but paid for by stupid taxpayers like me.

But West Ham have built their propaganda on the image of the ground, but without the investment, care and attention that is needed to create a team worthy of such propaganda.  The club is, in fact, a media image, which even members of the media are starting to get fed up with.

They won’t go down because Ipswich, Leicester and Southampton have all decided to take the Premier League money and use it to continue their development in the lower tier, but West Ham are being run on the basis that their prime aim is to have a team that is good enough to survive.  Investment beyond that is not on the table.   The club is for sale as a club with potential in a ground that has already been paid for by us taxpayers.