West Ham can't keep the ball out of their net let alone their fans off the field, a problem John Brewin says isn't surprising given the mismanagement of the club.
Brewin joined Off The Ball AM's Ger Gilroy and Eoin Sheehan to discuss the recent pitch invasion and protest by angry Hammers fans, and Brewin believes invasion, along with the problems facing the London club, can be placed at the feet of the owners, David Sullivan and David Gold.
"I've seen it quoted as being the worse run club in the Premier League, that's someone else's opinion, but flick through the other 19 clubs and you will struggle to find such chaos".
"Take a flick through their accounts which West Ham actually released last week and you'll see that they made a profit of £43million. The idea of the owners being benevolent towards the club is shown by the fact that they are charging interest rates of 6% on the loans they've given to the club. The transfer net spend is not particularly high, and also the hiring of managers has also been quite haphazard".
"Pick through all that and it's no wonder that people are getting angry".
Brewin painted a picture of a club in turmoil and the fan base united against the owners, which could be seen when tension finally hit boiling point during the 3-0 home defeat to Burnley at the weekend, on the 25th anniversary of club legend Bobby Moore's death.
Brewin puts the ease at which fans stormed the pitch down to the fact that the owners had until now foregone the opportunity to employ trained security, instead preferring to use the limited, inexperience staff employed by the stadium.
"What happened on Saturday, I think it was pretty much... it was always likely to happen, this type of thing. Actually, cut down to the bones of people storming the pitch invading, one of the reasons they could get on the pitch is that the stewarding at that ground is run by a third party quango that own the stadium. There's people employed on minimum wage, lots of foreign students and things like that. Confronted with a 40-year-old, 100 kilo football hooligan, they're not going to get in the way".
"We've seen the the stories this week where West Ham have said 'OK, maybe we might be prepared to pay for the upkeep of the security'. This only seemed to happen once they, the owners, were threatened by this. I think if you speak to a lot of West Ham fans they will tell you that the security problems have been there ever since the stadium has been opened, but previously the owners, the cheapskate owners, were prepared to accept the low quality of service that the London Stadium is providing".
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