King Athelstan
The Football Rant - Fotball is Cancelled
by , March 18, 2020 at 05:59 AM (1533 Views)
For the better. Corona is upon us, and after two weeks too many of play the Premier League, Fa Cup, Euros, Tippeligaen, etc etc have finally been postponed. But too late, Arsenal Manager Mikel Arteta for example is in isolation after being infected. Luckily he's about the youngest manager around, so he'll be fine. But what if someone like Roy Hodgson got it? He's 72, which means that when Sky sports pondered on barring anyone above 70 from entering a football game, he'd be in big trouble. The whole handling of this case has been shambolic, but oh well. At least they cancelled Cheltenham, a giant horse-racing festival with over 250.000 attending, right? Right? No. The whole of Britain is going to be infected within the year. I worry for my grandma.
Anyways, with the PL off I won't be able to do the week by week match reports I had planned, but there's still plenty left to write about. So today, I thought I'd present the proud owners and chairmen of this club, whom together represents everything wrong with the club. Almost, at least. There's still the stadium and staff structure.
The Owners
The West Ham board is primarily owned by businessman extraordinaire David Sullivan with 51.1% of the shares and David Gold with 35.1% of the shares. Together they form the dynamic duo, the devils in disguise, the Dildo Brothers™ or the porn barons. Your choice. Represented outwards by Vice-Chairman Karen Brady, these three form an entirely new entity of ridiculousness. So then, let's go by their portfolio, eh?
David Sullivan
Now then, let's start off with a very cheap shot. - He appointed his unqualified son Sporting Director and head of recruitment. You don't even need to know which way the ball's supposed to be kicked to see how ludicrous that is. But oh well, that's Sullivan for ya. Now then, how did he make his money? Porn. All due respect, nothing wrong with making your money that way. I presume the many fallacies of that genre is well-known to most people. He started out selling soft-porn magazines, expanded into sex shops and proper movies. Man, he got rich fast. His girlfriend at the time was the main star of several of these. A couple were still in production when she commited suicide. And guess what? He went ahead and produced them anyways. Since then he's expanded into real estate, a part which we'll come back to later when discussing the stadium.
David Gold
Gold started up Ann Summers with his brother Ralph, which is the largest sex shop in the UK. So he got pretty rich of that, in addition to partnering with David Sullivan with several magazines etc. Gold's a proper east-london boy, and actually trialed for West Ham in his youth, but didn't get in due to family problems and the like, his dad was a petty thief who spent a lot of time in jail. What he's accomplished is quite impressive to give him is due. Anyways, Gold and Sullivan started their footballing adventure in 1993, when they became major shareholders of Birmingham, which at the time was badly run-down, had a pish-posh stadium and was in deep trouble. They actually did an ok job and got them up to shape, but I won't go into that much detail on Birmingham, this is a blog on West Ham after all. At Birmingham they put Karen Brady in as managing director, and brought her with them when they bought West Ham.
Sullivan is viewed as the crook, but Gold has some absolute gold tweets.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Karren Brady
She took up a high role as managing director of Birmingham FC at 23, which made her both the youngest and first woman to hold that role. Which to her credit, job well done. She's dabbled in reality tv aka the Apprentice where I've heard she's a bit of a meanie, politics, you name it. However, after following the Davids to West Ham and becoming the Vice-chairman there, she has continued to write her block in the Sun, which as tabloid as tabloid papers get. In there, she for example claimed that the current Premier League season should be called null and void. With Liverpool 25 points clear of second place, and West Ham only out of the relegation zone on goal difference. Now see, the issue here isn't the statement per se. But due to her position, her saying this means she's speaking for the club itself, which is making the whole club look bad.
Together they form a trio of ineptness, with nepotism over transfers, awful PR and public press, bad reputation and horrible pretense. I'm getting tired from just thinking about it, but next time in what is hopefully starting to become a series I'll go over the main issue with the club. The Olympic Stadium.
For now, I leave you with this
Email Blog Entry
Go to Profile
Mark as Read
