Apologies all round but it’s West Ham who go down

RICHARD PELHAM/ GETTY IMAGES

West Ham’s Jarrod Bowen has that sinking feeling while Roberto De Zerbi 

and Guglielmo Vicario (inset) enjoy Tottenham’s escape on the final day of the season

Nuno says sorry as win isn’t enough to save club from Premier League relegation

25 May 2026 - The Guardian

Jacob Steinberg, David Hytner

Nuno Espírito Santo apologised for West Ham’s relegation from the Premier League and refused to say whether he intends to continue as manager next season.

With victory over Leeds on the final day not enough to lift West Ham out of the bottom three at Tottenham’s expense, Nuno was reluctant to discuss his future. He is able to walk away from the three-year deal he signed in September while West Ham are free to part company with him without paying compensation.

“It’s the day to understand the moment of sadness of our fans, of ourselves, of the club,” Nuno said. “And apologise and thank them for all of the support they gave us through the season, the way we re-established a good relationship here with our fans, and respect them.”

There are indications that West Ham want to keep Nuno but the former Nottingham Forest manager did not dispel doubts over whether he wants to manage in the Championship after his side’s relegation was confirmed yesterday.

“It’s not about me,” Nuno said. “We are in a tough place and West Ham has to go back in the Premier League. But now we have to go through this period of sadness, understanding the frustration and anger of the fans.”

This is the first time since 2011 that a side have gone down with a tally of 39 points. West Ham posted losses of £104.2m last year and face losing quality players such as Jarrod Bowen – who also refused to be drawn on his future – Mateus Fernandes and Crysencio Summerville.

Seven miles away at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Micky van de Ven said it was “embarrassing” that his club had been made to sweat until the very end.

“It is unacceptable that the last game we played this season, we play for relegation. This club has some unbelievable players. It was embarrassing to let it come to the final day but we did it and that is what is important,” Van de Ven said. “I played almost every game and I have suffered a lot. The emotions are really happy and we must not let it happen again.”

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RICHARD PELHAM/GETTY IMAGES

Supporters still pine for the Boleyn Ground 10 years after leaving

West Ham pay brutal price for Sullivan’s mess

25 May 2026 - The Guardian

Jacob Steinberg

West Ham 3

Castellanos 67, Bowen 79, Wilson 90+4

Leeds 0

As the minutes ticked away and the trap door widened, the home crowd made light of the misery and amused themselves by turning on the man who has done more than anyone to condemn West Ham to relegation. David Sullivan watched and squirmed. The West Ham fans showered him with abuse and nothing summed up the vacuum of leadership at the top of their club more than the sight of Sullivan leaving his seat in the directors’ box before full-time.

The 77-year-old was not there to face the music. Perhaps he needed a moment of quiet, space to work out where it has gone wrong. The answer, though, comes back to his outdated methods. Others have underperformed, not least Nuno Espírito

Santo since taking over as manager last September, but ultimately this is Sullivan’s mess. He is the largest shareholder and it is hard to see anything changing until he hands power to someone with the vision to capitalise on West Ham’s potential.

This was utterly avoidable. Just as when West Ham were relegated with a record 42 points in 2003, a desperate bid for survival came too late. Closing out a dreadful season with a 3-0 victory over Leeds brought belated cheer but with Tottenham beating Everton it was not enough to stave off deserved punishment for West Ham, who will not even find solace in this being the first time a team has gone down with as many as 39 points since Birmingham and Blackpool in 2011.

Maybe this is how it had to end, Championship football confirmed at the home without a soul, It has long been evident that West Ham had no real plan when they left Upton Park 10 years ago,long clear that Karren Brady’s prediction of a worldclass team in a world-class stadium amounted to empty marketing talk.

There were poignant moments as West Ham’s 14-year stay in the top flight ended. When Jarrod Bowen made it 2-0 with 11 minutes left, the Hammers faithful celebrated by singing: “We sold our soul for this shithole.” It is three years since Bowen scored the winner when West Ham won the Conference League final. Nothing has gone right since that night in Prague.

The mistakes have piled up. The £105m earned from the sale of Declan Rice was wasted. David Moyes left in 2024 and Julen Lopetegui lasted six months as his replacement. Graham Potter took over from Lopetegui in January 2025 but could not make it work. Potter was gone five games into this season, with his side unable to defend corners, and there was hope that Nuno could stop the rot.

Yet Nuno’s reign began in a fog of confusion and weird team selections, leaving West Ham with too much to do despite a resurgence after Christmas. The former Nottingham Forest manager has managed poorly.

Now what? Nobody mourned Brady quitting as vice-chair a month ago. There is uncertainty over Nuno’s future. West Ham want to keep him but there is no clarity over whether he wants to stay.

It cannot be forgotten that Nuno took charge of 33 games. The rebuild will not be easy. With West Ham posting losses of £104.2m last year, players will go. Bowen, who has never stopped trying, deserves better. The captain cannot be held responsible after finishing with 20 goal involvements. Top sides will be circling. Axel Disasi, who brought a semblance of order in defence, will go back to Chelsea. There will be interest in Crysencio Summerville and the outstanding Mateus Fernandes, who made Bowen’s goal with a lovely piercing pass.

Sullivan will need more than £100m in sales and an air of doom hung over West Ham at kick-off. Nuno dispensed with the back three that proved so disastrous during last weekend’s defeat at Newcastle. West Ham were back to 4-4-2, Pablo Felipe partnering Taty Castellanos up front, but they were nervous and passive during a dreadful first half.

For a while the only real source of entertainment came from the Leeds fans running through all the Championship teams West Ham will face next season. Leeds were safe. They had a lengthy injury list and tried to enjoy themselves. Dominic Calvert-Lewin spurned their best chance. The home fans were booing in the 40th minute.

News of Tottenham going ahead soon followed. Nuno responded at half-time, Callum Wilson replacing Pablo, who has not scored since joining for £17m in January. West Ham grew frantic and Leeds wilted. Bowen delivered a corner and Castellanos headed home. The crowd celebrated with chants of “sack the board”.

Bowen scored and Wilson added a third in added time. West Ham fought but a long, painful summer awaits.

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CHARLOTTE WILSON/OFFSIDE/GETTY IMAGES

West Ham players do a subdued lap of honour to half-empty stands

Relegation the shameful but inevitable outcome of years of relentless executive failure

25 May 2026 - The Guardian

Barney Ronay

If you’re going to die, die with your boots on. Belatedly and pointlessly on. But on all the same. It felt deeply fitting that West Ham should show some fight on the final day of the Premier League season, but that relegation should still be confirmed by events elsewhere, any pleasure at a 3-0 defeat of Leeds rendered irrelevant by Tottenham’s win at home against Everton, as West Ham’s season flopped like an ailing dog in the mid-summer heat.

There was at least some joy at the London Stadium, a reminder that joy is both the only thing that actually matters here, and also the precise polar opposite of the football-club-shaped blob that West Ham’s ownership has created. When Jarrod Bowen scored West Ham’s second goal on 78 minutes, charging past a Leeds defence already ranged about the place on sun loungers flicking through the latest Sally Rooney, there was a brief glimpse of some other West Ham, some other reality, a lost place of greater care and competence, other hands on the wheel.

But no. Events elsewhere, old boy. Here was another day in this club’s history that said, very clearly, this thing is now beyond your reach. This was the story of the day and also of the season. “You sold our soul for this shithole,” the home fans sang through the dappled lateafternoon sun as David Sullivan sat looking opaque in his VIP director pod – and this is exactly what has happened here, a macro-collapse, a managed alienation, a club that has forgotten what it was trying to be.

It was a genuinely strange day at the London Stadium. Football clubs have such profound cultural life in them. This stuff is in your blood like holy wine, so bitter and so sweet. But it doesn’t mean they’re unbreakable, and West Ham have been broken, a case study in managed corporate entropy.

They are, of course, far from alone in this. The prize here wasn’t just escaping relegation, but avoiding the title of most appallingly managed London team, most debauched waste of resources, most impressive incineration of your own advantages on a brazier of incompetence. Even the West Ham matchday programme featured a cover photo of a righteous flame devouring a darkened corporate hell-hole, although on closer inspection this turned out to be a picture of some excited fans watching a pre-match fireworks display.

In the event it took 43 minutes for that flame to die. It is rare to hear a genuinely new and surprising expression of emotion. But there was one of those here as news filtered through that Spurs had scored and instantly the energy just vanished from the stands, like watching a blackout engulf Los Angeles. Even the boos at half-time felt like boos by rote, as though the club had employed its own outside hype-booers just to generate some energy.

These are always creepy occasions, ghost games haunted by voices through the wall. The ground had been debilitatingly hot at kick-off, the pitch-side machines pumping out exhausted, heat-sapped bubbles, which sank instantly and expired on the running track.

This place always feels odd just because of its topography, the sense of being at the wrong angle to the pitch. Ten years here have never fixed that disconnect. Perhaps the club can at least rustle up a beta-level naming rights deal for the second tier. Wimpy. Ask Jeeves. This game is brought to you by the Ryanair extra legroom executive hate-space.

Nuno Espírito Santo was out on his touchline from start to finish, something of a relief in itself given his deeply-haunted picture above his programme notes. “There are a great many things we could say about the last few matches,” Nuno had written. “Almost none of them are good.”

So, what now then? By common estimates West Ham’s relegation will cost the club £100m in the first season alone. Jobs will be lost, members of staff laid off. There are wider implications too. Sadiq Khan has suggested relegation will cost everyday Londoners £2.5m a year to cover the rent and stewarding, consequence of a disastrously bad deal negotiated by (no, really) Boris Johnson.

It is no mystery why this has happened. Why have West Ham been relegated? Relentless executive failure. The shameful squandering of resources. A complacent, low-quality management tier that has been completely outflanked by highly competent middleweight clubs elsewhere levelling up in every area, while West Ham have doodled around in their rented shopping-centre annexe.

Sullivan and his assorted close relatives in executive roles must take the blame for this. It is commonplace to call old-school football figures “dinosaurs” but this is unfair on dinosaurs, who did at least evolve to some degree, who are still among us, pivoted into birds and lizards.

West Ham’s entire corporate structure contains nothing but slackness, no exceptional qualities from player production to managerial hiring and firing. This is a hugely mediocre organisation, one that has now expressed those qualities in the hard currency of results. The remaining dinosaurs will at least live to see their own investment value shredded. Or better, cut their losses and lumber off, with the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky flexing his ownership muscles.

What kind of West Ham will emerge from this? One without Bowen and Mateus Fernandes for starters, and presumably with a new manager to sift the wreckage. This seems fair. All that’s really worth hanging on to here is the noise, the rage, the applause at the end; in fact the only things that actually mattered all along.

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Going down in complete disarray

Nuno Espírito Santo joins the players on the pitch after relegation was confirmed

39 - West Ham’s points total – the most by a relegated side since Birmingham and Blackpool in 2010-11

16th - Had only results from Nuno Espírito Santo’s first game in charge on 29 September counted, West Ham would have finished 16th with 36 points (W9 D9 L15)

11 - Jarrod Bowen’s league assists total, his most in a season