West Ham have been warned they could slide into League One for the first time in their history after a 3-1 defeat at Newcastle left their survival hopes hanging by a thread. Troy Deeney said the club could suffer back-to-back relegations, with Opta putting their chances of Premier League survival at just six per cent.
The numbers leave West Ham needing a near-perfect final day and several results elsewhere to go their way. They must beat Leeds, hope Tottenham lose against Chelsea and Everton, and then need Everton to lose again, all while trying to rescue a season that has already started to feel beyond repair to many of their supporters.
Deeney did not soften the scale of the problem. He said the club’s discontent with the ownership and its recruitment of too many players who were already used to losing had come back to haunt them, pointing to a squad he described as “a group of misfits, a band of misfits” that had been “dragged, pulled and cellotaped together.”
He singled out Mateus Fernandes, Crysencio Summerville, Mads Hermansen and Kyle Walker-Peters as the core of the team and noted that they had all been relegated over the last two years. For Deeney, that mattered. “The reason I don’t like that is because they’re used to losing games,” he said. “When you get used to losing obviously that’s why you got relegated, it’s a trend that you go ‘Oh how do I get out of this’ and they can’t do that.”
West Ham’s collapse has been building for months, and Deeney said the warning signs were there long before the Newcastle defeat. “Unfortunately over the course of the season, the cracks have shown,” he said, adding that he did not know where the club go from here. It was a blunt verdict on a side that supporters now fear has already run out of road.
The backdrop is a club whose fans already believe relegation is done, even if the mathematics have not yet caught up. Deeney had previously said Julen Lopetegui was the wrong fit for West Ham and that Graham Potter was not the man for the club, while also defending Mark Noble after criticism from Joey Barton and calling West Ham’s fans the best in the country.
That history makes his latest warning harder to dismiss. West Ham still have a route out, but it is a route built on other teams failing as much as on their own recovery. If the final whistle of the season brings no escape, the question will not just be whether they were relegated. It will be how a Premier League club reached a point where a fall into League One could be spoken about without sounding absurd.
