Julen Lopetegui: Delete as Appropriate

At the exact time of writing, Julen Lopetegui hasn't been sacked by West Ham United, but by the time you read this he might.

The exact time that I am writing these words is 9.35am, and as far as anybody in the world knows, as of this exact moment in time Julen Lopetegui is the manager of West Ham United. What we know for certain is that a press conference scheduled for this morning has been cancelled, and it has been widely reported that Graham Potter is waiting in the wings, albeit with the caveat of a dispute there over the length of his contract.

Now, I know fully well that no-one is crying for the jobbing football writer at a time like this. Were I a true pro, I’d have already written two different versions, to publish in line with whichever scenario actually comes to pass. Instead, last night I was sitting on the sofa eating Maltesers and watching Newcastle beat Arsenal in the League Cup. More fool me. I could hold on until a decision and its accompanying announcement have been made, but I’ve got a pretty strict schedule and this is my slot for doing this sort of thing. Them’s the rules.

But if you pause to think about it for a second, one small matter pops straight to the front of the mind. I’m just a jobbing football writer. You may also be one, or just a supporter, or an interested bystander. You may be the West Ham players, who could well be forgiven wondering what on earth is going on at the moment, or a member of the coaching staff, wondering for how much longer you’ll have a job.

Or you could be Julen Lopetegui himself, who, if he doesn’t know his ultimate fate already, must have some sort of Houdini-esque mother of all escape plans up his sleeve. Whoever you are, whether inside or outside of the game itself, it’s difficult to avoid the small matter that none of this reflects particularly well on the owners of the club itself.

In a sense, sacking Lopetegui right now really doesn’t even make that much sense. Sure enough, they’ve shipped nine goals in their last two games, but that was against Liverpool and Manchester City. Prior to that, they’d won two and drawn two. Was the remit for Lopetegui that he simply had to keep winning, no matter who against? Was it the heaviness of those last two losses that has caused all of this?

Because the one thing that West Ham have been this season has been inconsistent. Following a run of four games unbeaten with a 5-0 loss and a 4-1 loss is very on-point for their season so far. They’ve had some decent results. They’ve beaten Manchester United, and won away at Newcastle and Crystal Palace. But there have also been some rotten performances in there, too. In their 4-1 defeat at Spurs in October, for example, a fifteen-minute collapse at the start of the second half saw them put to the wall.

It wasn’t the only time they’ve been defensively jelly-like. They conceded five against Arsenal and Liverpool, And that 4-1 defeat at Manchester City was the eighth time they’ve conceded three goals or more in a Premier League match this season, out of twenty. When the League’s website wrote, “How will West Ham look under Lopetegui?” upon his appointment in May, the extremely short answer was, “There are two core principles that Lopetegui follows: defensive sturdiness and possession.”

But here’s the thing. That was the genuinely-held belief about Lopetegui when he arrived. Alex Keble’s description of him was on the nose, all of which makes it all the more perplexing that a head coach with a reputation for being defensively solid should, at just over the halfway point of his first season with his new club, have conceded 39 goals, a figured topped by just three others, two of whom occupy the bottom two places in the table. Somehow, Loptegui has become the defensive coach who cannot coach a defence.

But this isn’t about Julen Lopetegui. This is about West Ham United. The owners of the club seem to have waited until after the Liverpool and Manchester City matches to have even contacted Graham Potter, a decision which looked foolish when there was subsequently a bit of a dispute over the length of his contract, which is the presumed reason for this interregnum. Of course, it’s not the end of the world, should he end up shaking hands and agreeing the contract, but it just has a little reek of grubbiness and incompetence about it.

This was similarly evident in the rumour spreading on Tuesday night that the axe would finally fall on Lopetegui on Thursday, which really doesn’t make much sense at all, since it gives his replacement 24 hours less with his new team ahead of their trip to Aston Villa in the FA Cup on Friday night. Why not pull that trigger on any of the first three days of the week, or give Lopetegui the Villa game to see if he can drag the swing-o-meter back in the other direction again? It’s even been reported that he will be taking training today and then leaving, which again doesn’t really make any sense.

West Ham should know more than most clubs how good a feeling it is to actually lift a piece of silverware. They’ve done so more recently than most. To sack a manager the day before an FA Cup match when they could have been done a few days before or even afterwards makes it feel as though the owners simply couldn’t care less about that particular competition. And that may be the case, but it sits ill at ease with the fact that some of the clubs greatest historical triumphs have come in this very competition.

Attention has also been paid to technical director Tim Steidten. Max Kilman, Crysencio Summerville, Carlos Soler, Niclas Fullkrug, Luis Guilherme, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Jean-Clair Todibo, Guido Rodriguez and Wes Foderingham all arrived during the summer under his watchful eye, yet West Ham won just one of their first six League matches, by which time they were down in the 14th spot in the table that they still occupy now.

There have been rumours of disagreements between Lopetegui and Steidten over transfers during the summer and suggestions that the technical director is unpopular among staff, too. If the disquiet behind the scenes is that great, then perhaps a very stiff broom will be needed to reset and try again. If Lopetegui has to go, there’s a strong case for saying that Steidten should as well.

West Ham are seven points above the relegation places, and that’s clearly underperformance, if you measure it on the solid, tangible metric of all those players they brought in and all that money they spent (about £132m, with nothing like that recouped) during the summer. Add the 60,000 capacity enorm-o-dome (with a huge shopping centre nearby, for the ultimate retail experience), the attractive East London location, and yes, expectations will have been somewhat higher than ‘just doing enough to not get relegated’.

But if you take the more vibes-based approach of sticking your finger in the air and asking yourself, “where does it feel like West Ham, as a football club, should be in the Premier League?”, the answer becomes slightly more muddled, because West Ham United definitely have a history of doing This Sort of Thing. They finished 14th two years ago. They finished 16th in 2020 and 13th in 2018.

Go back a little further, and things get worse than that. Over the last half century, they have been relegated from the top flight in 1978, 1989, 2003 and 2011. It has to be said that the occasional season flirting with (or occasionally actually achieving) relegation is certainly not out of character. West Ham also remain the last club from outside the top flight of English football to have lifted the FA Cup. To suggest that this sort of can’t happen at this particular club is to be illiterate of West Ham’s history.

But the history isn’t the here and now, and the here and now is what matters. Graham Potter is a process manager. His success came at Brighton, where there was a plan and a system. At Chelsea, he was thrown in at the deep end with an unbalanced and manically assembled squad and fell short of expectations brought about in no small part by the amount of money frittered away. Can West Ham give Potter the tools that he needs in order to be successful? Because he feels like a long-term fix and expecting short-term fixes from him isn’t applying the best of his skill set.

At 11.25am, it’s time to hit the ‘send’ button. I’ve got things to do. We’ve all got things to do. West Ham seem to have agreed terms with Potter, and everything that we say in speculation can be consigned to the great bin fire of hot takes. West Ham United are set to make their change, but even if it is in many senses the right decision to take—the West Ham vibes-o-meter has also pick up a lack of discernable shape or style at points this season—it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that this could all have been treated with a little more competence. In some respects, this could even be argued to be The West Ham Way, not that their supporters would thank you for it.

Accompanying image from Arne Museler through Wiki Commons under the Creative Commons License CC-by-SA-3.0.