David Moyes’ presence as West Ham manager has divided opinion among supporters but news of Grady Diangana’s potential transfer seems to have made him a sympathetic figure.
After a strong end to the campaign, the Scottish manager doubled down on his belief that he wished to build his team full of young and talented players that would be hungry to play for a club like West Ham.
After an excellent season playing in one of the most physical leagues in the world, Academy product Grady Diangana fits the mould of the exact type of player the club would be trying to recruit if he wasn’t already on the books.
As we all know by now, the club has accepted an offer to move Diangana to the Midlands for a sum believed to be around £20 million. According to EXWHUemployee on the West Ham Way Podcast, Moyes is a fan of Diangana, but he has accepted that he needs to raise transfer funds in order to improve his defence.
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That the club that is supposedly the twentieth richest in the world but is being forced to sell a twenty-two-year-old that has come up through the Academy of Football and is passionate about wearing the shirt in order to improve another facet of the squad is downright laughable.
The board has used their usual mouthpieces in order to push the idea that COVID and the failed Pellegrini experiment has affected their finances immensely, but at this point, the West Ham faithful are tired of hearing excuses. Quite frankly, “GSB OUT” has become the uniting force for the divided fanbase.
And this derision for the board has motivated the support to stand firmly behind David Moyes as they fail to understand why the gaffer can’t have his cake and eat it too. If the club truly wants to reach the next level and establish some consistency in East London then they must be holding onto players like Diangana while recruiting more defenders.
After all, West Ham didn’t leave Upton Park for the London Stadium and “next level” in order to be outspent by the Premier League new boys like Fulham, WBA and Leeds.
Twitter was rife with statements that Moyes should walk due to the lack of support from the board, and in a different world, he may have well done so. But he recognizes this is his last chance at managing at the Premier League level and one senses that he is determined to succeed even while being undermined at board level.
Whether he will be able to do it over the course of the season remains to be seen, but it does seem as if the court of public opinion has firmly placed Moyes’ on-side with supporters who now view him as a sympathetic figure due to his struggles with a board that don’t seem to have West Ham’s best interests at heart.