After confirming Nuno will be staying as West Ham manager, the club are now looking to bring in a Director of Football. 

After a few days of debate, the West Ham board decided to keep Nuno Espirito Santo as manager of the team. The Portuguese manager will be hoping to get the Hammers promoted as he did with Wolves in 2018.

The 52-year-old will also be ‘helped’ out by the club with the hiring of a new Director of Football. The club will reportedly let Nuno pick who he wants for the role.

Many fans would see this as exciting, bringing someone in to almost run the transfers. However, it just doesn’t work like that at West Ham United.

There have been some huge failures in similar roles at the club in previous years, starting with Tony Henry, to Mario Husillos, to Tim Steidten, to Kyle Macaulay. The director of football or head of recruitment roles end in disaster.

This isn’t the only reason I think it’s a bad decision. The fact the club is letting Nuno pick the person to take up this role is crazy. A director of football is supposed to direct the football on the footballing club on and off the pitch.

Meaning he is supposed to choose the direction of the club – picking the style of play he thinks is best for the squad, picking players to sign, and most importantly, choosing the manager.

The DOF is supposed to be in charge of the manager, almost; if Nuno picks the person, that isn’t going to be the case; Nuno will be in charge of him, and as we saw with Husillos and Pellegrini, that doesn’t work.

I mean, it’s better than what we did with Tim Steidten. We brought the German in under David Moyes when he had no interest in working with him. They ended up clashing; we let go of Moyes, kept Steidten, and then Steidten ended up being sacked after bringing in Lopetegui and a lot of poor players.

I believe the appointment of Nuno was the right decision, but to let him choose a director of football is a silly decision; even if it’s just a ‘head of recruitment’, it just doesn’t make sense. We know how Nuno works; he’s going to favour his agent Jorge Mendes’ clients when he can, like we did with Pablo, and a DOF isn’t going to change that.

Nuno’s hire is likely either going to be a complete yes man, or if he ends up trying to question Nuno on players to sign, Nuno will kick off, as he has at every club. It’s just a recipe for disaster. Nottingham Forest hiring Edu as head of football was the beginning of the end for Nuno at the Forest Ground.

A similar situation could easily arise at the London Stadium, and we might be forced into sacking Nuno just like Forest were, and it will take millions we don’t have to sack him when we could have released him for free this summer.

The lack of planning for this season when we knew the possibility of relegation was high is embarrassing from the club. We should have kept Nuno and kept it as that, or we should have sacked Nuno, hired a director of football and trusted them to move the club forward, hire a manager, and bring in players that can help us get back to the Premier League.

But as usual, the board have managed to complicate things. This really needs to work out for Sullivan and Kretinsky and co, or this club could be in real trouble on and off the pitch.