Pardew makes spending promise
West Ham manager Alan Pardew has assured fans his plans to spend heavily in January will not put the club’s future in jeopardy.
The Hammers have made an impressive start to their return to the top flight but Pardew knows only too well how damaging a drop out of the Premiership can be.
The club almost buckled under the weight of trying to balance a Premiership wage bill with a Championship income following relegation in the 2002-03 season and Pardew was convinced that delayed promotion by a year.
Pardew has just signed a new five-year deal and revealed that everyone at the club knows a drop in wages is now the inescapable consequence of relegation.
He said: “When I sit down with players I say: ‘OK, this is your Premiership money and this is the money you would get if we go down into the Championship’. And that applies to my contract too. If I’m giving that to players then it is only right that the manager has that as well. I didn’t even argue about that, I accepted that as only right.
“So now we are a Premier League club that is armed in terms of going down when before of course we weren’t. We took all those Premiership contracts into the Championship and it caused us a major problem.
“We may well have been back in the Premiership a year earlier had that not been the case.”
Pardew has vowed to try to tempt Champions League-calibre players to the club in January and is convinced that more will now be looking at the Hammers as a possible destination.
He said: “We have got some investment for the next window – and I’m going to use it. Then we will see how quickly we can move on from there.
“The one problem I had in the summer was convincing some really good players to come to West Ham. Now players can look at us and see we have done really well so perhaps they would like to come now. We are certainly getting more calls from agents anyway.
“We are armed with a budget for players who could potentially play in the Champions League. It’s not Chelsea’s budget, or Manchester United’s, but it will give me a chance to bring success to the club at some point.”
Exactly who will arrive to bolster the squad remains to be seen but Pardew was convinced he would choose wisely.
He said: “My record on recruitment, when I was at Reading and here, I think is pretty good. It is one of my strengths.”
