Reports of a clandestine meeting with Graham Potter in a London hotel added a noir feel to the end of Julen Lopetegui’s days at West Ham.
The truth is Lopetegui never felt like an upgrade.
Other than being Spanish, thus being on trend, and being fired by the national team and Real Madrid in short order, there was no real brand power around which to forge a sense of destiny.
At least Potter has Brighton in his locker, a period that built on his hipster beginnings at Ostersund before the immolation at Chelsea.
Anyway, the questions are not so much about Potter’s suitability as West Ham.
Is this a club to which any aspiring coach would want to be attached, especially one as savvy as Potter, newly announced as co-director for the the Professional Footballers Association’s certificate in football psychology, emotional intelligence and leadership?
What West Ham need more than anything is a sense of place, an idea of self befitting its new surroundings.
The club of Hurst, Moore and Peters, of Bonds, Boyce and Brooking, is in its ninth season at London Stadium yet no nearer to reaching an accommodation with itself or the locale. Even the bubble machine rings inauthentic.
Though barely three miles from Upton Park, the setting in the Olympic Park, a redeveloped brownfield site on the fringes of Hackney Marshes, might as well be Milton Keynes for all the cultural and community relevance it has to a club once known as the Academy.
That heritage feel, that sense of what it means to be Claret and Blue, has all but disappeared.
Matchdays at a stadium tagged on to the arse end of a major retail and entertainment complex have yet to acquire their own character and distinctiveness.
Thrusting the football crowd and shoppers amongst each other at the Stratford terminus that welcomed the world at the 2012 Olympic Games still feels wrong.
A home is more than the walls that frame it. It is a place of belonging and tradition, of familiarity and connection.
And none of this feels connected to West Ham in the way it did when spilling out of the tube at Upton Park and filing down Green Street past Queen’s Market.
For visiting fans the vibe was unmistakenly hostile, reeking of hyped masculinity, but it at least felt like home for those who cherished it.
The problem is one of leadership.
Majority ownership of the club still rests with David Sullivan and Vanessa Gold, the daughter of David Gold, with whom he built a porn empire before moving into property and then dominion at Birmingham City in the early 1990s.
During my nascent years as a Midlands football correspondent, Sullivan stopped taking my calls after I reported that he would not pay for suits for the players when Birmingham met Carlisle United in the Auto Windscreens Shield final at Wembley.
If they want them, they can bloody well pay out of their own pockets, he said.
That wheeler-dealer mentality clung to him at St Andrew’s, where he was never really embraced by the crowd or the council. The feeling was mutual.
West Ham was his big opportunity, but like Mike Ashley at Newcastle United, he had neither the wherewithal nor appetite to keep pace with rivals backed by Gulf State ownership or American investment funds.
Sullivan sensed there was a deal to be had and lucked in when acquiring a rental agreement for the former Olympic stadium, which currently costs £3.6m a year to rent, a trifling percentage of the £290m annual income.
He then banked £35m for the sale of Upton Park.
But the real value of the club to Sullivan and Gold was in checking out, which is the fundamental barrier to moving the club forward.
West Ham sit 16th in Forbes’ list of the world’s richest clubs with a valuation of £1.1bn, with huge potential for growth.
Sullivan and Gold bought a 50 per cent share of the club in 2010 for just £50m. Beats making blue movies for a living.
Their big hope is that Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky adds West Ham to the Royal Mail in his English portfolio.
Since he already owns a 27 per cent stake in the club, he could clear out Sullivan for a tenth of the £3.6bn he paid for the Royal Mail and take majority ownership. Czech’s in the post, so to speak.
Sullivan is all ears. How much Kretinsky wants in is the question, and for how much?
What is clear is the need for a new vision as well as investment, one that connects the future with the past in a more coherent way.
Changing the coach can be a part of that but not without the requisite infrastructure around it.
So unmoored have West Ham appeared at times, fans have fought among themselves.
The latest eruption against Arsenal last month mirrored a similar display at home to Watford in the early days at the new site.
This, it might be argued, is just another manifestation of their displacement and discontent.
A squad featuring Jarrod Bowen, Mohammed Kudus, Lucas Paqueta and Crysencio Summerville clearly has potential.
Lopetegui was no more successful than David Moyes in finding the sweetspot at a club stuck somewhere between then and now.
Maybe Potter will do better, but not without help from above, and that won’t come from Sullivan and Gold.
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