At the final whistle on Sunday, a strange mix of heartache, toxicity, disbelief rippled beyond the London Stadium, out to everybody connected with West Ham.
It is not just the end of 14 years in the Premier League. It is the lost years, the staggering demise since the highs of Conference League glory in 2023.
These days Michail Antonio begins each day “thanking God for getting up” after the car crash which nearly cost him his life in 2024 – but before then, he had seen West Ham’s decline in real time and up close.
West Ham fans lay the charge for that at the doors of Karren Brady and David Sullivan – Antonio does not necessarily agree.
‘Potter didn’t understand the culture’
“I just feel like Graham Potter came in and tried to change too much,” he tells The i Paper.
“As a manager, you’ve got to come in and understand the culture of the club. And I just don’t feel like he did. He came in, he got rid of all the senior pros: me, Lukasz Fabianski, Aaron Cresswell, Vladimir Coufal, Edson Alvarez – the captain of Mexico.
“Then within three, four weeks of getting rid of those players and the season starts, the first thing he says is, we have no leaders in the changing room. How can you say you’ve got no leaders in the changing rooms if you get rid of all the leaders? So it was just, I feel like it was Graham Potter, who kind of put the team in bad stead.”
There is still a rawness about the way the forward talks about West Ham, a year after being let go in the aftermath of his accident. He admits having so much “resentment against the club, the owners” that he did not know how he would feel if they failed to stay up.
“I was like, if they get relegated, it’s the only way the club’s going to feel it, the owner’s going to feel it. But now I’ve got rid of all the frustration and anger, I actually feel bad for the boys. I actually want the club to do well now – before I was just angry at everything.”
Brady was ‘ruthless’
Antonio, like many players, says he had a “good relationship with David Sullivan” and Brady. That changed when it came to contract talks following his leg break, suffered as he was hauled from the wreckage of his car.
The accident revealed two very different sides to Brady. She visited him in hospital, bringing him an eye mask. “She was a nice lady,” he insists. “Before the car crash, me and her really got along. Even after that, she was like ‘business is business but if you ever need me, you can call me… She said a couple of things that were quite hurtful towards me, but it was her talking business. When it comes to her business, she’s quite ruthless.”
He was offered a £5,000-a-week contract which stipulated he could not play for the first team and would train with the under-21s.
“If you’re going to give me a contract and I can’t play for the first team, at least give me a contract that’s more than what the under-21s are on. Her response was, ‘well they haven’t broken their leg in a massive car crash. We don’t know what the outcome is going to be’. I was just like, ‘alright’. Thank you very much.”
Days after West Ham finally released him from his contract, he was training in Manchester when he heard the news about Diogo Jota’s death.
Jota’s passing ‘shook me to my core’
“It shook my whole entire body,” he recalls. “I felt myself getting emotional. I couldn’t train. It really affected me massively because at the end of the day, I could have gone. I could have passed myself. It just shook me to my core.”
Antonio’s first encounter with death had come as a teenager. His friend Eugene was a victim of the knife crime that was prevalent in the south London neighbourhood where they grew up. Were it not for an older brother, Antonio believes he could have ended up in a gang because of his reputation for “fighting”.
“When you’re growing up in those areas, gangs have the money, they get the girls,” he says. “When I spoke to my brother, he was like ‘no, never join it, as soon as you do you’re joining a lifestyle you don’t want to be in.”
Read more
- Kevin Garside: West Ham’s future has never felt bleaker
- Special report: West Ham’s £100m abyss – and who could replace Nuno
Antonio’s roots were in Wandsworth and Tooting, but family ties meant he always wanted to play for Jamaica. He was courted by England under Gareth Southgate, the one coach he says has a reputation within the game for treating players like “humans”. But he knew he “wouldn’t be playing much”.
He ended up joining Qatari club Al-Sailiya in March, a move which coincided with the outbreak of war in the Middle East.
“On the first day, all the bombs were hitting, that was scary,” he says. “I was looking out my window and seeing fire from the rockets going past my hotel window. The hotel was shaking. But other than that, it was fine.”
There is every likelihood he will retire there, inspired to seize every opportunity by what happened in that Ferrari: “Tomorrow’s not promised to anybody.”
Michail Antonio was speaking to launch his book “Humans not Robots: when elite sport and real life collide” (Harper Collins, released June 2026)
from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/egpHZ6l
Post a Comment