Sam Allardyce has said that only Harry Houdini could have done a better job than him as the West Ham United manager over the past four years. Allardyce’s future is on the line, with his two-year contract due to expire next month and the club’s owners planning to decide on whether to stick with him only after the club’s final match of the season at Newcastle United on Sunday week.
A host of managers have been linked with the potential vacancy, the most prominent at present being Napoli’s Rafael Benítez. Yet Allardyce was in bullish mood on Thursday morning. Chewing gum and with the word “Gaffer” printed on to his club flip-flops, he put forward a strong defence of his stewardship.
Allardyce won promotion from the Championship, via the play-offs, in his first season and he has since finished 10th and 13th in the Premier League. With two matches of this season to go, his team are again 10th and they face 11th-placed Everton at Upton Park on Saturday.
“I have had a great time here, I have enjoyed myself, I have enjoyed London and I have done what I was asked to do, which was deliver a team that, this time round, has not only been the most successful [of his tenure] but the most entertaining, the most thrilling,” Allardyce said. “It is the youngest squad we have put together since I have been here. If you want somebody else to do more than I have done then I think you will have to be calling for Houdini.”
Allardyce signed a two-year contract when he took over from Avram Grant in 2011 and he was asked whether he would seek a minimum of two more years when he sits down with the co-chairman David Sullivan after the Newcastle game. West Ham enter the Olympic Stadium the season after next.
“I don’t know until it comes but I wouldn’t have thought it will be any different to a two-year,” Allardyce said. “The owners have been pretty consistent – it has been a two-year and a two-year. So I would have thought that is where it will start.”
Allardyce said it was important to resolve the situation as quickly as possible, especially as West Ham’s plans for the summer stand to be turned upside-down if they were to qualify for the Europa League via England’s fair play table. They sit second, behind Liverpool, who are likely to qualify through their league position for the Europa League, and marginally ahead of Everton.
“Particularly if we are in Europe, we need to be quick about that negotiation,” Allardyce said. “Our first game would be on 2 July and there’s a lot to finalise – planning and pre-season – on the basis of that.”
Allardyce was also asked whether the uncertainly over his continued employment had affected player recruitment plans for the summer. He said that it had not. “We’re just accumulating our targets at the moment,” Allardyce said. “Our first list of targets are generally not successful. So we generally get down to the first group of players that you would look for and then the second group. Generally, because of the situation throughout the world of football, you have to play an extremely good game of poker in the summer.”
Allardyce said it was “not inevitable” that the game against Everton would be his last at Upton Park as the West Ham manager and he warmed to an extremely familiar theme.
“There is no news as always [on the contract],” he said. “It’s at the end of the season. It was always going to be at the end of the season and it will still be the end of the season. Two years ago, I signed on 29 May. At the end of this season, it falls in the same lines. We sit down and we negotiate. Whether I’m staying or going, that hasn’t been decided. I could do without this because of the speculation it causes but I’m not in control of it at the moment.”
