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Many West Ham fans will welcome Brady's departure

Baroness Karen Brady has stepped down as the vice-chair of West Ham United.  the timing is hardly ideal, coming at such a vital stage in the season. Brady put her announcement back 24 hours to avoid disrupting Monday night’s match against Crystal Palace, although it is hard to imagine any game will feel less than crucial from here given the relegation fight.

Media speculation suggests that there may be a new role for her with the Premier League, FA or elsewhere in football, although many fans would not welcome her.

Brady, 57, has been in the role for 16 years and is credited with leading the negotiations to secure West Ham’s move from Upton Park to the 62,500-seat London Stadium in 2016. 

She has also become a major Premier League power broker, and her departure from the club marks the end of a business relationship with the joint-chair, David Sullivan, that dates back almost 40 years. She persuaded Sullivan to buy Birmingham City and it was a groundbreaking moment for a male-dominated sport when she became the club’s managing director in March 1993, aged just 23.

Alongside Sullivan this season Brady has nevertheless been a target of protests by fans concerned by the club’s financial performance as well as their results on the pitch. While a draw against Crystal Palace on Monday night kept Nuno Espírito Santo’s side 17th in the Premier League, two points above the relegation zone, it was announced in February that West Ham had lost £104m in their accounts for the year ending May 31, 2025, with a decrease in revenue of £42.1million. 

Brady would deny she has been chased out, though. If dissent, protest or downright abuse was going to shape her decisions, she says would have quit in 2018 when fan anger at West Ham’s poor form and a negative reaction to the move to the London Stadium was at such a height a pitch invasion halted a 3-0 home defeat by Burnley.

More it is a sense of disillusionment. “If the football’s not going well, nothing’s going well,” she once said. And for the person who helped drive revenue up at the club by 218 per cent, that was an increasing source of frustration. Brady felt underappreciated, she felt misunderstood and falsely maligned.

Her purview was the business. She thought delivering the London Stadium would unlock the club’s vast potential, hoping that the Hammers could win the title, but instead a section of the fan base rejected it and her proud vision of “a world-class team in a world-class stadium” was used against her, as if it was all a con.

I have always found her difficult to like, but it is not easy for a hig- profile woman in football and a tough, unyielding persona is one way to cope with that.

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