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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