More Sullivan Secrets

 

The sheer, cinematic horror of it all. Just when you think the David Sullivan era has finally folded its gaudy, tabloid tent and slunk off into the night, the BBC drops another spectacularly grim update. It turns out the man was operating under a secret safeguarding ban since 2023. A classic West Ham move, really; keeping the curtains tightly drawn while the house is actively burning down.

For three whole years, a quiet little coalition of the FA, the club, and the local authority had barred our largest shareholder from having any contact whatsoever with the women’s or youth teams. No matches, no training grounds, nothing. Yet there he was, week in, week out, parked prominently in the London Stadium director's box like a permanent fixture of the fixtures. The institutional silence required to pull that off is honestly breathtaking.

It is a deeply uncomfortable car crash to watch, a tragedy wrapped in decades of Sport newspapers and pornography money. He has, of course, stepped down now to "focus on fighting" the claims, but the revelation that eight separate women had already gone to the police over the years makes the collective amnesia of football’s governing bodies feel even more damning.

Personally, I am utterly relieved to see the back of him. The club deserves a clean slate, free from the heavy, suffocating smog of these unending scandals. But watching the layers of this particular onion get peeled back in the national press? It is utterly gripping, terribly sordid, and entirely impossible to look away from.