West Ham United's 14-season stay in the Premier League is over. Despite a 3-0 victory over Leeds United on the final day, the Hammers were relegated to the Championship — a fate that, on reflection, had been coming for much of the season.

A dismal start under Potter

The campaign began without a shred of optimism. A 3-0 opening-day thrashing at Sunderland set the tone, and Graham Potter never recovered from it. In five Premier League matches, his side won only once — against Nottingham Forest — and lost the other four.

When Potter was dismissed on September 27, West Ham sat 19th with a goal difference of minus eight. His final match in charge was a 2-1 home defeat to Crystal Palace, extending the club's winless run at the London Stadium to eight games. Across 23 Premier League appearances, Potter managed only six wins — statistically the lowest points-per-game return in the club's history.

No new manager bounce

Nuno Espirito Santo was appointed swiftly, but improvement was slow to materialise. Five games into his tenure, West Ham had collected just one win and one draw, and the club remained rooted in the bottom three with a goal difference that had deteriorated to minus 11.

Selection decisions drew intense scrutiny. In a 2-0 home loss to Brentford, Nuno started Oliver Scarles at right-back and Kyle Walker-Peters on the left — both playing out of position. Lucas Paqueta led the attack as a lone striker, Andy Irving made his first full start in midfield alongside Tomas Soucek, and Freddie Potts and Soungoutou Magassa — impressive in the previous draw with Everton — were left out. Brentford produced 22 shots, seven of which required saves from Alphonse Areola. West Ham managed one shot on target from seven attempts.

Points dropped from winning positions

A winless December was followed by a last-gasp win at Tottenham Hotspur on January 17 — West Ham's first in 10 league games. That run proved terminal. In Nuno's first 16 matches, the club collected only 11 points from a possible 48. Worse still, they had been in winning positions in five of those games and converted none of them — meaning 22 points were available and 11 were squandered.

A 2-2 draw at Bournemouth, when West Ham had led 2-0, was particularly costly. Nuno altered his shape to protect the lead, but it backfired. Heading into the final weekend, the club had dropped 20 points from winning positions across the season.

Were West Ham complacent in the summer?

The squad assembled for the 2025/26 season looked thin from the outset. Creative players lost in previous windows — Said Benrahma, Manuel Lanzini, Pablo Fornals, and Mohamed Kudus — were not adequately replaced. Defensive experience departed too, with Aaron Cresswell, Emerson Palmieri, and Vladimir Coufal all gone, replaced largely by academy product Scarles and 21-year-old El Hadji Malick Diouf, signed for £19 million from Slavia Prague.

No central defender arrived in the summer window. That decision looks damning in hindsight. Axel Disasi was eventually added on January's transfer deadline day and performed well — West Ham kept five clean sheets after his arrival, compared to just one before it. The club's net spend of £60 million paled against Sunderland's £141 million and Leeds United's £95 million. Their biggest signing, Mateus Fernandes, cost £38.5 million from Southampton and did not arrive until August 29 — by which point West Ham had already played twice, lost twice, and conceded seven goals.

West Ham finished the season having conceded 65 goals, ending with a goal difference of minus 19, the fourth worst in the Premier League.

A deeper decline

For some supporters, the roots of this fall stretch back further — to the move from Upton Park to the London Stadium, which many believe cost the club its identity and fractured its bond with the fanbase. Others point to the departure of David Moyes, under whom West Ham achieved finishes of sixth, seventh, ninth, and tenth, three seasons of European football, and the 2023 UEFA Conference League title in Prague. Since Moyes left, the club finished 14th and are now relegated.

Off the pitch, the season was marked by persistent protests — fans raising red cards in the 16th minute of every home game, representing 16 years of the Sullivan, Gold, and Brady ownership — as well as marches and mounting anxiety over the financial consequences of dropping out of the top flight.

On the pitch, the disruption caused by Lucas Paqueta's departure following a red card against Liverpool added further turbulence to a campaign that had been troubled from the very first kick.