In a refreshing change of events, former Birmingham City owners, David Gold and David Sullivan took control of the Hammers and admitted straightaway the mess that West Ham United have been battling with. Since the crashing collapse of the Icelandic banking system, West Ham had been financially stricken and the true extent of the footballing debt is now apparent. The Hammers owe £110 million out. One Hundred and Ten Million pounds.

Only in November did C.B. Holdings claim that the Hammers were in debt to the tune of £38 million, misleading the fans in to thinking that the situation was nowhere near as bad as some in the media had reported. In fact it was almost 3 times as bad as they made out and the new owners/controllers made clear exactly where they debts lay. They also confirmed that the club were going to have to sell players in this transfer window, contrary to the clubs previous stance. An immediate cash injection of £8 million was needed to keep the club going.

The list reads like a what not to do in football, or to put it another way, how to run a club like Leeds United. It’s as if someone wrote a business plan based on what went wrong at Elland Road and it was mistranslated into Icelandic to make it seem positive. It’s madness to see the debt and borrowing going on at West Ham over the last 3 years.

• £50 million owed to banks.
• £40 million owed to other clubs for transfers.
• The £40 million owed to other clubs, includes £20 million compensation to Sheffield United.
• Alan Curbishley is still owed his severance deal after winning his case for constructive dismissal
• No-one owes West Ham any money, all player transfer fees that were received paid the bank debt immediately
• C.B. Holdings had borrowed money against the next two seasons season ticket revenue
• There is no money for strengthening the squad.

Now this paints a completely different figure to what the West Ham fans believed, rightly or wrongly what the were being told. The previous regime were filling there heads with nonsense. It is a very real prospect that relegation would have seen West Ham implode financially. No ifs, no buts, they were immediately into administration. After all the information about Leeds United, C.B. Holdings were following exactly the same route.

It seems like absolute madness that not one lesson from the Yorkshire clubs demise has served to teach anyone anything it seems, as we see with the issues at Manchester United, Portsmouth and Liverpool in the last week. Regardless of the riches awash for the Premiership clubs, you still have to cut your cloth accordingly. Someone sooner or later is going to fall over the edge, which is a subject I’m going to be looking at in more depth for EPLtalk.com next week.

Gold and Sullivan have acted quickly in bringing in their trusted lieutenant, Karen Brady as vice chairman and she’ll be quick to install some much needed pragmatism at Upton Park. They are now going to talk to Newham council about moving to the Olympic Stadium after the 2012 Olympics. That could be  a challenge as Tottenham enquired about taking it over and were plainly told it was not available. The Olympic stadium is set to be reduced from its 80,000 capacity down to a pointless 30,000, for which there is neither the use nor the need.

The NFL could still play a part in the stadium’s future use that could play into West Ham’s hands. The NFL have earmarked that the often mooted London franchise’s potential base could be there. It would certainly make more sense to use it as a dual sport stadium than a white elephant for athletics, which is the current plan. There is neither the inclination or support for that size of athletics venue in London, they should sell it and use the money to redevelop Crystal Palace Athletic Stadium.

So now, West Ham have to focus on the future and the fans will be thankful that regardless of the criticisms that could be placed at Gold and Sullivan’s door during their tenure at Birmingham City, they still have a club to support. The work is now on to bring in fresh investment to try and work off the remaining debt and crucial to that is the fact that West Ham United need to stay up.

Gianfranco Zola has been nothing but a gentlemen throughout this difficult period for him and he needs to make sure that he can keep his side together for one almighty relegation scrap. For a first job, he has certainly been earning his money, of that there is no doubt. In the next six games, West Ham face Portsmouth, Blackburn Rovers, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Burnley, Birmingham City and Hull City. Come the end of February, Gold, Sullivan and Zola will know exactly the size of the task to keep West Ham United in the Premier League.

So it’s official then, Owen Coyle will be the new manager of Bolton Wanderers and Burnley now have to find the right man to replace him as they look to continue the good work this season has produced. It is crucial that the chairman, Barry Kilby, makes the right decision in who to appoint as Coyle’s successor at Turf Moor.

Without wanting to state the obvious, it is paramount to Burnley’s continued success this season that the right man is given the job. That means the chairman has to avoid being star struck when the same old names come calling for the vacancy. Get it right and Burnley’s home form should see them stay up. Make the wrong decision and the club could spiral to the foot of the table in weeks.

Whilst Kilby should be rightly lauded for appointing Coyle in the first place, I don’t think anyone could have predicted just how much of an effect he would have on the sleeping giant. Stabilising the club by keeping them in the Championship and slowly building, improving the side year on year would have been a wonderful achievement. He surpassed all that when they won the play off final with their highest finish to a season since 1976.

Yet, you only have to look back to the mid nineties to see the age old disease that afflicts certain chairman. They get star struck and with the tenures of Adrian Heath and Chris Waddle still in the minds of Burnley fans, the last thing the club needs is a ex-footballer who thinks he can manage in the Premiership. They need someone who knows the demands of Premiership football and what the club means to the fans. It is not an easy decision for the club to make but they have to keep their eye on the prize.

It also means avoiding such arch self publicists as Graham Souness, Ruud Guillit, Bryan Robson and Gianluca Vialli. Men who’s reputations are fanned by the hero worship dished out to them as pundits on Sky Sports. Ignore their failings as managers, they’ve won countless trophies as players, men such as Tony Cottee who took over a Barnet side flying high only to completely destroy them in less than 5 months. Star struck chairman should be banned.

So I had a look on the League Managers Association Website earlier, to see who was available on their list. Oddly, Souness, Vialli and Guillit are still touting their wares, but a couple of oddities appeared. Burnley’s two previous managers before Coyle, the overrated Steve Cotterill and the universally detested Stan Ternent are still on there.  In fact most of the list reads as a who not to give the job too, with John Barnes and Tony Adams still refusing to realise their limitations and the ever popular Gary Megson available if you want to alienate your entire fan base.

Yet there are some stand out candidates, firstly Alan Curbishley is there, as is Mark Hughes and Steve Coppell. Former Scotland manager George Burley and  Paul Jewell are still available. For me, those are the 5 top options of unemployed managers that the LMA are offering. Curbishley wouldn’t probably want to move so far North and probably Coppell is wrestling with the idea of returning to Reading no doubt.

It may be too soon for Mark Hughes to return to the game so quickly after his ignomious exit from Manchester City which leaves Burley and Jewell. Burley proved at Ipswich that he could work on a tight budget, play effective and attractive football and earn promotion whilst at Ipswich. What he has against him is his failure to deal with bigger name players and keep sides in the Premiership. Jewell also has proved an ability to make a purse out of a sows ear, as his spells at Bradford City and Wigan Athletic showed.

Jewell though is still tainted by his awful spell at Derby County and Burley proved in his third Premiership season with Ipswich and during his time as Scotland manager, he just can’t handle big name players. He was also tainted with a torrid spell at Pride Park, which begs the question, what happens to managers at Derby County?? So would going after a manager currently employed be the answer?

Looking outside the Premiership though only seems to point to one candidate who could cope with the job and the pressure of Premier League football. He’s managed an international side and took a team from non league to the cusp of promotion to the Championship. He then took over another sleeping giant and took them up before almost taking them to the Premiership in 2008. That man is Gary Johnson at Bristol City and I believe he’s the only man out there for the job at Burnley.

Now, don’t laugh but I honestly feel he’d be perfect for the job and would keep Burnley up. The only downside is that potentially, Bristol City are a bigger club, with a larger fan base. This season, they’re averaging 14,553 fans a game, whilst Burnley are almost at capacity with 20,344. Promotion for Bristol City would be a massive boost for the area, and with plans to move the club to a 30,000 seater stadium by 2011, with option to increase it to 42,000, would Johnson give all that up for a crack at the Premiership? It’d be a tough ask, but if they could get him, then they should bite his hand off. Just don’t give it to one of the usual suspects, it’d be curtains for Burnley.

If the decisions that Alan Curbishley and Kevin Keegan took earlier this season to leave their respective Premier League clubs doesn’t serve as good enough evidence to foreign owners that trying to get involved with matters on the pitch is a terrible idea, then the future hopes of some of England’s top-flight teams are in shatters.

When two of the country’s most respected managers walk away from jobs at the clubs they love so much then you know something is wrong. Curbishley and Keegan have such affection for West Ham and Newcastle respectively that just resigning out of the blue was never an option. There had to be something or someone that had caused such shock exists.  And there was.

In both cases the reason for departure was how the club was being run at board level, and more specifically how the board were attempting to run the football side of things. At West Ham Curbishly said publicly towards the end of the summer’s transfer window that no more of the club’s players would be sold, only for Anton Ferdinand to be shipped out against his wishes days after making the statement. It was not his choice to see him go; in fact it had nothing to do with him at all. The decision was made by the executives of the club who sit upstairs mulling over finances and revenue most of the time.

And the circumstances were almost identical at Newcastle, where Keegan left because he discovered that on the final day of the transfer window several of his first-team players were offered for sale by the club’s board. Keegan spent a few days discussing the situation with Newcastle’s hierarchy before coming to the decision to resign with immediate effect. Once again a man who was steering a club in the right direction was forced to leave because stupid board members and executives above him were trying to do jobs they were not supposed to even think about.

Football is not their area of specialism so trying to invade the club’s on-the-pitch matters with their absurd ideas just simply doesn’t work. They employ a manager and coaching staff to work in that field, and to work with the players and pick the team, so with that the job of deciding which players come in and out of the club should rest with them as well. They are the football people, they have played the game professionally and they know what they are doing, so leave it to them. If businessmen from upstairs are signing players and then presenting them to the manager all of a sudden then what are they supposed to do? The individual who is responsible for training the players should have the choice as to which players he is training. This is the manager. It should not be somebody who does not know the ins and outs of Premier League football, like the board members at Upton Park and St James Park.

Yet despite the sufficient evidence provided by managers like Curbishley and Keegan, and many before them,  that interfering with their jobs is almost suicidal, owners will continue to come and buy clubs and attempt to get involved with football matters. Doing this has a track-record of failing miserably, and even Chelsea were victims of this when Roman Abramovich tried to meddle with Jose Mourinho’s job, only for the gifted Portuguese manager to walk out on the Stamford Bridge outfit. They suffered and mourned, and so will many clubs in the future if the current predicament remains. Why rich businessmen from abroad continue to do this is beyond most people that follow the Premier League. It sometimes makes you wonder how they became so wealthy when they come and do such stupid things.

One example, however, of a foreign owner taking charge of a top-flight club in England and proving wonderfully successful is that of the American Randy Lerner at Aston Villa. He has injected money into the club but has not stuck his nose into matters on the pitch. He never talks to the media, and remains out of the spotlight, so much so that people often forget he is such a high-profile figure. Lerner does things so simply but so effectively and that is what makes him such a great owner. He does not seek attention, and he knows that he is never going to be the most important person at the club, like some owners think they are. Randy Lerner should be the role model for wannabe Premier League owners, when currently everybody wants to be the next Roman Abramovich and get stuck into the football side of things.

Things need to chance at the top of the hierarchy if clubs are function properly in the future. Let’s hope there are plenty of Lerners out there, ready to mirror Randy’s masterful running of Aston Villa.

If reality TV executives are looking for the next smash hit, they should consider Premier League football.

Consider the real world drama that happened this week alone. There was Fergie picking up Berbatov in his Bentley under the noses of Man City’s executives. In Newcastle, there was the two-day boardroom drama involving Keegan, his lawyers and the Toon executives. At Upton Park, a real-life episode of Eastenders was being played out as Curbishley delivered his words of resignation with a cockney accent.

And then there was the cliffhanger, the point in the show where viewers were on tenterhooks with the bombshell that one of the richest families in the world had purchased the unfashionable Manchester City.Without a doubt, the Premier League has become the most entertaining soap opera there is. There are so many plotlines, characters that we love to hate and secretly admire. And the amazing is that we’ve only just finished gameweek three. We have thirty five more to go.

While the drama off the pitch has generated a sea of emotions — from anger to disbelief and everything in between — the Premier League clubs need to ensure that the focus returns to the place it truly should be, on the pitch. We’ve had three entertaining weekends thus far, but we haven’t seen a classic match that has left us speechless. Let’s hope it happens sooner rather than later.

Alan Curbishley has handed in his resignation as manager of West Ham United. In a statement released by the club, West Ham confirms it has accepted the resignation, and has not yet announced any plans for a successor.

Curbishley became manager of the club in December 2006, several months after leaving his long-time job at Charlton Athletic.  During his time as manager, he lead West Ham out of relegation in the 2006/07 season with wins in seven of the team’s last nine Premier League matches, and finished tenth in the league the following season.  West Ham won two of its first three matches to start the current season, but Curbishley was reportedly upset at the team’s transfer policy.  West Ham sold Anton Ferdinand and George McCartney last month to fellow Premier League side Sunderland, but was otherwise mostly inactive during the summer transfer window. West Ham’s next league match is September 13th against West Bromwich Albion.

Tonight West Ham United plays the Major League Soccer All-Star Team in Toronto, Canada. The match will be shown live on ESPN and ESPN360.com beginning at 7pm ET.

I’m intrigued by this match but it’s hard to get excited. West Ham is one of the most vanilla football clubs in the Premier League. The club has few players that spark a lot of emotion other than Dean Ashton. Then there’s boring old manager Alan Curbishley. And lastly, you have to wonder how different everything may have been if the original choice for the opposition was selected instead of West Ham: Liverpool.

Still, the passionate Toronto fans should make the atmosphere better than previous MLS All-Star games. And it’ll be fun to see the increased police presence surrounding the Hammers fans.

Let’s hope that both teams come out with a commitment to win this one. Keeping my fingers crossed, I’m hoping this will be an entertaining game to watch. We’ll see.

What do you think? Share your comments below by clicking the comments link.

Best Player: Cristiano Ronaldo, Manchester United

It’s difficult to argue with this one.  Even if he does score a number of goals on penalties, he still produces a striker’s tally from midfield and, unlike Frank Lampard, he manages to look skillful while doing it.  The scariest thing is that he is only going to get better.

Worst Player: Kevin Kilbane, Wigan Athletic

This was a difficult choice, as teammate Titus Bramble is equally incompetent.  However, Bramble at least shows flashes of ability at times, while Zinedine Kilbane is 100% useless.  Michael Ballack would have been in the running, but was disqualified due to two few appearances.

Best Manager: Sven-Goran Eriksson, Manchester City

There are some worthy candidates, notably Arsene Wenger and Harry Redknapp.  However, both had far better raw materials to begin the season.  Sven had a squad that looked likely to be relegated and revitalized it into a Champions League contender in a matter of weeks, even without a striker.

Worst Manager (still standing): Alan Curbishley, West Ham

Consistently outclassed tactically, check.  Bad signings, check.  Inability to regognize/utilize talent, check.  When is the last time that anyone has praised a brilliant decision made by Curbishley?  West Ham are mid-table, but in spite of him rather than because of him.

Best Signing: Elano, Manchester City

Torres may be a better player, but Elano was 1/3 as expensive.  No one, at least in the English media, knew who he was (despite him being a Brazilian International).  City bought him for 8m GBP and could probably sell him for 3 times that now.  A brilliant signing.

Worst Signing: Darren Bent, Tottenham Hotspur

Nothing against Darren Bent, he is a solid above average striker.  But, he is certainly not worth 17m GBP.  Particularly to Tottenham who already had Robbie Keane, Berbatov, and Defoe.  The 17m GBP could have been redirected toward buying a few competent defenders.

Best Game: Tottenham 4 – West Ham 3

No particular reason that this was the best game, but it sticks in the memory.  Carlos Tevez scored his first goal in this match.  Berbatov had a nice free kick.  It was edge of the seat action and entertainment.

Worst Game: Wigan Athletic (Entire Season)

Best Goal: Seb Larsson vs. Tottenham (Dec. 2)

Some other goals were flashier, but this strike was simply pure skill.

Most Overrated: John Terry, Chelsea

Throwing his personaltiy aside, John Terry is not a bad defender, but he is not a particularly great one either.  He hasn’t been one for quite a while.  Claims that he is a world-class elite defender are ridiculous.  Just in the Top Four of the Premier League one would take Carvalho, Carragher, Vidic, Ferdinand, Gallas, and Toure over Terry at this point in time.

Most Underrated: Peter Crouch, Liverpool

Crouch does two things, he causes defenders to panic and he scores goals at a reasonably high rate.  He may look like a jackass while doing it, but he is a solid player and definitively Liverpool’s 2nd best striker.