Leading pundit Jamie Carragher has revealed why he’s changed his mind on West Ham’s chances of staying in the Premier League this season.
West Ham have been a complete shambles for a long while now.
Just one win in the first 10 games of the new season in all competitions has seen the Hammers close to rock bottom.
But the alarming regression to reach this point has been going on since January 2024.
West Ham hit a peak as they went sixth with a 2-0 win at Arsenal on December 28th 2023.
They were within a win of the top four midway through the campaign and would go on to reach the quarter-finals of the Europa League.
West Ham’s two years of abject misery and decline
But there had been just 17 wins in the club’s 66 Premier League matches since the turn of that year.
That had fans, pundits and journalists queuing up to write the Hammers off as relegation certainties, let alone candidates.
At the start of the season Jamie Carragher was one of several top pundits, including the likes of Paul Merson, who named West Ham as one of the teams they thought would be dropping down to the Championship.
After the recent 2-0 defeat to Brentford, which saw Nuno Espirito Santo make a host of bizarre changes, Carragher remarked he has never seen a worse team in Premier League history in terms of athleticism than this West Ham side.
When asked for a ‘hot take’ back in August, Carragher stated that he felt West Ham would be relegated.
“Is West Ham in a relegation fight or getting relegated (a hot take)?” Carragher said.
“I think West Ham are going to struggle,” Carragher added shaking his head.
After previously writing off the Hammers’ survival hopes, the Sky Sports pundit has changed his tune following the superb 3-1 win over Newcastle.
Now Carragher has explained his U-turn on West Ham’s Premier League survival chances.
The Hammers could have been forgiven for thinking they were doomed and accepting their fate just five minutes to the game against Newcastle on Sunday.
Carragher U-turn on West Ham’s Premier League survival chances
Talismanic captain Jarrod Bowen applied a brilliant finish to a sweeping move just moments into the game but it cannoned back off the post.
Newcastle gathered the ball, launched a counter-attack and immediately went 1-0 up through Jacob Murphy at the other end.
It was a sequence of events so typical of West Ham’s miserable couple of years.
But instead of folding like a cheap pack of cards as they have so often under David Moyes, Julen Lopetegui and Graham Potter across 2024 and 2025, West Ham showed courage, resilience, aggression and fight to get back in the game.
The Hammers led 2-1 at the break and were fully deserving of the 3-1 win by the time Tomas Soucek slid in to sweep home at the death.
The victory sparked wild celebrations from the players, fans, Nuno and his staff.
Those celebrations suggested the belief has been restored ahead of a crucial game against Burnley, where West Ham could climb out of the bottom three going into the international break.
It seems the performance and result has also given Carragher belief West Ham can now stay in the Premier League.
Carragher believes West Ham have enough good players to stay up.
Carragher says West Ham have too many good players to drop
But he also thinks the owners will back Nuno with new signings in the January transfer window.
“I look at the teams in the bottom three, I look at Nottingham Forest and think that they have too many good players to end up getting relegated,” Carragher said on Sky Sports.
“I think the same about West Ham.
“I think they (West Ham) will have a go in January transfer wise (too).”
Carragher is not wrong either.
A leading Sky Sports journalist revealed recently that West Ham are planning to sign at least three players in January.
Nuno reportedly wants a defender, a midfielder and a striker in the winter window as a bare minimum.
With top West Ham sources also backing Nuno to be at the helm long-term, it suggests the trajectory of the entire club might be about to change in the coming weeks and months.
