David Sullivan appointed Tim Steidten as West Ham United’s director of football back in the summer of 2023.
Tim Steidten was given the keys to the kingdom at the West Ham by David Sullivan earlier this summer.
The 45-year-old German is completely in charge of transfers, whilst Julen Lopetegui is tasked with training the players he is given to work with.
Steidten has plenty of supporters in East London, but he has his critics as well, including Chris Sutton who went to town with an astonishing attack on the 45-year-old on Friday.
Interestingly, Sullivan and Steidten were both criticised recently by Guillem Balague, with the Spaniard cryptically telling the Hammers fans to ‘look behind the bench’ to understand the problems at the club.
The former Bayer Leverkusen chief oversaw nine new signings in the summer, but pretty much all of those have struggled during the first month or so of the season, aside from perhaps Max Kilman and Aaron Wan-Bissaka.
And now a truly stunning claim has been made about Steidten’s influence on the summer transfer window.
Reporter close to David Sullivan’s staggering Tim Steidten claim
The German still has a lot to prove at the London Stadium, as does Lopetegui of course.
In truth, we won’t know whether Steidten will go down as a success at West Ham for another couple of seasons at least.
He clearly has a huge influence at the London Stadium – perhaps an even bigger one than we all first thought.
Sean Whetstone took to his official X account today, and dropped a hugely surprising claim about Steidten.
He said, “Hammers technical director Tim Steidten picked all the players West Ham signed over Summer with the exception of Crysencio Summerville.“
Tim Steidten claim from David Sullivan confidant questionable
The reason I find this so hard to believe is that it surely wasn’t Steidten who pushed for the £40 million signing of Kilman, given his history with Lopetegui.
And if anyone did have a Tim Steidten signing stamped all over him, it was Crysencio Summerville.
I believe that Lopetegui would have taken a list of attributes that he wanted in each position to Steidten in the summer, and the German would then have identified targets.
I’m sure that the German had a hand in all of the summer signings we made, but I really don’t believe that Summerville was the only one who he didn’t handpick himself.
David Sullivan obviously signed off all the transfers at the final stages of the deals, before Tim Steidten and Julen Lopetegui held talks with the players themselves.
The latest claim from Whetstone just doesn’t make much sense to me.
