The Heroic Tale Of Winston Reid And His Remarkable Contract Negotiation Skills
The concept of the footballer with a long-term injury is an awkward contradiction. You’re paid to play footy, it’s the core aspect of your personality... yet you’re unable to do it. It’s got to be such a difficult thing to come to terms with. Ryan Thomas has spoken quite a bit about the mental struggles that he dealt with after his dream move to PSV was followed, just a few training sessions in, by a season-ending knee issue before he’d even had the chance to make his debut. It took him 14 months before he could finally play a game for PSV. Fourteen months. Unable to do the thing that he’d dedicated his professional life to.
Winston Reid can sympathise and then some, he last played a competitive game of club football on 3 March 2018. It was a game against Swansea which West Ham would end up losing 4-1 and you know the rest. He’s since played bits and pieces of preseason games. He’s played half a game for the All Whites. He’s played for the West Ham U23s. He’d made a couple matchday squads. He’s now gone on loan to Sporting Kansas City to try and resurrect his career, although issues (apparently) with getting his visa done meant he didn’t feature in their first two games and now the entire league is on indefinite lockdown.
There’s been some confusion about his situation with SKC. Not playing in the first couple games didn’t help matters and neither did the weirdness that MLS has about not announcing the length of contracts. He’s on loan but for how long? Initially it was suggested six months, meaning half the MLS season, which would give him a chance to play regularly but still be back in London for preseason with the Hammers. But since then it’s been reported Stateside that the loan is for the entirety of the 2020 MLS season and SKC even have an option to buy in amongst the fineprint.
There’s a massive difference between the two. At this point it’s anybody’s guess as to when the football will resume this season, if it will resume, in what form it may resume, how the next season will look, etc. But at the time this deal was done that wasn’t the case and the intentions are telling. Six months means he’s committed to coming back to West Ham, the American stint is just for fitness and fun, the Hammers are where it’s at. The 12-month deal suggests he’s ready to move on in his career and that he views his West Ham days in the past tense.
Winnie probably would’ve made his comeback with West Ham already had Manuel Pellegrini not been sacked. He was on track to, by his own account. Then the Chilean got the flick and back came David Moyes which is kinda crazy because David Moyes was the manager the last time he played for the club. Reid literally never featured under Pellegrini outside of a couple preseason games. It must’ve felt like waking up from a dream in a strange way. Reid initially made a couple matchday squads under Moyes... until the pair had a heart to heart about Reid’s future at the club and Reid apparently pushed for the loan move himself.
If things were entirely up to West Ham they’d probably rather have let him go permanently. The dude hasn’t played for two years, there’s no guarantee he’ll ever get back to the required standard in the Premier League and for a club that has massively underachieved over the last few years they don’t really have the luxury of easing him back in. They’ve got to worry about staying in the top flight – at the time of the postponement they were only out of the relegation zone on goal difference so no surprises that club vice-chair Karren Brady was leading the charge to void the current season... though she’s backtracked on that more recently because of the financial implications. Clubs are pretty desperate to play it out if possible even if it goes into July, even if they’re behind closed doors. People talk but money screams.
Anyway, Winnie’s mention of “a new challenge” on his own insta backs up the belief that both parties would be happy with a clean divorce. But then if you’ve watched that movie Marriage Story then you’ll know that there’s no such thing as a clean divorce when money is involved and Winston Reid happens to have seventy thousand reasons per week not to want to leave West Ham permanently. That’s £70,000 too, which is a whole lot more in kiwi dollars. Of which Sporting Kansas City are apparently only paying about 15%... an absolute bargain for them and a stink deal for West Ham considering that Winston Reid – and here’s where this yarn kicks into hyperdrive – is NOT EVEN HALFWAY THROUGH HIS CURRENT CONTRACT.
West Ham, 18 August 2017: “West Ham United are delighted to announce that Winston Reid has signed a new long-term contract with the Club. The long-serving centre-back has put pen to paper on a deal that will keep him in Claret and Blue until summer 2023, meaning he will potentially spend 13 years in east London.”
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. That contract was signed in the days after his 150th Premier League appearance... in the not-quite three years since then he’s played a further 16 PL games. Chances are that he won’t play for the club again which would mean 16 games is the ultimate sum of what he offers them for the duration of that contract. A reported £70k per week for six years. That’s somewhere in the realms of £21.8m... no idea what the tax brackets are like but £1.36m per game seems like it’ll be decent cash either way.
Hence why Winnie is so hard to get rid of. He’s under no incentive to leave permanently until that deal’s run down because not only will other clubs have no incentive of their own to pay him anything close to that after two years of injury but none of the clubs at a level where they might want to could afford to anyway. The Premier League is in its own financial bubble and this is what that looks like. Clubs like Real Madrid, Juventus, Barcelona, PSG, Bayern Munich... they can all compete with any club in the world for the dollar signs but only in England can teams at the bottom of the top flight still afford to throw money around willy nilly. Remember they’re still paying 85% of Winnie’s wages while he’s on loan in the States.
How, though. How did West Ham get themselves into such a predicament? Tell ya what, that’s actually a really interesting story and it goes all the way back to a fella called Sam Allardyce. Fat Sam (or Big Sam, as he named his autobiography) spent four years in charge of West Ham, taking over just after they’d been relegated and leading them straight back up to the Premier League in what proved to be Winston Reid’s breakout season with the club. Reidy had struggled to get settled initially as the Hammers went down but in the Champo he thrived, starting 30 games (including the playoff final, a 2-1 win over Blackpool) and he was a Hammers fave from that point on.
But Fat Sam was never a popular manager despite guiding the club to three straight mid-table finishes back in the Premier League. His perceived negative/defensive tactics and his gritty personality meant that even as they were bustling for promotion in the Championship he was still getting criticised. By the final year of his contract it was becoming a big distraction for the club, who were trying to figure out whether to offer the big fella a new deal or not. Also with an expiring contract at that time: Winston Reid.
This is where we have to pause and say that despite the culture of capitalistic greed and ever-inflating transfer fees that player agents have spread like a cancer throughout the sport... whoever Reidy’s agent is must be a bit of a genius. They leveraged that situation for all it was worth, two months into the campaign we were seeing headlines like this one...
Within months clubs like Arsenal, Tottenham, Manchester United, Everton, and Liverpool had all been linked with the dude. Chances are that all those rumours stemmed from Winston’s agent as a deliberate tactic to drive up the market and see what the club really think he’s worth. But then there was also the murky situation with Sam Allardyce going on at the time. Now, not saying he fell out with Big Sam or anything here, but in the first week of the January transfer window in 2015, Sammy was out there hinting firmly to the press that he thought other clubs were illegally tapping him up with early pre-contract offers...
Sam Allardyce, 6 January 2015: “If he is not going to sign a contract here, I would find it highly unlikely if it is not already verbally done [somewhere else]. You have to accept the way it is and contrary to whether it breaks the rules or it doesn't, it happens. It is just one of the ways the football world works... There is no future for Winston Reid at West Ham at the moment as his contract finishes on 30 June. He hasn't said he is or isn't going to sign. You would err that he isn't, by the feel and look of it, at this moment in time.”
Allardyce later apologised, sort of, for suggesting that... but remember he was in the same situation himself at the time and as it became clear that West Ham were not going to offer him a new contract the mood seemed to change. In February of that year it was confirmed by Karren Brady that no contract talks would happen during the season, which was more or less the writing on the wall - if they wanted him then they’d have signed him then and there, it’s not like they were gonna learn anything over the last few months of the season that they hadn’t learned in the almost-four years prior. They’d already been knocked out of both cups and were slumping towards a mid-table finish despite having been flirting with the European spots a third of the way through. They lost 8 of their 12 remaining games after Brady said that about the big fella’s contract. By the start of March, everybody knew that Sam Allardyce was leaving. Speaking of which...
Winston Reid, 5 March 2015: “It’s one of those things that took a bit of time, but we got there in the end and I’m very happy to be here for the next part of my career. I’m looking forward to it. At the end of the day, for myself I feel comfortable here. I was speaking with the joint-chairman David Sullivan and everybody and felt like I was valued here. He was clearly very committed to getting the deal done and keeping me at the club, so I’d like to thank him for that and I’m delighted to sign for the next six years. My family are happy living here too. We’ve been part of the club living in London, so we weighed all the factors up and I’m delighted to be staying here.”
Yeah, basically as soon as Allardyce’s days were officially numbers, Reidy went and signed a new deal to stay at West Ham beyond him (Mark Noble and James Tomkins had both re-signed in the weeks prior too). Not only a new deal but a six and a half year deal. Keeping him in town until 2021 as it stood. West Ham were preparing for their final year at Upton Park at this stage and having a manager who could bring more attractive footy to London Stadium was a huge part of the decision. Allardyce was officially let go minutes after a 2-0 defeat to Newcastle ended their season (Newcastle, coincidentally, being the team they’d come to Aotearoa with that preseason).
The transition to London Stadium didn’t go quite as well as planned but the last season at Upton Park was something special. West Ham finished seventh to make the Europa League qualifiers and took Manchester United to an FA Cup quarterfinal replay. And of course Reidy famously score the final ever goal at Upton Park to beat Man United, locking him in West Ham legend status forever more.
That was also the Dimitri Payet season. But then Payet left in a mess and they made a mess of trying to replace him. They were eleventh the next season, losing five of their first six Premier League games and getting knocked out of the Europa qualifiers by Astra Giurgiu of Romania. There was unease about the lack of atmosphere at the echoing Olympic Stadium after the up-close-and-personal feel of the stands up Upton Park. It was a chaotic time. A slow start to the next season would see Slaven Bilic sacked and replaced by David Moyes. But before that could happen, this happened...
This is the truly inexplicable part of all this. Winston Reid had signed a six and a half year deal two and a half years earlier. He still had four years left on his contract on 18 August 2017 when he agreed to a new six year deal which effectively added two years to that contract and gave him a nice hefty raise. He took his previous contract into the final four months of that deal and this time he couldn’t even handle testing the waters of the final four years. But it was another transitional time for West Ham who were desperate for stability and Winston Reid by this time was growing into a veteran defender. Again he and his agent leveraged that into an extremely favourable advantage. It was a statement deal for West Ham, showing anxious fans that their club heritage was still first and foremost even without Upton Park by re-signing a fan favourite player. Little did they know what a wreckage that decision would end up being for them.
There’s an alternate timeline somewhere out in the eternal ether where Winston Reid never got injured and continued to dominate things for West Ham throughout this contract as planned. He might even be club captain by now, he’d definitely be vice behind Mark Noble. Winnie’s only 31 years old after all.
But if you are gonna be out injured for two years then you might as well do it while you’ve got the security of a long term contract to help you through. Plenty of players would have found themselves cast out into the big wide dangerous world during two years out of the game. You could even say that last contract extension has saved his career from that perspective. It’s definitely given him leverage over his future and support through his injury... and let’s be honest the club can afford it. They’re still paying Jack Wilshere for another year too, remember. Plus whatever they’re paying him is nothing compared to the financial boost of avoiding relegation (which is a possibility worth keeping Reid on the books for just in case – if they get relegated he’s be more likely to be of assistance in the Championship and also there’d probably be an automatic wage cut written into his contract in case of relegation).
And in an abstract way he can thank Sam Allardyce for all of it.
Speaking of Big Sam, if you were wondering if he had any beef about the matter, this is what he wrote in his autobiography in 2016 when he picked a starting XI of the best players he’d ever managed... and at centreback he not only picked Winston Reid but also his compatriot Ryan Nelsen. How nice of him. Ryan Nelsen also played a bit of a part in getting Reidy’s loan deal to Sporting KC over the line as well, just to wrap it all up in a neat little bundle.
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