Former West Ham assistant coach Jurcevic said in an exclusive interview that despite finishing the 2025-26 season with 39 points, the team still could not avoid relegation; to bounce back quickly in the Championship, the key is keeping core players such as Jarrod Bowen and Tomáš Souček, and addressing long-standing stability issues.
Final-Day Win Still Not Enough to Avoid Relegation: Survival Fight Lost from the Start
On the final day of the 2025-26 Premier League season, West Ham won 3-0 at London Stadium, while Tottenham Hotspur also took all three points with a 1-0 home win — both sides won on the final day, but the points gap had already been opened up earlier in the campaign. Jurcevic was blunt: what truly decided their fate was not the season finale, but their “disastrous form” in the first half of the season. The team fell into a huge points deficit early on, and even though their record from January through the end of the season would have been enough to support a mid-table finish, their relegation rivals kept picking up points at the same time, making it impossible to dig out of the hole no matter how strongly they finished.
Recent results on the platform back up that assessment. West Ham lost 1-0 at home in Round 36 and 1-3 away in Round 37; back-to-back rounds of dropped points sharply increased the relegation pressure, and the 3-0 win in Round 38 came too late. By contrast, Tottenham lost 2-1 away in Round 37 and only stabilized with a 1-0 win on the final day — with both teams kicking off on the same day under the same points pressure, West Ham’s “win and still go down” outcome shows precisely that second-half points efficiency could not make up for the deep hole dug in the first half.
Fixture Congestion and Stability: The Same Old Problems Remain
Jurčević served as an assistant under Slaven Bilić at West Ham from 2015 to 2017, giving him firsthand insight into the Hammers’ fitness cycles and swings in form. He recalls that the team also beat Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United and finished fifth that season, only to be dragged into a relegation battle the following campaign — “a lack of continuity” has long been West Ham’s unresolved problem: sustained high-level spells are hard to come by, and collapses in form always follow; this season is simply a rerun of the same script.
From a fixture-recovery perspective, first-half collapses often stack up — chaotic rotation during congested schedules, mounting injuries and wobbling confidence all feeding into one another. Jurčević has not gone through this season’s line-ups match by match, but the pattern he highlights aligns closely with Jesse-style fixture analysis: when a team burns through too much “margin for error” in the first half of the season, even if win rates improve and recovery windows shorten in the second half, overtaking rivals in the “parallel points race” among fellow relegation battlers remains difficult — every win you take, opponents may also grab all three points, so the points gap does not automatically shrink.
Personnel churn drives up rebuild costs
None of the players he worked with a decade ago remain at the club — hardly surprising, yet it reflects West Ham’s chronic high turnover: frequent managerial changes and constant patchwork in transfer windows mean a stable core never takes root. With Nuno Espírito Santo about to lead them into the Championship, further departures of key players would mean a triple adjustment of “new league + new tactics + new squad” next season, with an even denser schedule and tighter rotation options.
Bowen and Souček: symbols of a promotion push who cannot be allowed to leave
The 59-year-old Jurčević puts retention at the top of any rebound plan. He believes Bowen and Souček have “carried the team for years” and are symbols of this West Ham generation; if either leaves, the Championship promotion push loses its most reliable scoring outlet and midfield anchor. The club should open talks with both “as soon as possible” to steady the squad in the turmoil after relegation.
The Championship campaign runs long, with midweek fixtures a regular feature, and the fitness load on key players directly shapes how deep Nuno can rotate. Bowen as the main attacking spark and Soucek as the midfield shield are exactly the kind of “recovery anchors” a heavy schedule should not break up — with them in place, the coaching staff can manage minutes sensibly through a congested calendar instead of papering over cracks with emergency signings.
What to watch next: Nuno’s first Championship season
Nuno has confirmed he will take charge in the Championship. Jurčević accepts that this is a starting point for rebuilding, but warns that a rebound will not happen on its own: the first half of the season showed that points banked early matter more than a late surge. For supporters, the focus now should be on Bowen and Souček’s contract situations, and on how efficiently West Ham pick up points in the first 10 rounds once the Championship fixture list is released — that will say more about whether the Hammers can truly escape the promotion-relegation merry-go-round than a 3-0 win on the final day.
Professional view: West Ham’s problem was not a lack of fight on the last day, but giving away control of their survival fate in the first half of the season. If they can keep the core intact while improving stability at the start, the Championship is not an insurmountable gap. But if they repeat the cycle of digging a hole early and filling it in late, even an experienced manager like Nuno will struggle to stay ahead of the clock across a 48-game league season.
