West Brom: Presenter worried over current people working at the club

Chris Lepkowski has been speaking on The Liquidator podcast about how he’s concerned over the lack of footballing people working on the board at West Bromwich Albion.

It’s understandable why Lepkowski is worried by the lack of footballing people on or even advising the board or owners, because if there was, they may have urged them to sign some players over the summer without relying on loan signings and free agents in a season where they have been cut adrift of the automatic promotion spots.

West Brom directors currently at the club are Li Piyue,  Xu Ke and Mark Miles – with the latter being an operations director who only looks at the health and safety of fans and ensures matchdays run smoothly, so he would have no say in the footballing decisions being made.

However, when you look at chairman Piyue and chief executive Ke, they certainly will have roles to play, but their profiles on the club’s website do not state or highlight any previous experience working in football, which should be a concern.

Lepkowski highlighted how there is a severe lack of football knowledge on the board.

“The real problems at the club are the fact that we are a football club, football is our business, we do football, and yet we don’t seem to have the people involved at the top who do that – they’re not football people, and I’m very concerned about that.”

TIF Thoughts on West Brom’s setup…

Given that both the club’s chairman and chief executive were only appointed when Guochuan Lai became the majority owner of the club, that does signal that he may have been looking to hand his friends or business partners top roles at The Hawthorns, with Piyue previously working for the company that Lai set up.

It’s no surprise that people may be frustrated with West Brom at the minute as they’re in a poor run of form domestically, already sitting eight points off the automatic promotion spots and clearly have a lack of investment coming in from their owner given how little was spent over the summer, which does not bode well for the January transfer window as it could potentially be the Baggies’ last chance to turn their season around.

In other news: ‘I’ve got no doubt’ – Masi sheds light on what Ismael ‘wants’ in January at WBA