Antonio accuses West Ham of offering £5,000-a-week deal and banning him from training after car crash

Michail Antonio has spoken candidly about feeling cast aside by West Ham in the months after his serious car accident in December 2024, detailing a bitter falling-out with then-manager Graham Potter and a contract offer he describes as insulting.

The 36-year-old striker, who made more than 300 appearances for the Hammers across a decade in east London, was in the final months of his contract when the crash left him with a severe leg break. What followed, he says, was a complete breakdown in his relationship with the club.

Antonio says former West Ham chairman Karren Brady was the first to signal the club’s intentions. “Karren Brady told me that she’d offer me a £5,000-a-week contract, but with the under-21s, not the first team,” Antonio said. “I said, ‘How can you offer £5,000 a week and tell me to play for the under-21s, when the under-21s are on more than that and I’ve been at this club for 10 years?’ Her response was, ‘Well, they haven’t been in a car crash and shattered their leg.’ I was like, ‘Oof, OK…’ I didn’t sign the contract.”

Potter, who had replaced Julen Lopetegui during Antonio’s recovery, then attempted to stop him attending the training ground after Antonio made comments on a television appearance about how clubs treat players once they are no longer needed. “Graham Potter tried to stop me coming to the training ground for the rest of my contract because I made a comment during something I did with TNT, the same comment that I’d been making for years, about how clubs treat players like meat,” Antonio said.

“He said, ‘I think it’s best that you don’t come back in here.’ I told him, ‘Well I will be, because you guys have a duty of care to me and I know I’m allowed to be here, so I’ll see you tomorrow.’ It was an argument and, from that day, we never even said hello to each other, and never spoke again.”

Antonio also pushed back on any suggestion that Potter saw him as a disruptive presence, arguing the manager had never had the chance to properly know him. “He just had a problem with me — he came in after my car crash and during that period I wasn’t really in the club. I was doing rehab in Dubai or Manchester, I might have been at the club maybe once a month for a week, so he never got to know me.”

He added that former teammates had reached out to him after he left without a new club, telling him his presence had been missed in the dressing room — a detail he feels underlines the contradiction in Potter’s handling of the situation. “Graham Potter got rid of all the leaders at West Ham, then complained about it. How does that make any sense?”