David Sullivan, West Ham United’s co-owner and newspaper magnate, has apparently confused the transfer market with the newsroom. According to multiple women, Sullivan believed his wealth granted him a novel negotiating tactic: sex in exchange for newspaper features. It’s the kind of strategy that might work in a particularly grim fantasy novel, but in 2026, it turns out, even billionaires can’t simply add “column inches” to their shopping list.
The absurdity here is almost too perfect. In football, Sullivan knows the rules. You want a striker? You pay the fee, negotiate wages, maybe throw in a signing bonus. There’s structure. There’s precedent. There’s an entire industry built around understanding exactly how much a 28-year-old midfielder costs. But newspapers? Apparently he thought those operated on a barter system nobody else knew about.
What makes this genuinely farcical isn’t just the delusion—it’s that Sullivan actually believed power worked that way. In the theatre of modern sport, billionaires get away with an astonishing amount. They dodge taxes, they dodge accountability, they dodge basic human decency. But they usually do it quietly, through lawyers and shell companies and the kind of structural corruption that’s almost boring in its predictability.
Sullivan instead went full amateur. He didn’t hire a fixer or build a system. He just… asked. As if the rules that govern everyone else simply didn’t apply to him. As if a woman’s career could be traded like a player in January.
Turns out even in 2026, you still can’t.