Arnie is terminated

The departure of Marko Arnautović was officially announced via the medium of a deliciously petty and cold statement on the club’s website this morning and there will be few West Ham fans who are sad to see the back of him at this point.

There are two points worth considering about the circumstances surrounding this transfer:

1. The club’s failure to sell Arnautović at the right time has cost them a lot of money for very little gain
2. Replacing Arnautović won’t be especially difficult

The first point is fairly self-explanatory: instead of selling him in January when news of interest from China first cropped up, West Ham decided to hold onto Arnautović until the end of the season, going as far as giving him a new contract in order to keep him motivated. Although it’s unclear if a formal bid ever materialised, there was a reported offer in the region of €35–40 million for the forward in January and given that the reported fee for the official transfer is €25m, it seems that West Ham’s stubbornness has cost them between €10–15m.

That in itself is bad, but would have been tolerable if they’d benefited from Arnautović’s performances in the intervening period. That wasn’t the case at all, however, as he scored a grand total of 3 league goals after the end of January, all of which came in the last two games of the season against Southampton and Watford when there was nothing at stake.

(And that’s not to mention that acquiring the funds from this sale in January would’ve allowed them to trigger the release clause in Maxi Gómez’s contract, something the club have allegedly ended up doing anyway, before Valencia had secured Champions League qualification, which would’ve helped West Ham avoid a protracted transfer saga that threatens to leave them floundering without a main striker going into the new season).

Holding onto players for too long and missing out on the peak of their value is something the club has been guilty of in the recent past — the time to sell Dimitri Payet was after his sensational performances at Euro 2016, where the club probably could’ve demanded a fee double the ~£25m they eventually sold him back to Marseille for. This isn’t a case of hindsight being 20/20 either. It was perfectly predictable that these players would have an enormous dip in form and become disruptive if they wanted to move on.

Selling players is a skill and West Ham are terrible at it. Hopefully the club learns from this situation.

The second point is slightly controversial. Arnautović is undoubtedly a talented player (although it can be argued that his performances were awful at West Ham for longer than they were good across his two full seasons) and finding a like-for-like replacement who can match his best form and output is going to be difficult and expensive. That’s the approach that West Ham appear to be taking by placing all of their eggs in the Maxi Gómez basket, but I’m not sure it’s the most effective way of doing this.

Another way of looking at it is to think about how to replace the whole strikeforce in a broader sense. Over this summer, West Ham have sold or released Arnautović, Pérez, and Carroll, so the club presumably need to bring in at least two new forwards to fill out the squad. When the performances of the departed players are tallied together, it leaves a relatively low bar for any incoming striker(s) to clear.

Between them, Arnautović, Pérez, and Carroll put up 13 goals + 4 assists in the league last year in ~33 90s (2,918 mins). The reason for that low overall goal contribution is largely due to Pérez and Carroll being useless but turning one functional player and two hopeless ones into two average goalscorers would work just as well as signing one marquee name; get two 6 goals, 3 assist players in to split those minutes and you’ve surpassed their output.

A quick scan of Premier League players who did roughly similar to those numbers in limited minutes last season throws up names like Ryan Babel (5 Goals, 3 Assists, 1276 mins), Andre Schürrle (6G, 0A, 1670 mins), Bobby Reid (5G, 2A, 1414 mins), Shane Long (5G, 1A, 1262 mins), Xherdan Shaqiri (6G, 3A, 1048 mins) Andre Gray (7G, 2A, 1343 mins). (Schürrle is the only one to outperform their xG by significantly more than 1 goal among these.)

It doesn’t cost a fortune to get that level of productivity from forwards.

Obviously the club want to progress by improving on the attacking performances of last season but that would be easier and probably cheaper to achieve by spreading the cost among two players who can contribute across a whole season rather than being reliant on one superstar centre forward.

The money that would be saved by taking this approach, instead of spunking an enormous fee and wage packet on a marquee striker, would allow the club to utilise their budget on addressing other deficiencies within the squad, which arguably should be the focus anyway.