West Ham Season Preview 19/20 Part 1: Transfers
With pre-season wrapped up and the first Premier League game of 19/20 a matter of hours away, now’s a good time to evaluate what West Ham have done over the summer and to prognosticate about the upcoming season.
Similarly to last year, a couple of glitzy signings have stirred the hype machine into life and caused pundits who should know much better to include West Ham among the pack of clubs, along with Leicester, Wolves, and Everton, who look well-placed to break into the top 6. Peel away the artifice and look closely for even minute and it’s easy to see why this idea is fanciful at best, farcical at worst.
Transfers
Out
The one thing that West Ham have undeniably done well this summer is trim an enormously bloated wage bill. Exactly how they’ve gone about this is much less praiseworthy.
West Ham did the best piece of transfer business of any Premier League club this season by releasing Andy Carroll on a free transfer. The bloke has deteriorated so much as a player over the course of his contract that he actively hinders the side any time he plays. Best of luck with him, Newcastle.
A close second in terms of good business is shipping off Lucas Peréz to Alavés. Although selling a player for 50% of what you bought him for after 12 months is never a good look, simply getting his £100k p/w wages off the books is a huge positive and worth taking the hit on the fee for.
Then there’s the Arnautović situation. I wrote about it more extensively here, but the condensed version is: it’s good to get back our money on a player who is about to start a massive athletic decline but the club cost themselves even more money by holding onto a clearly unhappy player for an extra 6 months for very little gain; Arnautović scored 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. All of this was entirely predictable but he’s gone now so a line can be drawn through it.
Getting rid of these three freed up a lot of money in terms of wages and eased a potential logjam in terms of squad structure: if all of our attackers from last season had been fit simultaneously (ha!) we’d have ended up with ~£500k p/w sitting on the bench/not even in the matchday squad every week. Between them, Arnautović, Pérez, and Carroll put up 13 goals + 4 assists in the league last year in ~33 90s (2,918 mins), so Haller and Fornals don’t have to do much to match the output of the forwards we lost in this window.
The €8mil fee for Pedro Obiang feels a little light, but he’s not someone I’m too cut up about losing. He was a wildly frustrating player to watch — he clearly had excellent vision as he spotted the right passes and runs and he regularly made the right decisions as he attempted to play those passes, but his execution was erratic and he’d fizz a crossfield ball out of play at least once a game.
My initial reaction to the sale of Edimilson Fernandes would largely the same as the Obiang one — a player who hasn’t shown much outside of glimpses who has been let go for slightly too cheap — but the fact that Mainz bought him gave me pause. There are certain clubs (Brentford, RB Leipzig) where you should probably reconsider selling a player if they’re interested in buying one of yours. Mainz are another one of those clubs. In this window, they’ve brought in Aarón Martín and Ronaël Pierre-Gabriel, a pair of exceptionally talented cheap young FBs, and in the last few years they’ve picked out Jean-Philippes Mateta and Gbamin, Moussa Niakhaté, and Abdou Diallo. These guys have a superb eye for talent and have got very few of their recent transfers wrong. Letting Fernandes go could prove to be a blunder by West Ham.
I’m extremely sad to see the back of Adrián. He was a player it was easy to feel affection for and he was treated quite poorly by the club with the Joe Hart situation, but had little hope of dislodging Fabianski as number one here. He remains an excellent goalkeeper though and has fallen on his feet by taking the back-up slot at Liverpool, where he seems like a good fit as a kind of Diet version of Alisson.
I’m much less sad to see the back of Samir Nasri. A couple of bright moments here and there but his time with West Ham was characterised by a lack of availability. Much like the Patrice Evra free transfer signing the year before, this was a complete waste of time for everyone involved, even if it was only ever meant to be a temporary plaster for a creaking squad. Hopefully the club have learnt their lesson in regards to these types of short-term signings.
Where West Ham have really let themselves down though is in the departures of Sam Byram, Marcus Browne, and Reece Oxford.
The Byram one is more understandable as his growth as a player has been severely hindered by a succession of injuries, making it difficult to portray him as a player with a proven track record at Premier League level. Even so, a versatile player who can cover both full-back positions for Norwich is worth a gamble for £750k.
The fee for Browne has been reported as anywhere between £200k-£500k and wherever it may fall within that range, it’s far too cheap for a player with his skillset. With that said, it difficult to command too much of a fee for a player who will be 22 in December and yet has less than 50 senior appearances at any level to his name. Browne was good without being spectacular in League One last season but had his development been handled better, if he’d been put in environments where he could gain the right kind of experience, he could and should have gone for more given that Karlan Grant and Tom Bayliss have both been sold for £2mil+ (and Krystian Bielik has just gone for £10mil!) in the last couple of transfer windows after strong performances in League One.
The Oxford one is the worst of the lot. Although he has allegedly been on £20k p/w so it’s good to clear that off if the club has no intention of using him, the fact that the club were willing to let him go for a paltry £2m is a testament to just how disastrously Oxford’s development has been handled by all parties.
For context, Brighton have just paid double that for Matt Clarke from Portsmouth. Clarke’s a couple of years older and therefore further along in his development than Oxford, with nearly 200 senior football league appearances under his belt, predominantly in League One and League Two. Oxford, meanwhile, has 15 Bundesliga appearances across two different half-season loan spells and a similar amount of Premier League apps to his name (albeit mostly as a sub).
While that is bad, there are better examples of what West Ham could have sold Oxford for if they’d managed him a bit better. Chris Mepham, Ezri Konsa and Reece Oxford are virtually identical players in terms of style, profile, and quality. Two have been sold by Brentford for ~£15m in the last 6 months and the other sold for peanuts. Oxford’s stunted development has been at West Ham has been a shambles and has cost the club a small fortune.
Hugill’s loan to QPR should act as a cautionary tale for clubs who chuck around big wages just because they can. West Ham paid way over the odds for Hugill and gave him a big, fat, long contract way beyond his worth. Now they’ve decided they have no use for him, they can’t offload him because Hugill, quite rightly, is unwilling to take an enormous pay cut to leave because he’s contractually obligated to another 3 years of inflated wages. The only hope for the club is that he has such a good season that demand for him is driven up and the offers he gets are more aligned with what he’s receiving, at least enough for him to consider leaving permanently. A goal on opening weekend against Stoke is a good start, but I’m not holding my breath.
In
There’s not an awful lot to say about the two back-up goalkeepers, really. David Martin is purely there to put out the cones for training, and Roberto seems competent enough with the ball at his feet, but ultimately feels like a worse version of Adi. There are some question marks to be had about our recruitment when we’re signing the sons of former players and players who have previously worked with Mario Husillos.
Gonçalo Cardoso is a bit of an enigma but a left-footed CB who can cover at LB and has 15 Liga NOS appearances at the age of 18 feels like a sensible sort of punt to take for the reported £3m fee. Signing him at this age also means that he’ll count as an association-trained player if he stays at the club until he’s at least 21. It seems increasingly clear though that West Ham have a friendly agent in Portugal offering them these young players. That’s Xande Silva, Mésaque Djú, and now Gonçalo Cardoso all in the last 12 months.
Albian Ajeti is someone who I knew by name but I can’t profess to have seen any of the Swiss Super League, so I didn’t really have a firm idea of what he’s like as a player. The always flawless, never misleading YouTube scouting process gave the impression of a player who:
- is strong and scores lots of headers despite a relatively small stature
- has no real pace but makes intelligent runs off the shoulder of last defender
- is technically good, strikes ball cleanly off both feet and spins quickly
- loves a dinked finish from wider angles
It’s impossible to tell what a player’s link-up play is like from these highlight videos, so I don’t know how well this comparison will hold up, but he reminds of Neal Maupay in his style of play. Considering we’ve paid approximately a third of what Brighton did for Maupay, this feels like a good value deal.
Signing another forward should have been low-priority but it’s sensible to lock down a 22 year old striker with decent European pedigree (for roughly the same fee as we paid Hugill!) considering Javier Hernández’s contract expires next season. Ajeti has room to grow and seems like he’ll complement the existing attacking options well.
There’s much more to shout about with the other two permanent signings though.
For one, they both fit the age profile we should be targeting to reduce the average age of a bloated squad, while also being players with room to grow and increase in resale value.
Haller is someone I picked out in January when looking for Arnautović, although he cost twice the amount I suggested he might (aided, in part, by Eintracht’s strengthened financial position following the sale of Luka Jović to Real Madrid). There are still some question marks about how he’ll adapt to a less direct style of football with fewer pacey runners around him, but he has all the physical and technical attributes to be a success at West Ham and our best moments in pre-season have come when he’s drifted wide and brought others into play. £45mil feels like it’s on the expensive side of things, but he has the potential to have a transformative effect of the team as an attacking force, so it’s easy to stomach a bit of an overpay.
With great agility, a light touch, nimble footwork, and impressive passing range/variety — allied with a deceptively big frame — the early signs from Pablo Fornals look like he could be a bargain at €25mil. He’s looked bright and been productive in the handful of friendlies he’s played and demonstrated a positional versatility that should help Pellegrini implement the sort of fluidity he’s aiming to achieve in his team this season. While he’s less active in direct interaction with the ball defensively, Fornals seems to have the awareness and positional sense to know how to press intelligently and cut off easy passing options for opposition defenders with his body shape.
Despite these two signings looking superb in a vacuum, it’s difficult not to ask…why?
I don’t know how anyone who watched West Ham play last season could come away from what they saw thinking that the best way to improve that team was to buy two centre forwards and another creative midfielder.
It’s a bit like buying a new TV for your living room while your house is burning down around you.
