West Ham Squad Depth, Wages & January 2019 Transfer Window

As the season edges past the halfway point and transfer rumours start to kick into gear, now’s a good time to check in with where we’re at and evaluate what’s possible in the transfer window.

Despite a poor result and even poorer performance yesterday against Burnley, we’ve undeniably made a lot of progress under Manuel Pellegrini — West Ham are 9 points better off than we were at this stage last season and Pellegrini’s points per game (1.35) is considerably better than both of Bilic’s last two seasons (1.18ppg in 2016/17 and 0.82 ppg at the start of 17/18) and David Moyes’ tenure (1.22 ppg in 27 games).

The Chilean has been a definite upgrade but you can make a case that he’s achieving what he is almost in spite of the squad he has at his disposal.

Finances

West Ham released their most recent set of financial results, covering the 2017/18 Premier League season, just before Christmas. Those results are analysed in more depth here, but the key points are:

• Matchday income, broadcast income, and commercial income all down compared to the previous year.
• Despite that drop, West Ham are among the best of the rest when it comes to matchday and commercial income. However, that is still roughly half of the amount Spurs, the least wealthy of the top 6, draw in.
• The club went from a profit of £11.4m to a loss of £6.3m year-on-year.
• The decrease in total income meant the club dropped to 10th in the Premier League standings on that front, with West Ham’s £176m roughly half of 6th place Tottenham’s £306m.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that in 17/18, even though West Ham’s wage bill increased by over 12% from the previous year, we fell behind a number of other clubs in this regard and ranked as the club with the 11th highest annual wage bill:

Given our flurry of transfer activity this summer, it’s difficult to imagine that will still be the case after the next set of results are published. Over the summer we brought in 9 players on first team-level wages and the only high-earning players to leave were Cheikhou Kouyaté (Palace) and Joe Hart (end of loan). Add in the fact that Pellegrini himself is reportedly on an enormous wage, the introduction of a senior infrastructure role that didn’t previously exist at the club (Mario Husillos), a huge wage bump for Declan Rice and contract extension for Noble, and we’re looking at a big jump in salary expenditure for next season.

The £5m gap to Palace and Southampton is roughly the equivalent of paying someone £96k p/w, while the £6m gap to Leicester is ~£115k p/w. If you compare the transfer business that the clubs above us conducted this summer, — Crystal Palace (Kouyaté, Meyer, Guiata, Ayew in; Cabaye, Delaney out), Southampton (Gunn, Vestergaard, Elyounoussi, Ings, Armstrong in; Tadic, Gardos out), Leicester (Maddison, Söyüncü, Pereira, Benkovic, Ward, Ghezzal, Evans in; Mahrez, Musa out) — it seems quite plausible that we’ve increased our wage bill to the point where we’ve surpassed those three teams to be the 8th highest spenders on wages.

Spurs obviously didn’t bring anyone in during the summer, but all of their big players other than Christian Eriksen have signed new contracts recently, whereas Everton, although they binned off Rooney and Allardyce and have shipped off a load of players on loan, are definitely paying the likes of Mina, Richarlison, Digne, Gomes, Bernard etc an absolute fortune, so those two clubs are probably still spending significantly more than us.

Looking at all that, it seems like bridging the gap to the top 6 clubs is virtually impossible. The only ways to be financially competitive with the teams at the top end of the league are to increase matchday income by jacking up ticket prices (not going to happen because people would stop going), somehow find some massively lucrative sponsorship deals (again, not going to happen because we can’t offer regular Champions League exposure or offer an in to lucrative markets overseas — we can’t even sell the naming rights to the ground because no-one wants them) or for the club to be bought out by someone who pumps a load of outside investment in (we can all dream).

Wage spend is generally regarded as one of the better predictors of on-field performances so, based on my estimates, we should probably expect to be the 8th best team in the league, although there’s probably not much in it between there and 11th or so. But if you actually look at how we’re spending our wages, it’s clear that there’s an incredible amount of waste going on right now. We could go a long way towards closing the gap on the elite not by spending more money, but by allocating the money we’re currently spending more efficiently.

Squad & Wages

The last two games have highlighted just how poorly constructed our squad is at the minute. Despite bringing in a net total of 7 senior players this summer and having one of the largest squads in the league, Manuel Pellegrini could only name 6 substitutes for the game against Southampton, while 3 of the players who started on the bench against Burnley were academy players who have barely played any Premier League football.

From the outside you never know for sure how much players are earning as there are all sorts of clauses and bonuses that aren’t publicised, but based on what’s been reported, common knowledge, rough estimates etc, I think it’s fair to claim that between Wilshere/Hernández/Lanzini/Yarmolenko/Fredericks/Sánchez/Zabaleta/Reid/Balbuena we probably had about £750k p/w not in the matchday squad against Burnley.

That’s not including Reece Oxford, who supposedly earns a decent wedge and yet is so out of favour that we’d rather name 6 subs than include him, or the three senior players we have out on loan (Hugill, Fernandes, Byram). It’s seems likely that those four represent another £100k+ p/w, although presumably (hopefully?) the clubs they’ve been loaned out to are picking up a heavy slice of their wages. According to those rough guesses, between those 13 players who were unavailable for selection on Sunday West Ham are spending ~£44m a year, which is probably somewhere between 30–40% of their total annual wage bill. There’s no point in spending that money if you can’t actually get it onto the pitch.

It’s easy to point out that we’ve been unfortunate with injuries and there is some merit to that argument. The Lanzini one was genuinely unlucky — a freak accident that happened on international duty that was totally out of our control. We just have to hope that he’s not been properly Dean Ashton-ed. Fredericks’ injury seems like a run of the mill issue. Zabaleta was ill which is entirely fair at this time of year, whereas Balbuena’s injury just looked like an unfortunate landing, and I don’t know enough about his injury history to know whether it’s a recurring thing or not.

For the rest, it’s more difficult to argue that we’ve been unlucky. At first blush, the Yarmolenko injury seems a bit of a freak occurrence like the Lanzini one, but it’s significant to note that he didn’t play for Dortmund between the end of January and the end of April last year because he injured his Achilles. I don’t know whether it’s the same one but it’s an injury we should have been aware of/ prepared for. Similarly, the Carlos Sánchez knee injury is a bit unlucky but it’s the risk you run when you buy older players who have a lot of miles on the clock. Same sort of thing applies to Hernández who has struggled with various muscle strains for the entire time he’s been with us.

As for Winston Reid, no-one can really claim to be shocked that the injury he picked up over the summer has prevented him from playing a single first team minute so far this season — he’s missed 10+ games through injury for us every season for the last 5 seasons. Tying him down to that 6-year contract is the one of the stupidest things we’ve done recently. It’s barely worth wasting breath on Jack Wilshere. Anyone who actually watched him play last season knew from the outset that signing him on any basis was a bad move but signing him on a first team level contract was especially bad because A) he’s a shadow of the player he was once so his performances were never going to justify the outlay and B) he’s never going to be available often enough to contribute as more than a rotational player.

When you sign (or extend the contracts of) players who are on an athletic decline and who have lengthy injury histories, you can’t really claim misfortune when they’re unavailable.

Transfers

(This is all currently correct, but squad registration rules might change depending on the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union)

Premier League clubs can register a squad of up-to 25 players and only those players who are registered are eligible to play first team Premier League fixtures. Players under the age of 21 (for this season that’s defined as born on or after 1st January 1997) do not have to be registered as part of the squad and are free to play first team games.

As part of what the Premier League call the “Homegrown Protocol”, Premier League clubs are restricted to registering a maximum of 17 non-association trained players in their 25-man squad. “Association-trained” players are players who were on the books at an English FA-affiliated club for at least 3 years before the age of 21. For example, Kasper Schmeichel, Cesc Fabregas, and Victor Moses are all association-trained players despite playing their international football for Denmark, Spain, and Nigeria, whereas Eric Dier doesn’t count as an association-trained player because he came through the youth ranks at Sporting in Portugal. If clubs want to register the maximum number of players possible, they need to have 8 homegrown players.

West Ham have a massive squad. We previously had 23 registered players in our official Premier League squad. 7 of those are association-trained. One of those 7 is Moses Makasi, who is 23 and has never played a senior game for West Ham.

The signing Samir Nasri takes us to 24 registered players in total and maxes out our allocation of non-homegrown players for the squad. That leaves us with room to bring in one more assocation-trained player over the age of 21 during this window. Therefore, if we want to bring in another non-homegrown player during January, we can only sign them if:

• they’re under-21 and therefore don’t need to be registered
• one of our current non-association trained players leaves
• we unregister one of the players currently taking up a non-association trained slot.

Option 3 could work for a loanee if, for instance, we decide that Yarmolenko or Sánchez’s injuries are so severe that they’re not going to play for the rest of the season, but it would give us a bit of a problem next year if the incoming player is a permanent signing.

We’re going to have a bit of a problem next year anyway. Issa Diop counted as an under-21 player this year but he’ll need to be registered next season, so that means there’s at least one non-homegrown slot that needs to be freed up. The same applies to Xande Silva, who will need to be registered if we want him available for Premier League games in the 2019/20 season.

On top of that, we’ll have 6 players returning from loan — Hugill, Fernandes, Byram, Cullen, Martínez, Browne — who would all need to be registered if we want them to be part of the first team squad next season. Including Nasri, that’ll leave us with 32 senior pros on the books. We need to cull 7 of those before we can even begin to think about making any signings in the summer transfer window, and we’ll have to pay special attention to the number of homegrown players we have because we’re not exactly swimming in them.

Squad Structure

Putting the future to the side for a moment, there are some questions that need to be asked about the structure and makeup of our current squad.

Having lots of players isn’t necessarily an issue as having strength in depth is generally speaking a good thing. It does become a problem though when your wage structure is quite “flat”, when you have lots of players who play at a similar level being paid virtually the same.

It’s easier to explain this by relating it to West Ham’s specific situation. Pellegrini seems pretty intent on playing his 4–4–2 system which means that there are 4 attacking starting roles and, at an absolute maximum, a further 4 attacking roles on the bench. In the wildly unlikely scenario that we had every single senior player available to use, we’d have Yarmolenko, Anderson, Arnautović, Hernández, Lanzini, Nasri, Snodgrass, Carroll, Pérez, Antonio as attacking options. That’s 10 players for a max of 8 slots, so 2 of them aren’t even going to make it onto the bench. You can only bring 3 of the 4 off the bench, so one of them isn’t even going to get onto the pitch on any given week despite being in the squad. Even if you omit the three cheapest players (Snodgrass, Antonio, and Nasri) that’s easily £150k+ p/w sitting totally idle. That’s not even considering that it leaves no space for Grady Diangana, who has arguably been more impactful this year than several of those other players.

If you have 4 attacking players on the bench and a back-up GK, then that only leaves room for one defender (one of whichever pair of full-backs aren’t playing vs Ogbonna or Reid) and one central midfielder (one of Obiang, Wilshere, or Sánchez). With that sort of set up, you’re probably excluding somewhere in the region of another £200k p/w from the matchday squad entirely. More likely is that one of the attackers gets dropped in favour of the security of an extra defender, in which case the amount of weekly wage not even getting onto the bench skyrockets to somewhere near £400k p/w.

Maybe it’s good to have that safety net of capable players who can fill in when injury crisis strikes but it seems like a massive waste of time and a poor allocation of resources. If you’re intent on having two players per position, I think it’s better to have a £70k p/w player backed up by a £30k p/w player than it is to have two £50k p/w players who are similarly talented.

The biggest issue in the current structure is that we pay our rotation players starter’s wages and we don’t get that level of production out of them. Being totally honest, we don’t need 4 strikers who are all earning £100k p/w. It would be fine if they were sufficiently different and could slot in and out in different scenarios to provide different threats, but that’s not the case. We’d be so much better off it we consolidated that money into two exceptional forwards and two development projects or into three really solid contributors and someone who could fill in as a last resort. The same applies to the central defenders — get rid of one of Ogbonna or Reid and replace them with someone up-and-coming who can develop into the 3rd choice player in the future or displace one of the starters.

The full-back situation has been a mess for a long time and it still needs sorting. The right side isn’t too bad as Zabaleta isn’t going to be around for too much longer and he’s clearly respected at the club for his contributions beyond 90 mins on a Saturday. We’ve not really seen what Fredericks is capable of yet so it’ll be curious to see whether he’s given the starting role or not when the time comes.

The left side is a shitshow though — we keep chopping and changing between Cresswell and Masuaku and, despite paying them both like they’re starters, neither are really suitable for what Pellegrini wants them to do. We’d be much better off getting them both off the books, signing someone who fits exactly what the manager requires of his LB and then adding a young prospect who can develop into that type of player further down the line. That process hinges the club’s ability to identify and acquire the right talent, which has admittedly been unconvincing in recent seasons, but it would be nice to see them move towards that sort of strategy.

The issues with the squad composition are made clearer in Experimental361’s squad age profile graphics. West Ham’s starting line-ups this season have had the 4th highest average age in the competition, a figure that is perhaps a bit misleading as it’s dragged down considerably by Declan Rice’s near omnipresence. A closer look at the distribution illustrates the main problem with the squad: a big chunk of first team minutes going to players aged 30+ and virtually none to players in the 21–25 age bracket. Felipe Anderson, Arthur Masuaku, and Issa Diop are the only players in that range to get a considerable amount of starts and Masuaku/Anderson are both at the upper end of that spectrum.

That’s what West Ham should be focusing on.

Anyone we sign in January isn’t realistically going to make a significant difference to our overall league position. It would be better for Pellegrini to use the rest of this season to assess what he’s got, decide who he wants to keep going forward and who he wants to get shot of come the summer. The club can then trim off the expensive, 30+ year olds who wouldn’t get into the squad if everyone was fit and bring in players in that 21–25 with lower wage demands who can provide cover when needed and eventually develop into starters. When the squad is a bit leaner, we can then operate with a one-in, one-out policy with the current starters and use the wages freed up from the deadwood fringe players to offer more attractive terms to big name players who can be difference makers.

Pellegrini is only a few months into his tenure and no-one expected him to sort everything out within one transfer window but there is certainly a lot of work to do still. Despite a rocky start, he’s laid some strong foundations for the club to build on for the coming seasons; the gap to the top 6 is still enormous and he needs some help on the recruitment front to help bridge it.

With a bit of judicious selling, West Ham could take a massive leap forward if they restructured their squad in such a way that meant that the majority of their wage expenditure was consolidated into a core of starters rather than spread thinly across uninspiring rotation options. A bit of efficiency would go a long way with this squad and ensuring that they’re getting more money onto the pitch than they’re leaving on the bench and in the stands is going to be pivotal if West Ham want to actually fulfil their ambitions.