Enner Valencia Nearing West Ham Exit
West Ham striker Enner Valencia appears to be edging closer to leaving the club in a deal that seems in both party’s interests, after comments from his agent confirmed European interest.
West Ham have made no secret of their attempts to bolster their goal scoring options after Ecuadorian striker Valencia had another mixed season, scoring a decent goal or two (his free kick against Bournemouth was special) but on the whole proving to be fairly wasteful in possession and the very opposite of clinical in attack.
“Lazio have shown a real interest and that’s an option that Enner is particularly keen on. Roma also like him, but only Lazio have made a move through their management. “
Having regularly claimed that he wanted to to be West Ham’s reliable goal scorer Valencia found the net only 4 times last season with a conversion rate of 16%. Add to that the fact he only scored in 2 games (2 v Bournemouth and 2 v Manchester City) and you start to see why Bilic believes he can’t rely on the Ecuadorian going forward.
According to Squawka Enner Valencia has been rated as the worst man of the match once in his 19 appearances last season, as well as picking up the worst attack award twice and worst possession award once in addition.
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On the same site you can see he has a worse goals per game record than Carroll, Lanzini and Antonio, who are in my opinion the three players you could justify dropping for Valencia in terms of position played. But not only that, he has a worse Key Pass per 90 minutes record than all of them as well as finishing last in the list in terms of successful take ons %. Quite simply Valencia offers nothing extra to the team and we have better players in all positions that he wants to play in. First Team football isn’t an option for him at West Ham.
According to various reports Roma and Lazio are the Italian clubs willing to take him off our hands, but I haven’t been able to unearth who wants him in Spain. He is probably more suited to Spain given the softer nature of the league and the lower physicality, but West Ham have made it clear they want to recoup the price they paid for him so I wouldn’t expect this to be a quickly resolved transfer issue.
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