The View from Away – Transfers 2019

Hello fellow West Ham Supporters. As you may know, I reside in Denver CO. and only get over to the shores of England a few times a year. I get a chance to watch pretty much every match (when the streaming works….but that’s a discussion we can take up later) and join the Mile High Hammers in The Celtic on Market downtown as often as I can.

I touched base with Jeremiah and the Green Street Hammers awhile back about trying my hand at a few columns. If you see this on their website, then it appears that either I passed inspection, or someone forgot to proofread it before they accidentally posted it. I’m hoping to give some sense of how I see the story of West Ham from the foreign fan, looking at the play of the club, the business of the club, the experience of fandom in the US and Canada (sorry Mexican Hammers), and the madness of the day about the club we love and support. Today, I want to spend a little time talking about transfers this summer.

For a long time, West Ham has been a selling club. As a result, the “Academy of Football” became a feeder club for many other top-level clubs. It does not take much of a search to see the many names that started in our academy and ended up having great careers elsewhere.

One of the promises from the board was that the move to the London Stadium (“Her Majesty’s Eastern Palace”) was that we would step up to the next level. From my point of view, that statement told me that we are no longer going to sell our best players. The investment by the board last year seemed to finally back that up in their transfer dealings.

Here’s a look at the business done last year. This table represents only the major names we dealt with, and none of the academy signings.

So, in the previous season, I would agree with Dave Walker from The West Ham Way that the folks at the board level kept their word. They went out, got a very good manager, and then spent a lot of capital to bring in some very good players (NB: the final number is a bit of a guess. We know that there is no such thing as a FREE signing.

Agent fees would significantly increase that outflow of cash, but I had to pick some number, so I’ll try to be consistent in that format throughout this piece). At this time, West Ham spent £83,000,000 on bringing in together a more balanced lineup. There was a mix of youth and experience, and there were highly skilled players added to the line-up.

The frustration this year over the inconsistent effort remains, but overall, it is hard to argue that we have a more talented squad available to us for the next year. Speaking of next year, let’s look at our line up as it stands at the end of the year and what I see happening to the players on our roster in the table below (FYI, the Fee column is mostly generated from values listed on trasfermarkt).