Report – West Ham keen to offload rarely seen £70,000-a-week ace in summer
West Ham have put veteran defender Winston Reid in the shop window as they look to offload him permanently, according to Football Insider.
The New Zealand international is currently on loan at MLS outfit Sporting Kansas, and will remain there until the end of the season.
But it is understood that the Hammers are willing to sell the 31-year-old, who hasn’t played a competitive fixture for the club since March 2018.
The report states that the Irons are keen to remove the player’s £70,000-a-week salary from their wage bill, and feel that his recent history of injuries means that he has little chance of recapturing his best form in east London.
Would this be the right move from the Hammers?
You can certainly understand the thinking behind it, yes.
Nobody can deny the work that Reid has done for the Hammers down the years, and there was a time when he was probably the first name on the team sheet.
Between 2012 and 2017 his average match rating never dropped beneath 7.00, as per Whoscored, and that level of consistency in a centre-back cannot be underestimated.
Certainly, you could probably argue that the Irons have struggled to find anybody to fill the void he left after he picked up that horrendous knee injury two years ago.
Issa Diop, for instance, maxed out at an average match rating of 6.89 last term, as per Whoscored.
But Reid is not getting any younger, and that dreadful injury has no doubt taken its toll.
£70,000-a-week is a lot of money for a player who might never reach the peak of his powers again, and as sad as it may be, the pragmatic thing to do is to cut him loose, for both his sake and the club’s.
In other West Ham news, Neil Warnock claims Irons must keep ‘super’ Hammer fit to beat drop.