WHZ Top 3s: West Ham’s weirdest Premier League transfers
Welcome to West Ham Zone’s Top 3s series, where we will take look through Hammers history and decide which people or events rank highest with topics as varied as players, managers and goals…
West Ham don’t have an outstanding record when it comes to signing players, it would be fair to say that there have been more misses than hits in the Premier League era.
For every Dimitri Payet, there is a Nene, for every Michail Antonio, an Abdul Razak. The list really is endless.
We’ve attempted to rank the top three weirdest signings West Ham have made in recent memory and to be clear, these aren’t signings that have been weird but successful, these are downright failures.
This list could cause some controversy as there are so many candidates for the ‘weirdest’ transfer of the last few years but we’ve tried to take into account the terms of their transfer and the legacy they left behind at either Upton Park or the London Stadium.
Some of these players arrived with big reputations and utterly failed, while another was an understated arrival who left after falling out with the manager after just six months at the club.
Here are West Ham Zone’s weirdest Hammers transfers.
3.) Samir Nasri
Former Manchester City midfielder Samir Nasri started training with West Ham while he waited for a doping ban to expire. Great start. Nasri was banned by UEFA for 18 months after taking an intravenous drip of 500 millilitres of water containing nutrients. Manuel Pellegrini clearly saw this as a good thing and offered Nasri a six-month contract. The Frenchman made six appearances in total and demanded £100,000 wages to sign permanently. It was never going to end well was it?
2.) Razvan Rat
May 2013 saw the arrival of Romanian left-back Razvan Rat who signed on a one-year deal. However, after just six months at Upton Park, Rat had his contract terminated after reportedly falling out with Sam Allardyce. It’s unclear what the falling out was over, but Hammers fans weren’t sorry to see the back of the Romanian who managed to thoroughly underwhelm in his 20 competitive appearances for West Ham. We think it is particularly unusual that Allardyce demanded that Rat’s contract was terminated despite it only having months to run and he didn’t really need to spend that extra money to get rid of him. It must have been some falling out…
1.) Simone Zaza
Where to begin with Simone Zaza. Initially loaned from Juventus for 5 million Euros with an obligation to buy for 20 million euros after a certain number of appearances. After not scoring in 11 appearances for the Hammers Slaven Bilic ended up purposely not picking the Italian striker so the Hammers didn’t trigger the obligation to buy clause. He returned to Juve in January of 2017 with his one highlight being an attempted shot at Old Trafford that went out for a throw-in. What a waste.
In other West Ham news, many Hammers fans have reacted to Sebastien Haller’s performance against Fulham.