Coming from his previous club, Tim Steidten had a reputation for producing the pearls – the undiscovered gems – with which Bayer Leverkusen went on to achieve so much success. At West Ham we all awaited the arrival of a plethora of young, exciting, undiscovered inexpensive gems about to set the world on fire. After Luis Guilherme, Steidten’s first signing – no more followed and worse still, at present we still have the oldest squad in the Premier League despite the £100m plus investment in August.
Recruits such as Niclas Fullkrug (31 and the less said about him just now the better) and Guido Rodriguez (30) seemed the opposite to everything we’d been promised in the so-called ‘Red Bull’ model of investment.
Each year the quaintly-named ‘Golden Boy’ awards are created in Italy to celebrate the 100 best under 21 year old footballers in Europe. Pearls if ever there were: Now we hear, frustratingly, six of the 100 who made the awards list were West Ham targets but none were signed by the club: And the young forward they did sign – Luis Guilherme – for in excess of £20 million didn’t even make the list and so far hasn’t made the starting line-up.
A Failure for Steidten?
Those six included Samuel Omorodion, Ibrahim Osman and Vitor Roque: All on the fringes of first team football at the moment but frankly, all young, fast and skilled strikers who we’d dream of having in our squad just now.
Steidten can’t be blamed for Osman who was ‘veto’d by Moyes. That doesn’t mean that we accept that the plan to recruit young talent should be thrown out of the window. With the January window just weeks away now West Ham have an urgent need for young, mobile talent to develop over the coming months. The plan was good, the execution needs some work.
Time for another dive for pearls, I think.
