Times change with all football clubs. Managers come and go, new coaches have their own pet players and those they don’t rate. West Ham saw it with Maxi Cornet (main pic), brought in by David Moyes and then discarded with hardly a run in the team, along with £30 million James Ward-Prowse dispatched after just one season: Lopetegui didn’t rate the set-piece expert and booted him out on loan unceremoniously on deadline day, to make way for his own ‘pick’ Carlos Soler.
The astonishing pace with which Luis Guilherme has been seemingly earmarked to be jettisoned epitomises the crazy tug of war at the heart of a club with a technical director, head coach and chairman all thinking they’re running transfer deals. The £20 million – plus that was chucked away in August on an 18 year old raised eyebrows at the time: Now in hindsight it looks mind-blowingly reckless. For a club of West Ham’s resources, the tying- up of such a large quantity of the club’s transfer budget on a ‘hunch’ is a significant failure.
This is not about apportioning blame. More than one person at the club would have been involved in signing off the purchase. Having made the decision to buy Guilherme, the club had no idea what to do with him. One u21 appearance, a few minutes as a substitute in lost cause matches: Guilherme could have been loaned out to get match sharp. Instead the poor guy has become the latest casualty of a split-personality club. Once dubbed as fast as Mbappe, West Ham could be sitting on the next, South American version of the French Superstar for all we know. Nobody seems to have bothered to find out.
As ex-Hammer Divin Mubama is just starting to find a pathway into first team football at Champions Manchester City, so Guilherme is likely to come back to haunt West Ham as we look back wistfully in five years when we see the giant he will probably become. I wouldn’t mind if he’d even had a couple of starts. Even Maxi Cornet got that before being jettisoned.
