Eight West Ham moves for Graham Potter’s perfect January transfer window

Julen Lopetegui’s doomed-from-day-dot reign at West Ham has come to an end at least a month later than it should have done, and having been linked with pretty much every job going in the meantime, Graham Potter returns to the Premier League after 21 months in the wilderness to take the reins at The London Stadium.

The former Brighton and Chelsea boss has been told he will have some money to spend in January, though probably not an awful lot after Tim Steidten’s busy summer saw the Hammers end the window as the sixth-highest net spenders in Europe and because unlike Manchester City and even Manchester United, West Ham have an alarming lack of saleable assets to earn them a few quid.

With that in mind this list is skewed far more in favour of incomings, with five joining and three leaving in the ideal January transfer window for Potter.

Niclas Fullkrug out
We can’t help but feel let down. Having got our hopes up at being able to enjoy a Proper Old-Fashioned Centre-Forward in the Premier League – one with a tooth missing and everything – kicking defenders as much as the ball and having it launched to him as frequently as possible, he’s supposedly already wanting out.

West Ham are also apparently willing to see the back of Fullkrug despite spending £22m to bring him to the club just five months ago. It’s knee-jerk nonsense all round given he’s missed half of the season through injury and two goals and an assist in 368 minutes is actually a very good record in the forever damned position of West Ham striker.

Anyway, everyone seems to have made up their minds that it’s not going to work out, Juventus are interested, and as long as they stump up £15m or so then it makes sense to bring his brief, miserable time in east London to an end.

Edson Alvarez out
A couple of months after joining West Ham – having largely impressed under David Moyes – Alvarez claimed “I don’t feel the pressure of replacing Declan Rice”. And in fairness, that confidence and composure was replicated on the pitch. He wasn’t Declan Rice, but he was significantly more than a third of him, as his £35m transfer from Ajax would suggest.

But that confidence and composure now manifests as sloth and indifference, which have never been among the many accusations levelled at Declan Rice.

Upon hearing of Alvarez being linked with Milan in the wake of his particularly laboured performance in the 4-1 defeat to Manchester City, former West Ham midfielder Martin Allen quipped: “As the kit man or in the ticket office?”

Guido Rodriguez out
They bought him for nothing in the summer and we would advise West Ham to sell him now and secure a not insignificant PSR win because he’s been rubbish, is unlikely to improve to the point where he can be good enough in the Premier League, and at the age of 30 his value is only going in one direction.

Carney Chukwuemeka in
Potter’s reluctance to hand Chukwuemeka more game time was one of several oddities in his time as Chelsea manager. A much greater reluctance from Enzo Maresca provides some perspective, but the key difference is Chukwuemeka was denied opportunities under Potter despite looking quite a lot better than the alternatives playing ahead of him at the time.

That Chelsea snubbing has predictably been turned into spanner-in-the-works claims over West Ham’s proposed move for the Blues outcast, but if reports claiming the Hammers are after an “energetic and combative central midfielder” in January are true, Chukwuemeka undoubtedly fits that bill.

Most likely, Potter will arrive and decide that the players he has at his disposal aren’t as good at West Ham as they were at Chelsea and think – as everyone else does – that Chukwuemeka would walk into his midfield at The London Stadium.

Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall in
He probably should have seen the writing on the wall before moving to Chelsea to compete with Moises Caicedo, Enzo Fernandez and Romeo Lavia for a spot in midfield. In his defence, two of them had been the primary targets of the “billion-pound bottle jobs” jibe having been terrible for the vast majority of last season and Lavia barely played.

Dewsbury-Hall probably saw a way for him to start roughly half the time; he’s unfortunate that the midfield trio have all improved dramatically and have been among Maresca’s best players this season.

He’s impressed in the Conference League, albeit against vastly inferior opponents, and would be an excellent addition to most Premier League teams, with supposed interest from Arsenal, Manchester United and Tottenham illustrating what a coup this would be for West Ham.

And he wouldn’t be the only summer transfer on the move by January.

Ben Chilwell in
The While We’re Here signing while Steidten’s in negotiations over the other two Chelsea stars, but he may as well give it a go as the Blues bosses are likely amenable to any sort of offer in order to secure Chilwell’s exit with Maresca not giving the full-back the time of day let alone any opportunity to play a game of football, aside from 45 minutes against Barrow in the Carabao Cup.

At 28 he’s supposedly in his prime years and a prime Ben Chilwell is a Champions League winner. If he’s good enough for Manchester United he’s probably just about good enough for West Ham.

Evan Ferguson in
Unbelievably, he might have been better off moving to Manchester United. Since the Red Devils instead signed Rasmus Hojlund, Ferguson has scored seven goals at a rate of one every 299 minutes having previously found the net every 134 minutes.

He had still only scored 10 goals when the Red Devils supposedly ‘low-balled’ Brighton with a £50m offer, before the pre-Sir Jim Ratcliffe United policy of throwing money at problems reached stratospherically misguided levels a year ago when they were said to be considering a £100m bid.

Roberto De Zerbi and now Fabien Hurzeler have limited his game time to the point where more conspiratorial publications than ourselves might suggest Something’s Wrong, but apart from anything else we just want to see Ferguson play football, having been promised a generational talent that we’ve seen all too rarely in the two years since he made his Brighton debut.

It was Potter who gave him his chance in the first team and reportedly wants him to be his main man at West Ham. It makes a helluva lot of sense.

Adam Webster in
A club that’s signed three centre-backs for over £100m in the last two-and-half years and holds an option to sign a loanee centre-back for another £35m at the end of the season should not be conceding 39 goals in 20 Premier League games.

Hard to know how much of that is to do with Lopetegui, the system or the absence of any sort of protection from the midfield, but Potter has very little time to work that out before the window slams shut and would do well to land a reliable alternative to Max Kilman, Jean-Clair Todibo and Konstantinos Mavrapanos to ease concerns.

Webster’s been injured for much of the campaign but won’t hold out much hope of getting back into to the starting line-up at Brighton ahead of either Jan Paul van Hecke or Lewis Dunk having now returned to fitness; he was third choice even before his thigh issue.