West Ham Should Look Stateside For Talent In This Transfer Window

The Irons can’t compete with the big boys so we should shop in a different place

- Greg Richardson

There is a scene in Friends where Ross is looking for a date. He makes his way around the coffee shop, approaching different women attempting to chat them up.

You see him get rebuffed a few times and then the scene ends. The other characters’ stories are moved along and we return to Ross.

He is still in the coffee shop and is trying to flirt with another lady. Only he has already spoken to this one. And like everyone else in the coffee shop, turned off by his evident desperation, she has already rejected him.

I bring this up, not because I am a great fan of the show but because there are parallels between Ross in this scene and our transfer policy. And I mean beyond the fact that they are both a joke.

We, like Ross, keep fishing in the same pond despite regularly coming up with nothing.

Each window we publicly declare that we have ‘x’ budget or are prepared to pay ‘y’ wages for a top player.

We then go around a multitude of Europe’s top clubs attempting to woo them into selling their players.

More often than not we are aiming at talent way out of our league. We are rejected and publicly too.

So we go around again, this time aiming a tier lower in terms of players. Our desperation is obvious and the selling club or the player’s agent can play hard ball.

We then either end up paying more than we should or we give up and drop down a level again.