West Ham United had an incredibly lucky escape by missing out on one player in particular in the summer transfer window is seems.
David Moyes made some truly terrific signings for West Ham in the summer, with Edson Alvarez, James Ward-Prowse, Konstantinos Mavropanos and Mohammed Kudus all arriving at the London Stadium.
However, the Hammers did miss out on one player in particular – Carlos Borges, although it later turned out that Moyes didn’t even want to sign the 19-year-old.
He ended up joining Ajax instead in August for around £17 million (BBC), and many West Ham fans were fuming that we had missed out on the fleet-footed attacker.
Had we signed Borges in the summer window, things would have been very different indeed…in a bad way for us.
Let’s thank our lucky stars that the young Portuguese forward joined Ajax instead of us, for whatever reason…
In fairness to the youngster, he is absolutely electric, but he’s clearly still very raw indeed with just two goals and three assists to his name in 23 games for the Dutch giants so far (Transfermarkt).
It’s worth remembering how much of a jump up in quality and intensity the Premier League is to the Eredivisie as well.
I’m not saying for one minute that he won’t go on to become a top player in a few year’s time, but he definitely wouldn’t have been the player we needed for the here and now.
The thing is, it’s a double edged sword. Not only has the 19-year-old been really poor at Ajax, but had Moyes brought him to the London Stadium, we wouldn’t have signed Kudus.
The Ghanaian has proven to be an unbelievable signing for us. Ajax must be wishing that they’d kept the 23-year-old, and avoided a move for Borges at the same time.
The Eredivisie giants are currently sitting in fifth spot in the table – a disastrous season for them given their domestic pedigree.
In my opinion, West Ham had a really lucky escape by not signing Carlos Borges in the summer. Only time will tell as to whether I’m correct in making that assumption though.
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