West Ham‘s striker curse is very, very real. Four years ago the Daily Mail published a piece that listed the 50 forwards West Ham had signed since David Gold and David Sullivan bought the club in 2010.
The list was designed to deliver both maximum impact on the club’s failure to sign a proper goalscorer for so many years, but also to mislead its readers.
The list includes youth players who joined up with the Development Squad and never played for the first team – Sean Maguire, Jaanai Gordon, Luka Belic, Mesaque Dju and Toni Martinez all feature – and players who simply weren’t signed as ‘strikers.’ The piece tries to get around that by calling them all ‘forwards’ but only real West Ham fans know this is a STRIKER curse, not a FORWARD curse.
Those on the list who really shouldn’t be there include Pablo Barrera, Sofiane Feghouli, Andriy Yarmolenko and Nikola Vlasic. Enner Valencia, Jarrod Bowen, Marko Arnaoutovic and Mauro Zarate are also questionably included.
While the list is mostly inaccurate and was likely written by an intern who has absolutely zero knowledge of the club or most of the players on the list, it does still show how bad West Ham have been at signing strikers who can not only score goals but also stay fit.
Since that article was published, Gianluca Scamacca, Danny Ings Niclas Fullkrug and Evan Ferguson can be added to the list. The author of the piece might also want to incorrectly and disingenuously include Mohammed Kudus, Luis Guilherme and Maxwel Cornet, too, but I digress.
So the club’s search continues into yet another summer transfer window, when said search cannot be more desperate for a long-awaited happy ending.
Michail Antonio now looks very unlikely to sign a new contracrt, which means he will officially leave the club this week. He will leave as the club’s all-time record Premier League goalscorer but is departure will also leave a very huge hole in Graham Potter‘s attack.
That’s because Potter is now left with just Fullkrug as his only actual striker. The German spent the majority of last season sidelined through injury, so the need for a worthy back up cannot be understated.
But is the club capable of sourcing and signing a worthy back up? Well, recent reports suggest West Ham’s hierarchy could be about to repeat history.
There was a period of time when Dominic Calvert-Lewin was regarded as one of the best English strikers in the Premier League.
Between 2019 and and 2021, the England international netted 36 goals across two seasons, earning him a call up to the national squad in the process.
But since then, injuries have prevented him from fulfilling his clear potential at the top level.
Even before then, he’d had his issues with keeping fit and since joining the the Toffees from Sheffield United nine years ago, Calvert-Lewin has gone on to miss 111 games through injury.
He’s spent 714 days injured – that’s almost a full two years.
So under the circumstances, it’s little wonder West Ham are being linked with him this summer.
Calvert-Lewin announced over the weekend that he was leaving Everton on a free transfer this week. Immediately, reports of West Ham’s interest were doing the rounds.
However, while the Evening Standard‘s report suggests contact has already been made with the striker’s representatives over a move to east London, an ‘exclusive’ by Hammers News claims a senior source at the club has told them West Ham are ‘not interested,’ citing the 28-year-old’s recent injury record as the key reason why he won’t be arriving at London Stadium this summer.
The latter report would make a lot of sense, but so does the former given West Ham’s record with signing strikers.
Calvert-Lewin spent almost the entire second-half of last season sidelined with a hamstring injury, missing 14 games in the process. It’s a very uncanny similarity to Fullkrug, whose experience of Premier League life after the New Year was scarily similar.
It was, though, Calvert-Lewin’s sixth hamstring problem in four years. That is probably a key reason why David Moyes wasn’t keen on extending the striker’s stay with a new contract.
There’s no doubting Calvert-Lewin’s ability as a Premier League striker when he’s fit.
With 71 goals in 273 first-team appearances for the Toffees, it’s clear he knows where the net is.
If he didn’t have such terrible luck with injuries, this would be a signing West Ham should be doing all they can to get over the line. At the same time, if these injury issues didn’t exist then it would be likely Calvert-Lewin would either already have signed a new deal at Everton or been signed by a club competing in Europe.
West Ham need a reliable and effective goalscorer. One who can both score goals and stay fit, not just one or the other.
But here we have a player who currently doesn’t fit that profile.
Given the sheer amount of work that’s needed to get this current squad back up to the levels expected of it after two seasons of underperformance, gambling on the fitness of a striker purely because he’s available on a free transfer simply isn’t a bet worth making at his time.
If ever there was a summer to bring an end to the club’s striker curse, it’s this one. There is no longer any room for error.
It’s a signing that has so many similarities to the decision to sign Ings in 2023. We needed a striker and a player who had scored 43 goals for Burnley and 46 for Southampton seemed like a good option to bring in as back up to Antonio and Scamacca.
Ings would go on to score just five goals in 69 games for West Ham having spent much of his time in east London coming off the bench in the final few minutes of games. His £125k-a-week wages further underline the mistakes made his particular arrival.
Calvert-Lewin earned £100k-a-week at Everton and would likely command an increase in that salary at West Ham. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?
He simply isn’t the answer to what is currently the most important question at West Ham.
