West Ham defender Pablo Zabaleta claims that Hammers boss Manuel Pellegrini is struggling with a lack of quality compared to what he has had before.
The Chilean manager has once before won the league title in English football, achieving Premier League glory with Manchester City in the 2013/14 season.
In that season, where City also won the League Cup, Pellegrini’s squad had four players who scored 20+ goals across all competitions, namely in Sergio Agüero, Edin Džeko, Yaya Touré and Álvaro Negredo.
Despite signing 12 new players this summer, spending nearly £100million in the process, West Ham have struggled in their early season run-in, picking up zero points from their opening four games.
And the Argentine defender Zabaleta, who played under Pellegrini in City’s title winning season, accepts that it’s very much a lack of quality that is holding the club back. As reported by MailOnline, Zabaleta said:
For the first time maybe he doesn’t have the same quality in the team like he had before. So maybe it’ll take more time than at other clubs for him to get everything right.
At Manchester City, there was so much quality, we won games easily. Here it’s not the same. But he’s a great man, a good manager and will try to find the best way to get the results.
As usually happens when managers begin to struggle at their respective clubs, rumours of them being sacked are quickly generated. Recent reports though, have suggested that West Ham’s owners David Gold and David Sullivan will need to pay £15million to terminate Pellegrini’s tenure if they decide to wield the axe, having forgotten to include a ‘sacking clause’.
Regardless, the Hammers’ co-owners will be hoping that Pellegrini can begin to find his feet soon, with a trip to face Everton at Goodison Park next up on the fixture list.
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