With West Ham United now sitting outside of the Premier League relegation drop zone and having a two point safety gap on seriously struggling Tottenham Hotspur, Hammers fans are beginning to breathe a sigh of relief.
Gaffer Nuno Espirito Santo’s hard work in the background following his arrival as Graham Potter’s replacement in the dug out back at the end of September gave reasonable initial signs of working, but results were not following how anyone would have hoped. That has slowly begun changing in recent weeks and we have eeked out the small signs of consistency at just the right point with the business end of the season now with us.
Our quietly spoken gaffers’ record now reads 31 games played, nine won and ten drawn – but more importantly for us, that means in the last six games we have two wins and two draws and those using Bet442 for their gaming entertainment would have loved that. We are actually showing a slightly better form than the teams more immediately above us, which is a nice bonus.
With greater confidence now amongst the fanbase that the dreaded relegation will be avoided and that we will not suffer the drop into the second tier Championship this year, eyes are beginning to slowly turn more to potential future transfer action when the summer window opens as obviously nobody wants to repeat another year like this again.
One of the key players this year, and particularly during our more recent turnaround period, has been on loan Chelsea centre half Axel Disasi.
The 28 year old Frenchman arrived in the January transfer window and in the eight top flight games that he has featured in since, we have only lost two. Speculation had been building in recent weeks that given how he has impressed and made his mark that we would be looking to make the deal permanent come the end of the year, but obviously any and all negotiation talks would inevitably come down to money and that was going to be heavily dictated by what division we found ourselves in next term.
With survival looking far more likely now than it did even a couple of weeks ago, it means Nuno and the backroom boys can better plan what direction they will look to move in during the off season, and in fairness, it would now be quite the surprise if Disasi did not feature on our final shopping list as one of our prime targets.
The next question is obviously what kind of transfer fee would Chelsea be looking for? On the one hand he is clearly not in their plans and 56 starts across all competitions going back to August 2023 kind of demonstrates that given he did not feature once in the first half of this campaign. He also spent the second half of last campaign out on loan with Aston Villa and Unai Emery. On the other hand, clubs seem to continue paying a premier for their unwanted players because they have put themselves in such a mess with their ‘project’ spending on anything that moves.
We cannot, and we should not do that, especially with £30 million fees being bandied around for him as we need to make our budget go further for real improvements. The fact that they paid AS Monaco 45 million Euros in a deal that has gone badly wrong for them is irrelevant to us – and that is how it should stay.
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