Nothing about West Ham’s 2025/26 campaign went to script.
A season that began with talk of a steady reset under Nuno Espirito Santo ended with relegation to the Championship, a £170 million rebuild under the microscope, and supporters left separating the genuine positives from the painful lessons. Yet amid the wreckage, a handful of West Ham players defied every reasonable expectation — some gloriously, others in ways nobody at the London Stadium wants to relive.
The scale of the collapse is what made those individual stories stand out. Before a ball was kicked, football betting markets had the Hammers priced as comfortable survivors, with the drop viewed as an outside chance at best. Comparison platforms such as Betiton, which review licensed UK bookmakers and their sports betting odds, explain how those pre-season markets are put together — you can find out more about how relegation and outright prices are shaped. By May, those early expectations looked like ancient history, and the players below are a large part of the reason why.Mateus Fernandes proved every doubter wrong
West Ham rarely spend £38 million on one player, so Mateus Fernandes arrived from relegated Southampton carrying enormous pressure — and more than a little scepticism. A club-record-scale outlay on a 21-year-old midfielder from a side that had just gone down felt like a gamble on paper.
Instead, the Portugal international was the story of the season. He was the standout performer in a struggling team, the star of virtually every set of end-of-season ratings, and by the summer the subject of serious interest from Manchester United and Roma. Finding an undisputed player of the year in a relegated squad is rare; finding one in his debut campaign in English football is rarer still.
Diouf and Disasi: the bargains nobody saw coming
El Hadji Malick Diouf arrived from Slavia Prague as a genuine unknown, a 21-year-old left-sided defender signed for £19 million. He finished the season as one of its brightest sparks, offering relentless energy down the flank, and could yet be sold for a healthy profit barely twelve months after arriving — a remarkable outcome in a relegation year.
Axel Disasi’s revival was arguably even less predictable. Frozen out at Chelsea to the point of training away from the first team, the Frenchman rebuilt his reputation almost immediately in East London, forming a solid partnership with Dinos Mavropanos — whose own spring surge, capped by a commanding display in the 1-1 draw with Manchester City, made the Greek a season-of-two-halves surprise in his own right. Our end-of-season player ratings told the same story week after week: the back line’s best moments came from the men few expected to deliver them.
The West Ham players who surprised for the wrong reasons
Not every shock was a happy one. Aaron Wan-Bissaka was voted Hammer of the Year in 2025; twelve months later he watched the final-day meeting with Leeds from the bench. His campaign unravelled early — he was culpable for several goals in August’s 5-1 defeat at Chelsea — and he only fleetingly rediscovered his best form. The full arc of that decline, and of the season around it, is well documented across BBC Sport’s West Ham coverage.
He was not alone. Mads Hermansen, a £20 million goalkeeper signed to be the new number one, endured a bruising introduction to life at the London Stadium. And Pablo Felipe, an £18 million January arrival who had scored freely in Portugal, may go down as one of the club’s most ill-judged signings of the modern era. Thirteen new faces arrived across the season; the gap between the best and worst of them defined it.
What the surprises mean for the Championship season
The fallout is already shaping the summer. Nuno Espirito Santo has chosen to stay and lead the promotion push, Roma and Aston Villa are circling Crysencio Summerville, and the futures of Fernandes and Diouf will decide how much of the rebuild survives the drop. Review sites like Betiton have long noted how quickly bookmakers reprice promotion markets after relegation, and the Hammers’ squad value is a big part of why expectations remain high — though, as ever, anyone following those markets should only ever bet responsibly.
For supporters, the lesson of 2025/26 is a strange comfort: even in the worst season in a generation, this squad produced players who wildly exceeded expectations. If the right ones stay, the biggest surprise of 2026/27 might be how short the stay in the Championship proves to be.
