Hammers’ deals have made them worth watching
JOSE MOURINHO was half-joking when he cited West Ham’s transfer activity and declared: “It looks like they are playing to win the Premier League, too.”
The Manchester United boss was talking about the signings of the Manchester City pair Pablo Zabaleta and Joe Hart, plus the imminent arrivals of Javier Hernandez from Bayer Leverkusen and Marko Arnautovic from Stoke.
Of course, the master of mind games had his own transparent motives for flagging up the Hammers’ incomings.
It was a message to his chief deal-maker, Ed-Woodward, to get his finger out and buy some more players.
But if Mourinho’s words were all about self-interest as usual, there is some validity in what he said.
The Londoners may not be precisely playing to win the Premier League. But what they are doing is investing in the team to give themselves an outside chance of breaking up what’s threatening to be a closed shop at the top of the table.
Everton have taken similar steps to open up the competition by signing Wayne Rooney, Michael Keane, Jordan Pickford and Davy Klaassen.
Those deals seemed to confirm the Toffees as the best of the rest. With these signings, West Ham have joined them.
A few weeks ago, everyone seemed to agree that, while the order might change, the first six positions would be filled by the same clubs as last season.
The gap between them and the rest looked unbridgeable. Everyone else seemed to be playing to avoid relegation.
Everton refused to accept that and now, to their credit, West Ham have also decided to break from the peloton and try to chase down the leading riders.
The Hammers now have England’s goalkeeper, a potential Zlatan Ibrahimovic in £25m club-record signing Arnautovic, one of the League’s greatest professionals in Zabaleta and a real source of goals in Chicharito – a player Mourinho insists he would never have sold.
They should be over the teething problems of the stadium move, still have the financial advantage of paying little more than a peppercorn rent and can get 20,000 more people into home games than Everton.
Everything is aligned for Slaven Bilic and his team to give it a real go. Neutrals must hope that they succeed, because it would be very bad for the Premier League if the top six became uncatchable every year.
These are words I don’t say very often, but well done David Gold, David Sullivan and Karren Brady.