What are West Ham thinking?

First it was Thierry Henry, now West Ham are reportedly close to agreeing a deal to sign Juan Román Riquelme, that Argentinean playmaker extraordinaire.  The news will no doubt evoke mixed reactions in the football world.  Personally, I think it is silly season gone mad.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Don’t get me wrong, Riquelme is a fantastic footballer of a type that I love to watch, but in no way is he suited to the Premier League’s or West Ham’s style of play.  The Hammers may have in mind the impact he made at Villareal, a club of similar stature in La Liga, but the style of football is so different as to render the comparison irrelevant.

Riquelme is an old fashioned playmaker, the sort who dictates the play and dissects defences with slide rule passing.  Great.  But this is a free role, and defensive responsibility is not part of the package.  Riquelme is a throwback, a “glorious anachronism” as Jonathan Wilson called him in Inverting the Pyramid.

With the breakneck Premier League pace and the need for constant pressing all over the pitch, Riquelme will very quickly find himself shoe-horned into a system with which he is not familiar and asked to perform duties that he has never carried out before.

Then there is the question of system.  The traditional Argentinean system of 4-3-1-2, with it’s playmaker lying behind two strikers, was designed specifically for players like Riquelme.  Would Avram Grant play that way?  He has tended to be a 4-5-1 or 4-3-3 man, with no space for a central playmaker.

So how does Grant adjust?  Does he change the formation, or try and fit Riquelme into his existing tactics?  In his usual formation, Riquelme would either find himself supporting a lone striker or out on the wing, and in either position would be expected to track back and help out in midfield.  Whichever way you look at it, it just doesn’t fit.

The second problem is a financial one.  After taking over at Upton Park, Davids Gold and Sullivan went to great pains to tell the whole world just how close to the edge the club was, with 110m of debt and an inflated wage bill.  Reports in March revealed that Kieron Dyer and Freddie Ljungberg cost West Ham £1m for each match that they played.

Yet now we find that the club is trying to find the exact same sort of players who represent the exact same sort of risk.  Signing a player like Thomas Hitzlsperger may be less glamorous, but it makes much more sense in both footballing and financial terms.  Riquelme himself was willing to play for relatively little at Boca Juniors, his boyhood club, but that surely wouldn’t apply to West Ham.  As the players’ agent said

But it’s come to the position now where he feels he may have to look at all the other options that are being offered to him because he doesn’t feel like he’s getting value for money in terms of staying at Boca.

So it’s a big risk for West Ham whichever way you look at it.  I can’t see this ending in anything but tears.