Over the years some great players have pulled on a West Ham shirt, however there has also been a long list of truly bizarre and utterly frustrating catastrophes.
Narrowing it down to a top (or bottom) five proved a challenge due to the revolving door policy under Harry Redknapp, the over-priced, over-rated, has-beens of the Curbishley regime and the just downright ill conceived, reactionary purchases of Avram Grant and Glenn Roeder.
So the final shortlist is players that stand out for their shear bizarre ineptitude and incompetence that left many of us tearing our hair out and screaming into a cushion.
I could have made a list based on purely loan players that were never fit to wear the shirt, and there have been a lot of those. These include Sasa Ilic, who only played 50 minutes for the Hammers but managed to inspire Everton to a 4-0 victory at Upton Park before getting subbed.
Recently he appeared in some low budget films in his native Serbia, some say he had been acting as a goalkeeper his whole career. Mido was another shocker, he offered to play for just £1,000 a week, which appealed to the board at a time when our finances were in a similar state to Greece’s, it looks like we over-paid though.
Wayne Quinn took the biscuit. He was brought in with a host of loans signings during the first season back in the old Division 1 in 2003, his lack of pace, positioning, awareness and general ability to even kick a football amazed and confused fans and opponents alike. But as none of these geniuses were actual West Ham players they have all been left out for people we had to actually sign and waste money on.
First up in the hall of shame and propping up the rear with his massive backside, at number five, it’s Titi Camara. One of the many wastes of space Redknapp inflicted on us as he squandered the £18m we got for Rio Ferdinand. He was signed from Liverpool after earning a bit of a cult status for scoring some vital goals and playing after the death of his father.
At West Ham he only earned hatred and ridicule as he made 14 appearances between 2000 and 2003 before being loaned to Al-Ittihad in Saudi Arabia. During his spell he failed to score a single goal and when the club cancelled his contract for being useless and over-weight he tried to sue them…he was unsuccessful. He is now the sports minister and manager of the Guinea national team.
Number four is Joey Beauchamp. Signed by Billy Bonds as a promising young winger in 1994 for a then club record of £1.2m. After complaining about feeling home sick (for Oxford of all places) he couldn’t handle the traffic during his travel down the M40 to training each day. He was sold to Swindon (only 20 miles nearer to Oxford) without playing a competitive game.
Beauchamp makes the list purely because his sod-this-for-a-laugh attitude to football caused Bonds to question his faith in the game. Later he returned to Oxford United and became a very popular player for them. His story took a darker turn as he recently admitted to battling with drink and depression following his retirement.
Coming in at three is Marco Boogers. A Dutch striker signed by Redknapp from Sparta Rotterdam in 1995 as an answer to our goal scoring woes. In only his second appearance during an away trip to Old Trafford he was sent off early on for assaulting Gary Neville. Although extreme violence against Gary Neville is not he worst crime in the world, Boogers then legged it to Holland and reportedly hid in a caravan.
This turned out to be an urban myth and began with a misunderstanding by a journalist who heard ‘caravan’ instead of ‘car again’ when asking about Boogers travel arrangements to his rehab in Holland. He made a further two substitute appearances, then a recurring knee injury and a major case of don’t-fancy-it-itis saw him return permanently to the Low Countries. After he left Redknapp described him as an awful player and stated that he’d only seen him play in a video in which he looked ‘world class’…. a lesson there maybe?
The number two spot goes to the enigmatic Savio Nsereko. Supposedly a promising young striker who starred for the German under-19s, he was one of the more bizarre signings as part of Gianluca Nani’s ‘project’ during Gianfranco Zola tenure. He was signed to replace Craig Bellamy in the 2009 transfer window for reportedly up to £9m with add-ons from Brescia. Savio, as he was known, made a handful of less then average appearances in which he looked out of his depth in the Premier League, even against Hull and West Brom.
In the press conference at his unveiling his high-pitched voice sounded strangely similar to that of Michael Jackson’s, and as it turned out he kind of played like him too. He was later swapped as part of the Manual Da Costa deal with Fiorentina, where he failed to impress and was bounced around Europe in a succession of ever worsening loan moves. Most recently he fetched up at Serie B side Juve Stabia where he is now AWOL (for the second time) and currently being hunted by Interpol.
But the king of bad West Ham signings is Gary Breen. His constant poor performances during the 2002/03 relegation season have now become synonymous with the emotional roller-coaster of supporting West Ham and even inspired a book on the subject by Robert Banks.
Glenn Roeder signed him on a free transfer as Breen was without a club and had turned in some impressive performances for the Republic of Ireland during the 2002 World Cup, in particular scoring against known world beaters Saudi Arabia. On that basis Breen had the pick of European clubs, he chose West Ham over some ‘generous offers’, reportedly Inter Milan and Barcelona, and more realistically Charlton. In an interview reminiscent of David Brent in The Office he stated on Sky’s Goals on Sunday in 2009 that he would have moved to the San Siro if he hadn’t failed a medical.
After an infamous bust-up with Roeder following a defeat away to Manchester United, in which he was heavily blamed for many of the goals, Breen tried to suggest the wet turf was the reason he was unable to play to his usual high standard and even posses the most basic levels of foot and eye co-ordination. The Manchester United players seemed to cope with the conditions as they ended up winning 6-0. Breen was let go in the cull following relegation that year after making 18 embarrassing appearances.
Although no list of terrible West Ham players would be complete without mentioning superstars such as Gary Charles, Benni McCarthy, Nigel Quashie and Keiron Dyer, who will only be remembered as a drain on resources and taking vast amounts of money for being either drunk, fat, rubbish or constantly injured (in that order) and lacking any integrity or professionalism when it came to their supposed careers, the main five stick out as the biggest horror shows.
