Another talented player that’s going to slip through our fingers.
And just our luck it happens to be to exactly the same team that we lost the other promising Championship player to, after Eberechi Eze made his move to Selhurst Park a few weeks back.
According to a report from The Sun, Crystal Palace are set to win the race to sign 25-year-old Brentford forward, and West Ham United target Said Benrahma, in a deal worth £20m.
Benrahma was one of the best players in the Championship last season, contributing 27 goals and assists throughout the campaign. He earned himself PFA Team of the Year honours and picked up plenty of plaudits along the way, with many of the opinion that he was going to end up in the Premier League regardless of whether the Bees got promoted.
The report claims that we ‘turned down’ the chance to sign him, which doesn’t make a lot of sense on the surface (because at £20m, you’d hate to think that we were ‘priced out’ of a move, especially after we’d made £18m on the Diangana sale). So if it wasn’t for financial reasons, then it had to be simply that the club ended up not being interested.
How much will West Ham spend this summer?
More than £50m
Less than £50m
Either way, this could go down as one of the more egregious errors that David Moyes and the club make this window, because for a player of that talent to be sold for that low and us not to be a part of it is pretty scandalous on the face of it, especially when you consider he’s pretty much an upgrade of Diangana who we let go.
Even if we had to get into a bidding war over him, a player of his quality is too good to simply give up on without a fight.
And we could really end up regretting turning our backs on the deal so easily.
