West Ham have seen plenty of expensive misfits come and go down the years. A lot of money has been thrown away during the search for attackers capable of winning a game in the blink of an eye – £45m on Sébastien Haller, say, or £37m on Felipe Anderson – and in that context it was difficult not to feel apprehensive when David Moyes spent much of his budget on Lucas Paquetá and Gianluca Scamacca this summer.
Of course the unease was less down to concerns over Paquetá and Scamacca; it was more a comment on West Ham’s patchy record of making signings at that rarefied level work.
