West Ham signed a new No. 9 this past summer in Niclas Fullkrug, but the former Werder Bremen and Borussia Dortmund man has yet to make an impact for the Hammers due to injury.
The club remains hopeful that Fullkrug, who was key in Dortmund reaching the Champions League Final last season, can be an asset this season. In addition to Fullkrug, West Ham also signed young Leeds left winger Crysencio Summerville to give new manager Julen Lopetegui further attacking options.
Further, West Ham dipped into the former La Liga well to help Lopetegui, signing former Valencia attacker Carlos Soler from PSG to round out what looked like a deep attack on paper.
While Summerville has flashed the potential to start alongside Mohammed Kudus and Jarrod Bowen in a fearsome trident, West Ham have had little to show for their summer efforts with Lopetegui already, deservedly, facing heat for a woeful start to the campaign.
Even as West Ham mull Lopetegui’s future and await better days from the attackers, they are, apparently, monitoring top forward prospects, having also added Brazilian phenom Luis Gulherme to the attack.
According to a report from Brazil’s Ge Globo, West Ham apparently flew board members to Brazil in order to submit a 37 million euro offer to Botafogo for striker Igor Jesus, who literally signed for the Brazilian side this past summer on a free.
If that sounds like an incredibly inflated price point, that’s because it is. Jesus isn’t even truly a prospect at this point, since he’s 23 years old. Transfermarkt values him at just six million euros, which essentially means that he may not even be worth West Ham’s time at all.
At around 5-10 million euros, Jesus would be a decent flier transfer for West Ham. At 37 million euros, you have to question if the information Ge Globo is being fed is entirely driven by an overly eager agent.
That said, Jesus is a decent player who has put himself on the map in Brazilian football by going from free agent to a quality role player at Botafogo. He is averaging 0.6 goals and assists per 90 with 1.6 key passes.
Those are solid numbers, but, at 23, you’d expect Jesus to be lighting up the Brazilian league if he were at the level of a West Ham transfer target. Nothing about this transfer rumor makes sense, unless if the Hammers really have lost the plot.
