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Very Specific Football Question No.4: Would West Ham getting £6m for Modibo Maiga be the best piece of business in football history?
Seeing a headline that states West Ham have agreed to sell striker Modibo Maiga for £6m is a surreal experience. It’s like reading that Ed Miliband has become the new manager of Boca Juniors, or that Andy Carroll has passed a medical. In other words, it sounds made up. But the fact the Saudi Arabian club reported to have signed Maiga, Al Nassr, have released a photo of the player captioned, “Modibo Maiga: Welcome to Al Nassr” indicates the story may actually, unbelievably, be true.
There are a few reasons why this would be one of the most astonishing transfers of recent times. The first is that Maiga has proved to be one of West Ham’s most disappointing signings ever - and he has some pretty strong competition in that department - during three unhappy years in east London since a £5m move from Sochaux . As such, the Hammers have spent the last couple of years trying to literally give him away. They essentially did this last season when they paid the vast bulk of his sizeable wages while he played for Metz in Ligue 1. That was after they had offered him more than a million pounds to JUST GO AWAY - a deal Maiga refused. The Malian’s stock has not risen since then, and the highlight of his West Ham career remains a seven-minute spell in a 2013 league cup match at Tottenham in which he was completely unplayable. He scored the winning goal that night, giving birth to a rather cruel song Hammers fans like to serenade him with on the rare occasions he takes the field: “Maiga… He scored at sWhite Hart Lane, he’ll never score again.”
Having a song penned about you stating that you will never score by your own fans would be a low point in any striker’s career, but it seems that Maiga is somehow bouncing back. His resurrection began on Saturday, when he jinked past several flatfooted defenders and scuffed a shot into the net against Bournemouth. Admittedly, Slaven Bilic’s side were already 4-2 down at that stage and playing with 10 men, so the strike was meaningless. But it was nonetheless a goal, which meant the Maiga song was officially dead.
One can only assume a wealthy Saudi was tuning into the game and that, moved to tears by Maiga’s display of individual brilliance in the face of adversity, he decided to buy the player immediately. The £6m fee reported by respected West Ham news site Knees Up Mother Brown may turn out to be higher than the real figure, but even £6 would represent a good deal for the Hammers. Would £6m be better than Liverpool getting £50m for Fernando Torres, or Southampton getting £20m for Dejan Lovren? Probably, yes - because at least Torres and Lovren have displayed an ability to play football.
And so it’s a happy ending for all concerned, except there is one twist. With Carroll, Enner Valencia and Mauro Zarate injured, and Diafra Sakho getting arrested all the time, Maiga is currently West Ham’s only reliably available striker. As such, the club may not be able to rubber-stamp the deal until they find a replacement. At the same time, they will be desperate to quickly push it through before the Saudis look at Twitter, witness the joyous celebrations of Hammers fans and have a sudden realisation that they might be doing something terribly silly.
And so we wait on tenterhooks for confirmation of what would be the best transfer coup, by a selling club, in the history of football transfers. Either that or West Ham will be forced to reject Al Nassr’s offer because Maiga is their only forward, which on balance would be even more amusing.
