The sensational £20m West Ham transfer raid that could break the internet
The Hammers are being linked with a former Chelsea star.
He is the Andy Dufresne of professional football; quiet, unassuming, cerebral, wrongfully imprisoned in a baking hellhole with an eclectic cast of colourful characters and little realistic hope of doing anything other than seeing out his sentence in monastic passivity. You can almost hear the Morgan Freeman voiceover in your head: ‘N’Golo Kante came to Al-Ittihad in the summer of 2023’.
But tucked away behind a poster of Rita Hayworth; hope. N’Golo is planning his escape, and West Ham United could be the storm-swept sewage pipe through which he crawls to redemption and relevancy.
Quite often, we talk with hyperbole about a transfer story ‘breaking the internet’. Given how swiftly we were struck by a global IT outage in the aftermath of The Guardian’s report on the Hammers’ interest in Kante, this might be the first time that it has actually happened.
The details are fairly simple. Talks are underway between West Ham and Saudi Pro League outfit Al-Ittihad over a deal that would bring the diminutive Frenchman back to England for a fee of around £20 million or so. Newly appointed Irons boss Julen Lopetegui is understood to be a huge admirer of Kante’s (I mean, who isn’t?), and there is, from both sides, an apparent willingness to reach an agreement. For his part, the 33-year-old is said to be ‘happy with his current club but is open to returning to London’ too. Because of course he is; nowt’s a bother where N’Golo is concerned.
As for West Ham, this would be a pleasing bolt from the blue. Or Les Bleus, even. With Kalvin Phillips’ doomed loan stint fizzling into nothingness, the Hammers are in the market for a new defensive midfielder this summer, and over the course of Euro 2024, Kante went quite some way towards proving that he is still very much the iron-lunged Roomba who took the Premier League, and Europe writ large, by storm with Leicester City, and then with Chelsea.
The juice has not drained from the legs, the anticipation has not dulled one bit, the disruptive tendencies abide still. In other words, Kante is, as he was before he left for the Middle East, a world class midfield general; one who has spent a year in exile, granted, but one who has it within himself to return to the front line at a moment’s notice.
For these reasons, if West Ham are able to sign Kante, then they simply must. Ordinarily, it would be ill-advised to spend so much money on a player who will turn 34 next birthday. But N’Golo is no ordinary proposition. He still pickpockets opponents a decade his junior with the ease of an apologetic Artful Dodger, still reads the game like a venerable scholar studying the meticulously calligraphed pages of an ancient text.
Despite his age, and despite his Saudi sojourn, he is still one of the very best players in his position in world football. If he is available, whether it be for £20 million or not, then West Ham would kick themselves if they didn’t swoop.