Why West Ham’s £45m January gamble is destined to be another disaster

One thing you can’t accuse West Ham United of is going down without a fight, at least from a strictly financial standpoint – but after the Hammers spent serious money early in the January transfer window in order to fix their woeful attack, it’s still fair to question whether they’ll be fighting against relegation or simply amongst themselves.

Callum Wilson has been released on a free transfer, Niclas Füllkrug has been put out of his misery and sent to Milan, and in their place come Valentín ‘Taty’ Castellanos and the inexperienced Pablo Felipe for a combined transfer fee which could rise to around £45m, according to press reports. But will they be enough to save West Ham, or are they simply throwing money away as they go down? Can the new recruits score the goals that West Ham sorely need, or do these moves amount to little more than rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic?

Are Taty Castellanos and Pablo Felipe good enough to keep West Ham up?

It’s impossible to distil West Ham’s problems down to one single issue but while it’s eminently arguable that the defence has been the biggest concern since the summer, scoring some more goals certainly won’t hurt – only four Premier League sides have scored fewer this season or generated fewer expected goals. One way or the other, West Ham sorely needed fresh blood up front.

Castellanos is the more senior of the two. Pablo, at the age of 22, only established himself as a starter in the Portuguese league with Gil Vicente in 2025 and while his scoring record was highly impressive (he hit 10 goals in 13 games this season before the move) his CV is extremely short. Castellanos didn’t cost all that much more when he was signed from Lazio, but he is the one who will be leaned on far more. Either he scores goals, or West Ham have a problem.

The Argentine didn’t manage that on his debut, spurning presentable chances in either half in 2-1 defeat to Nottingham Forest which has made the short-term outlook seem even bleaker. Nuno Espirito Santo needed an immediate impact and didn’t get it.

That isn’t entirely surprising, because Castellanos has never been an exceptional finisher. In the last six full seasons he has played, he has scored more than his xG suggested that he ‘should’ have done just once, with Girona in the 2022/23 season. In three seasons with New York City before that and two-and-a-half years with Lazio, he has consistently hit the back of the net less often than the chances he’s had suggest that he might.

At Lazio, that translated to 16 league goals 75 matches, the equivalent of around a goal every five appearances, from a total of 22.7xG. It would be a stretch to say that such figures bode well for Castellanos’ chances of keeping West Ham afloat single-handedly.

As for Pablo, the sample size is small but impressive. He’s powerful and imposing, seems to cope well with the attentions of defenders and scored his 10 Primeira Liga goals this season from just 5.7xG’s worth of opportunities. If he can sustain that sort of form in the English top flight, he may prove to be an exceptional signing. Whether he can do so is an unanswerable question given that the Brazilian has only started 32 league matches in his entire career. There is promise there, but no guarantee, and it’s likely Castellanos who will have to do the Hammers’ heavy lifting.

Why Castellanos still has some attributes that West Ham need to survive

Happily, while Castellanos may not be a great goalscorer, there is more to being a successful striker than finishing, and what the 27-year-old lacks in precision in front of goal he may yet make up for with a combination of movement, link-up play and work ethic that allows him to get into enough good positions that he ends up scoring the goals regardless of how many expected goals he comes across.

On debut, Castellanos earned 0.4xG with his three efforts on goal, already putting him joint top of the average xG/game chart at the London Stadium – with Wilson, as one might have guessed – and perhaps he will continue getting into promising areas often enough that he will get goals through sheer volume of chances rather than thanks to his incisive final touch.

Certainly that has been a problem for West Ham. Their issues in front of goal haven’t just come down to the quality of the strikers but to their ability to find space for the players behind them to play them in. In Jarrod Bowen and Lucas Paquetá, West Ham should have the underlying creativity, but they need a player who can actually give them something to aim at. Castellanos is better equipped in that front that many other forwards that they could perhaps have signed.

Castellanos is also a fine passer whose ability to create space and chances for others could be highly relevant. Over the past year, he has been involved in the creation of an average of 2.39 shooting chances for his team-mates per game. That isn’t a towering figure, but it’s more than any West Ham player with at least five appearances has managed this season.

The hope is that his presence results in more goals, both directly and indirectly, than was the case with Wilson or Füllkrug even though he isn’t a great finisher. It may work. That said, it’s still quite a gamble to put a team’s Premier League survival around the neck of such a player.

It’s hard to shake the sensation that was a somewhat desperate move – money thrown at the strikers that were available at the very start of the transfer window rather than the strikers who would be mostly likely to score the necessary goals. Perhaps it’s better to move now than to wait patiently and let several games slide past without an upgrade, but it didn’t help much against Forest, and now West Ham’s upward battle to dodge the drop looks increasingly mountainous.

Castellanos may defy his statistical history and start scoring in volume, and Pablo may well end up being a superb centre-forward after settling in, but it’s hard to look at the data and the history of either play and see a saviour. West Ham will have to hope that those stats are simply wrong.

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