West Ham’s next £20m summer signing will be a major transfer gamble

West Ham United have spent much of the early part of the summer transfer window pushing hard to sign a new winger, but despite recent links with players like Steven Bergwijn it seems they may have decided who to buy – Arsenal’s Reiss Nelson has apparently agreed to join the Hammers in a deal worth around £20m.

TeamTalk are among a number of outlets carrying the claim, although the transfer has not yet been confirmed and there is still work to do with other clubs like Crystal Palace also alleged to be interested in Nelson, who has been on the fringes of the first team at the Emirates for years without breaking through. The question then, after years as a back-up, is whether Nelson is good enough for a club with European ambitions.

It's tricky to get a clear picture of Nelson’s ability from the stats, not least because he has only started one Premier League match for the Gunners across the last two seasons, meaning the sample size on the raw numbers he has put up is laughably small. Instead, you have to go back to his most recent loan spell, with Feyenoord in the 2021/22 season, to get a read on what he’s capable of.

Nelson, now 24, was a rotational player at De Kuip, starting 10 matches in a total of 21 appearances and finishing with two goals and four assists. That added up to a healthy 0.59 goal contributions for every 90 minutes he spent on the field, which isn’t an elite number but still hinted at a capacity from decent production.

On the other hand, the very next Eredivise season saw a young Mohammed Kudus bag 11 goals and three assists for Ajax at a rate of 0.70 goal contributions per match, hinting that as of a couple of years ago, one of the players that he would be directly competing with for minutes was simply better than he was – and it’s hard to argue, given Kudus’ impressive debut season at the London Stadium, that Nelson wouldn’t still be behind the Ghanaian in the pecking order.

A further problem – for Nelson, at least – arrives with a report by The Daily Mail (corroborated elsewhere) which suggests that Lucas Paquetá will very likely be available for most or even all of the upcoming season despite an FA investigation into alleged betting offences. The Brazilian’s case could take up to 10 months to work through, apparently, and that would give Julen Lopetegui another attacking option with a more proven capacity for production, at least in the short term.

But depth is still a necessity, as is a player who can compete for the wide positions for years to come, and Nelson could be that player if he can finally live up to his early promise – and there are at least a couple of areas in which he has impressed.

His passing accuracy is excellent for a winger and well ahead of a player like Kudus’, even though he hasn’t generated as many chances for his team-mates from those passes when he has been able to play over the past couple of years – but a player who can play precise passes at pace will always create ways of unlocking defences that other players might not be able to access.

He's also got a good track record in a pressing system, working hard out of possession and generating turnovers at a healthy rate, and often high up the pitch – and while he struggled with his dribbling last year, beating his man just eight times from 20 attempts in the Premier League and Champions League, his overall record over the last couple of years is good and he had extremely impressive numbers with the ball at his feet between 2021 and 2023 both with Feyenoord and Arsenal.

Ultimately, however, Nelson has never proven that he can generate chances or score goals at the kind of rate that a player like Kudus can, let alone Jarrod Bowen – but then again, he has played so little that there is very limited proof either way as to how good he really is at this point.

Somewhere in there is a dangerous winger who can beat men on the run, pass the ball around with accuracy and score goals, something he proved more than capable of during the loan spell at Hoffenheim five years ago which first put his name up in lights. With so little gametime in his boots he hasn’t come close to living up to that potential, but given minutes and opportunity, maybe he can get there. If he does, £20m may well look like a bargain – but for a club hoping to force their way back into European contention, it still looks like a relatively risky move.