West Ham United are a side who have never really seemed to crack the art of the foreign signing.
You can trace the pattern back to Marco Boogers’ arrival at Upton Park in 1995, which seemed to pre-empt an era of suspect signings.
Since then, the esteemed signings of Savio Nsereko, Pablo Barrera, Julian Faubert and Kepa Blanco, have come, gone and left nothing but a blotch on the balance sheets in East London.
And when they did once get it right, with the duo of Javier Mascherano and Carlos Tevez, it nearly led the club to ruin.
