West Ham United have been well known to splash the cash on players who failed to live up to the lofty expectations upon their arrival at the club.

Think back to when the club signed Felipe Anderson for a then club record fee of £36m, but he couldn’t display his best form and left three years later, or signing Niko Vlasic for £25.7m, yet he struggled so much last season that David Moyes loaned him out ahead of this term.

These are massive sums of money that have been spent without much return on the pitch and the trend doesn’t seem to be bucking, with Gianluca Scamacca and Lucas Paqueta arriving last summer for big fees yet have so far failed to suitably impress in the Premier League, scoring only five times between them.

However, one of the club's biggest transfer mistakes was the signing of Javier Hernandez, although there was much hype when he arrived in the summer of 2017 for a fee of £16m.

How much did Javier Hernandez cost West Ham United?

The Mexican frontman was signed by Slaven Bilic, who looked to bolster his goalscoring options, and on first look, luring someone of Hernandez’s stature back to the Premier League appeared to be an excellent move.

The 29-year-old had won two league titles with Manchester United, scoring 59 goals for the Old Trafford side over five years while also representing Real Madrid and shining in the Bundesliga for Bayer Leverkusen.

This was a player who could have the ability to score 20-plus goals a season for the club and give them a much-needed boost up front, yet it didn’t work out like that.

Chicharito scored eight league goals in his first season while netting seven in the 2018/2019 campaign, overall scoring just 17 goals across two terms, and this wasn’t anywhere near good enough.

West Ham eventually sold him to Sevilla for £7.2m in 2019, losing almost £10m in the process and his struggles continued in Spain, scoring just three times before he joined LA Galaxy in 2020.

ESON journalist Diego Cora reported that the striker thinks of himself as something of a megastar and is ostracized in the dressing room, saying: “The players look at him from the side and he thinks he’s a megastar.

“When I was in Leverkusen, I had to cover him once, and many around the club said he was an 'ego man'. In West Ham, they told me something similar and now the same thing. One of his teammates says that he thinks he is Cristiano Ronaldo.”

When accounting for Hernandez's £15.4m pay packet too, he ultimately rinsed West Ham of £31.4m over his 110-week spell at the club.

That undoubtedly represents one of their biggest mishaps in the transfer window in recent years, especially considering the hype surrounding his move in 2017.