Why signing Andy Carroll really is too good to be true

Andy Carroll signs for West Ham six years after Carlos Tevez's shock signing

When West Ham fans woke today to the news that Andy Carroll had signed for the club on a one-year loan deal, few would have reflected that it was exactly six years to the day that Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano joined the club. The euphoria amongst fans celebrating the capture of a player signed by Liverpool for £35m less than two years ago, bore an uncanny resemblance to the excitement felt on that same day in 2006.

Back then, jubilant supporters were oblivious to a clause in the contract that would have dire financial consequences for the club. The £25m fine imposed by the FA (on top of the £5m Premier League fine) is a liability that will sit on West Ham’s balance sheet for years to come. But it did not take a great deal of hindsight to reflect that West Ham signing two of the world’s best players had to be too good to be true.

The financial penalties were only half the story. The inability to integrate the Argentinians into the team turned the ninth-place, FA Cup finalists into relegation certainties. Tevez may have worked wonders in the final ten matches of the season, but that was the bare minimum required to undo the disruptive effects of his arrival. It is easy to laugh at Alan Pardew’s folly in selecting Hayden Mullins and Marlon Harewood ahead of the Argies – and perhaps he should have thrown a bit more caution to the wind in the early stages when Mascherano especially failed to hit the ground running – but this was an all-too-common and real tale of big fishes struggling to adapt to life in a small pond.

It is testament to the short-term memory of the football fan that Andy Carroll’s arrival at Upton Park has been met with near universal approval. Admittedly, his signing is very different to that of Tevez and Mascherano. Carroll has been playing in the Premier League for several years, so there should be no need for a bedding-in period. More importantly, he is anything but a square peg in a round hole, having been targeted specifically to fit into Sam Allardyce’s style of play (ie he is there to head in Matt Jarvis’s crosses). But there are still lessons to be learned from the Tevez saga, that give cause for concern.

Firstly, the big-fish-small-pond syndrome still holds true. Carroll may not be of the same ilk as Tevez, but he is still a player who should be playing for a club with greater ambitions than avoiding relegation. Put simply, he should be playing for a top-five team. What’s more, he knows that. He has spent the whole summer trying to resist a move to east London. West Ham and Liverpool reached a deal weeks ago. Had Carroll wanted to be a West Ham player, this deal would have been tied up back in July.

It has taken a preseason of disparaging comments from Brendan Rodgers and a lack of serious interest from any other club – most notably Newcastle, the team he really wants to play for – for him to finally cave. Having committed to paying the player’s £80,000-a-week wages in full, we are now reliant on Carroll to fully embrace life in east London.

Assuming that he does score the goals that merit the £1.5m loan fee and £3m+ wages, his stock will rise back to where it was during his peak at Newcastle, and it seems unlikely that he would choose to stay at West Ham, a club that simply does not have the resources and infrastructure to compete at the top of the Premier League. The woeful defensive display at Swansea last weekend was a worrying reminder of how weak our defensive players are. Carroll has the ability to score plenty of goals, but he can’t keep them out at the other end.

If we are going into this deal happy for Carroll to do a job for us for one season and secure us a place in next year’s Premier League (when the new, more lucrative TV rights kick in) then all well and good, but that really makes this acquisition a sticking plaster, rather than a building block. After years of boom and bust, wouldn’t some stability and steady progression be preferable?

As with the Tevez-Mascherano deal, it is the unknowns that are most scary. The motivations behind the deal are key. We now know that the deal with Kia Joorabchian was made possible because he had aspirations to buy the club and saw this deal as a way of getting a foot in the door. But Terry Brown didn’t want to sell the club to him. Hence, the deal was flawed from the outset.

I cannot state the exact motivations behind this deal, and it is that which worries me. What I do know is that Andy Carroll shares the same agent, Mark Curtis, as Sam Allardyce. Curtis is also the agent of Matt Jarvis, for whom we have just paid £10.5m. He also became the agent of James Tomkins, shortly before he was rewarded with a new, much-improved contract. Read into that what you will.

I wish it were otherwise, but 25 years of supporting West Ham has taught me that if something feels too good to be true, it almost definitely is. A club with £80m debt paying £80,000-a-week wages is too good to be true. In fact, it's not really good at all, is it.

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