West Ham United had a chance to add two of the more surprising and potentially underrated signings of the summer, but manager Slaven Bilic turned them down.
That’s according to West Ham joint-chairman David Sullivan. Sullivan told Sky Sports that Bayern Munich’s Renato Sanches and Paris Saint-Germain’s Grzegorz Krychowiak were both offered to the club, but Bilic decided against bringing the pair in.
Krychowiak ended up at West Bromwich Albion while Sanches was reunited with former Bayern assistant coach Paul Clement at Swansea City on a season-long loan.
[ MORE: Premier League stats ]
“Grzegorz Krychowiak and Renato Sanches were both offered to the manager before their switches elsewhere, but he told us that he is happy with the squad he has,” Sullivan said. “As a Board we are behind Slaven, and he believes he has the tools to turn around our form and rectify our disappointing start to the season.”
West Ham is winless to open the Premier League season and are currently bottom of the league after three games. The club brought in Pablo Zabaleta, Joe Hart, Javier “Chicharito” Hernandez, Marko Arnautovic and Sead Hakšabanović this summer but it hasn’t brought the desired results yet.
Sullivan wasn’t finished though. He commented that the club had made a record bid for Sporting CP’s William Carvalho but that it was rejected, only for Sporting to try and revive the deal at the last minute on deadline day.
“Late last night Sporting Lisbon made contact to accept the original offer, but unfortunately it was just too late in the day, and we simply did not have enough time to put the player through a medical,” Sullivan said. “We were not prepared, as a club, to buy a player for that amount of money without him having gone through adequate medical checks.”
That forced Sporting CP to respond, with communications director Nuno Saraiva calling Sullivan a liar in a Facebook post.
The translation reads: “David Sullivan lies. At Sporting Clube de Portugal, as has already been said by its president, no proposal has been made by the player William Carvalho. The football industry is not the set of an adult film in which all obscenities are allowed. So the boss of a club demands a lot more than this intellectual pornography.
“Mr. David Sullivan has a duty to prove what he says. That is why Sporting Clube de Portugal challenges him to publicly show the proposals he claims to have been made as well as the evidence that Sporting CP received them.
“One thing is certain: Sporting CP, as it has already been said, does not cut legs to its athletes. But we have nothing to do with the performance of entrepreneurs or relatives who live at the expense of players and who are offering them a club at a club price, without a mandate, as if they were cheap supermarket merchandise. Athlete and the club, and creating regrettable situations that have already forced the sporting club of Portugal to take drastic measures to defend these characters who parasitize the lives of some players.”
