Sebastien Haller struggled at West Ham, but his old-fashioned center-forward talent clearly shone everywhere else.

Who is it then ?
Sébastien Romain Teddy (!) Haller is a 27-year-old 6-foot-3 Ivorian striker who plays for Ajax. He was born in Ris-Orangis, in the southern suburbs of Paris.

He made his Auxerre debut, making his professional debut on July 27, 2012, playing in Ligue 2. In his third season he was loaned to Utrecht and did very well, scoring 11 games in 17 games. and winning the club’s player of the year title. reward, even if it only remained half a season.

Haller moved permanently to the Netherlands and spent from 2015 to 2017 in Utrecht, scoring 51 times in 98 games. It was a record that caught the attention of Bundesliga Eintracht Frankfurt, which got a boost, came with 7 million euros, pushed him onto the Utrecht desk and took Seb under their arm for a four-year contract.

In two seasons, he played well and scored 33 goals in 77 games. During the 2018/19 season he was involved in 24 goals, beaten only by Robert Lewandowski.

This caught the attention of West Ham United, who decided they preferred a good striker. So they offered £ 45million – nine times more than it had cost two years before – but couldn’t find the money all at once, so they bought it on HP, in putting 75% less than the remaining 25% payable over five years, which frankly looks like they couldn’t really afford it.

It was a club record.

His first season was not a great success, scoring seven goals in 35 games, and then the club failed to make a £ 5.4million installment payout in the summer of 2020, which made that the Hammers have been reported to FIFA. Naughty cockneys. Frankfurt sold the debt to the MSD Capital investment group. In January 2021, when his second campaign did not turn out any better, West Ham cut losses and sold him to Ajax for another club record – £ 18.8million – which shows just the difference in finances between big Dutch clubs and sausage-sized Premier League clubs. .

The worst was yet to come: They had to pay the £ 5.4million owed to MSD Capital, meaning they only got around £ 13million from the sale. The Hammers had lost the £ 30million jackpot in 18 months to Haller. Congratulations to everybody. You must be very proud of your financial incompetence and incontinence. I think we can all agree that this shows an unprecedented degree of financial stupidity that would get you fired from The Apprentice, ironically enough. But whatever, here’s the Premier League with an extra £ 100million and more free money within six months.

Ajax really believed in Haller, and it turned out that breaking his transfer record wasn’t the bet it seemed to be as he scored 13 in 23 from January 2021 and in the first half of that. season, he has scored a mighty 22 in 24 games, which means in one year he has scored 33 times in 45 games.

Haller is proof that just because you’re no good in the Premier League doesn’t mean you’re a bad player, even though some of the ‘abroad is a foreign country’ experts seem to think anyone can score tons in the Hairydivhayseed, Jeff.

He also made his international debut for Cote d’Ivoire in 2020, although he had already played for France at all levels. He has three goals in six games and is heading to CAN this month as a star player and one of the fittest strikers in Europe. He has 168 club goals in 388 games.

Why love?
His performances in the Netherlands and on the European stage have been so impressive this season. In this year’s Champions League group stages, Haller has scored 10 times. He made his debut in the competition with a 5-1 away victory over Sporting on September 15, scoring twice in each half to become the first player to score four goals on his Champions League debut. since Marco van Basten for AC Milan in 1992. In the next match against BeÅŸiktaÅŸ he scored again, becoming the first player in the history of the competition to score five goals in his first two appearances. In the second leg, he scored two more goals to become the first player to score nine in five straight games. He then scored in Ajax’s last game, becoming only the second player to score in six matches in a group stage after Cristiano Ronaldo in 2017/18. He is the fastest player to reach 10 goals in the history of the competition.

Haller appears to have both feet, scoring consistently with his left and right. On top of that, being 6ft 3in tall and wide means it gets its fair share of headers. Looking at all of his strikes, he scores almost all of his goals in the box, often being the first to knock down and bounce the goalie – an old-fashioned sniffer. He shoots early when he gets the chance and also has a good bike ride in his paint box.

His performances have been so ruthless in part because he fits so well into the Ajax system. Erik ten Hag, their manager, is one of the best coaches in the game and he gets the best out of Haller in a way David Moyes couldn’t, but the player has no grudges.

“Maybe I was not having the best time of my career. Maybe things were tough enough for me and maybe the setup wasn’t perfect and I myself wasn’t at the right time. I never blame a thing, it’s just the situation for you to understand and see. It was really frustrating to see these games come up and not score a goal. I also felt like I couldn’t really find the perfect spot on the pitch or anticipate what my partner was going to do.

Looks like they didn’t set up to get the most out of him and he couldn’t fit into the system they wanted him to play in. It also looks like they didn’t do their research to spot him and thought they were buying a different kind of attacker. Even if the price tag weighed heavily on him, if you don’t have the correct team architecture then everything will be disjointed and it won’t click. That said, Haller produced some impressive bike kicks against Crystal Palace, Bournemouth and Watford.

What’s impressive about Haller is that he’s a versatile striker, capable of scoring all kinds of goals. He’s by no means a pretty player, not someone who blinds us with great skill and a lot of stuff. Put simply, he’s blunt and ruthless, an attacker who doesn’t care how he scores or what that looks like. And in that sense, he’s a bit of a throwback from a center-forward. It just goes to show that a simple striker, the first to the ball and the highest leaping taller, although somewhat dated in modern play, can still be extremely effective, perhaps precisely because defenses don’t play against such players. as often as they once did.

Three great moments
Two with the left foot, one with the right and a head:

Only 14 goals in 18 months for West Ham but some cracks here:

Its quality was clear in Frankfurt:

What people say
And what people said wasn’t much this week. Maybe most people still think of Ajax as a household cleaner. Everyone was pronouncing it A-Jax in the ’70s, but now it’s Aye-ax here – although Ah-jahx is, I’m assured by the real Dutch, the right way.

Having only spent 18 months in England, maybe no one noticed. Even so, it still disappoints me when a top European player barely registers in England. I guess all of this shows that when mainstream football culture tells us that the foreigner is a foreign country, they really mean it. Those with a pan-European vision think we are all one football nation linked by our love of the game, but in Brexit in England nothing could be further from the truth. Interest in anything outside these shores is an unpatriotic intellectual elitism. F ** kers.

Refuse to be defined. Looks like a standard target man at times, but then will produce an elastic scissor bite or jaw-dropping movie. A creator as much as a goalscorer. First and foremost, an artist, and I guess that’s why we’re all here.

– Kevin Hatchard 🎙⚽️ (@kevinhatchard) January 7, 2022

I still wonder why he didn’t get more credit for his performances at West Ham to be honest. Looks to me like he scored some goals including some cracking effort. Still, it was £ 45million (before the pandemic) and Haaland went for less than half that 6 months later …

– Mickey Gallen (@mik_jg) January 7, 2022

Future days
The problem with a club like Ajax who have such a successful striker on their books is that some useless and bloated Premier League clubs like Newcastle could once again offer him a stupid amount of money. Money that Ajax would have a hard time refusing. It must be maddening. You spot your players well, integrate them into your system and turn them into an extremely effective player, only for some wealthy Premier League clubs using their money as a surrogate for the development of their own players to show up and pay a huge amount of money. on your board.

Dissatisfaction with the grotesque financial imbalance between the Premier League and everyone else is a source of fury across Europe, which is understandable. When even a club with Ajax pedigree and history can’t compete financially, you know something is seriously wrong.

However, they may get lucky with Haller. The fact that he failed at West Ham United will certainly keep other fat English fingers out of him. The stain of failing in the best league in the world is not easily washed away by the narrow-minded Premier League leaders who will think he had his chance and missed it. They will not be inclined to touch such soiled objects. It’s the Premier League, Jeff. Then again, given that Newcastle are so desperate they would sign a ground beef wheelbarrow for £ 100million to play as a center-forward, they can make an exception.

With their next game against Benfica there is a chance to get deep into the Champions League and Haller will want to stay for that, even if there is interest from afar. It’s a great story that shows the importance of matching player to team and manager and not just expecting that spending money will buy you success.

At the Africa Cup of Nations, it will be fascinating to see how far he can help Côte d’Ivoire progress. They face Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone and Algeria, with their first match on Wednesday. Without a doubt, he will be one of the most dangerous strikers in the competition.