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Diafra Sakho's decision to leave £200,000 Lamborghini at West Ham sums up the club… the training ground isn't up to scratch and Europe laughs at scouting system and infrastructure
Diafra Sakho abandoned orange Lamborghini when he left for Rennes in January
The under-performing striker earned enough money to disregard a supercar
Money is being thrown at average players as Premier League TV income balloons
West Ham have lost four games from four despite spending £100m this summer
Meanwhile, their Rush Green training ground is in desperate need of investment
By Ian Herbert
The story of the orange Lamborghini sums up the malaise at the heart of West Ham United, a club with another new manager, another £100m of summer acquisitions and four straight Premier League defeats to show for it all.
The vehicle was parked up in the same bay for days last spring at the club's Rush Green training ground and when a regular visitor asked why, it emerged that it belonged to striker Diafra Sakho, who had left the club for Stade Rennais in France, a full three months earlier.
'He'd just bought it and left it there,' a source tells Sportsmail. 'The sheer waste of it, sitting there for everyone who walked past to see.
A picture of Sakho's first Lamborghini Aventador, which he crashed into a wall in January 2016. The car left in West Ham's training ground car park (not pictured) was orange.
The gargantuan incomes of Premier League football allowed a bang average forward, who has since flunked in the French league and been loaned on to Bursaspor in Turkey, to view the idea of selling a £200,000 vehicle as simply not worth the effort. Yet the same river of TV money has done pitifully little for the basic football fabric and infrastructure of the club he left behind.
When David Moyes made use of his manager's changing room at Rush Green last season, he was surprised to find 14 people also occupying it. He discovered that he was expected to share.
When the 'Beast from the East' struck last winter, Moyes had to take the players into the gym as there was inadequate undersoil heating at Rush Green. The gym wasn't big enough, so extra Astroturf was laid outside it as well.
A threadbare infrastructure would be easier to accept if West Ham possessed one of the more fundamental requirements of Premier League success - a serviceable system to find and buy the best players.
'They have a handful of scouts and no target lists,' one source tells Sportsmail. 'The transfer policy seems to stem from the same four or five agents calling [co-owner] David Sullivan and telling him what he needs.
'I've not come across a Premier League club like it for sheer lack of football infrastructure. The Premier League income affords them this way to try to buy their way out of trouble. The rest of Europe just laughs at this kind of thing.'
Here is a club which does not seem capable of looking beyond which players are on the market. It is thought that David Moyes had wanted to overhaul the club's antiquated and random way of buying players, earlier this year, having built his success at Everton on a meticulous system.
There were promises to fans from Sullivan that things would change after the home defeat to Burnley last March provoked a pitch invasion. But West Ham's big bang instead came with the arrival of Manuel Pellegrini, who has brought Mario Husillos, sporting director of Malaga, a club relegated from La Liga last season. Very early days, but as yet no improvement.
Pellegrini has been decisive on some matters. He insisted on a three-year deal for Jack Wilshere, while Sullivan was inclined to offer the midfielder one year. New goalkeeper Lukasz Fabianski and the new central defensive combination are solid enough. Yet the initial signs are of a club still lacking any sense of what kind of football they want to play, or of how to bring the best from their players.
Marko Arnautovic is the best player on the club's books yet the very last thing he needs is a manager who tells him so. Moyes reined in the mighty ego and reaped the rewards, managing him more successfully than Mark Hughes at Stoke or Slaven Bilic. The more affable Pellegrini, whose man-management touch is much lighter, has made Arnautovic captain. His old Stoke traits seem to be back.
Few, if any, players will tell you Pellegrini has put a little fear in them. That was never much of a problem at Manchester City, where director of football Txiki Begiristain led the assembly of a vast squad. But there was a legacy. Pep Guardiola made Yaya Toure shed a stone after succeeding Pellegrini.
Life at West Ham is vastly less comfortable and on the evidence of the first four games, the club need steel from their manager's office. There was a fecklessness in Saturday's last-gasp defeat to Wolves which took us back to the dog days of the Bilic era and asked why Sullivan considered Pellegrini to be an upgrade on Moyes in the first place.
Players out of position, not looking for each other and barely co-existing on the field. Some dreadful decision-making from Aaron Cresswell ahead of the late goal. Three rolls of the managerial dice on three substitutes who were not remotely interested in defending.
West Ham have no intentions of parting company with their new manager, having invested so heavily in him. On Monday, Sullivan declared: 'The manager has our 100 per cent support. It's a difficult moment but we must have a strong reaction.'
Pellegrini has also demanded an upgrade at Rush Green, as Sportsmail revealed in July, though that will have minimal impact against the London Stadium's next three visitors: Chelsea, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur.
But the upgrade needs to come on the pitch - and fast.
