The £20m ideal James Ward-Prowse replacement who can improve West Ham with and without the ball

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West Ham may be about to replace James Ward-Prowse - and that makes a lot of sense when you start to look at the stats.

There seems to be a perception among players who don’t watch James Ward-Prowse every week that he’s a better all-round player than he perhaps is. The West Ham United man is a remarkably productive player and a quite exceptional set-piece taker, but in live play he seldom he doesn’t reach the same levels the best central midfielders in the Premier League do – and that may explain why the Hammers could be about to replace him.

Two separate reports going around the media appear to tell the full story. For the past couple of weeks, West Ham have been widely reported to be close to agreeing a £20m deal for Paris Saint-Germain midfielder Carlos Soler with the only hurdle remaining being the fact that Julen Lopetegui’s side need to sell some players in order to be able to free up the funds. That was all straightforward enough – but a fuller picture of the way Lopetegui wants to build his squad can be obtained by more recent news that the Spaniard is looking to let Ward-Prowse go.

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Very much a David Moyes signing, the 11-cap England international has only been a bench player for the first two matches of the Premier League season and is now viewed as dispensable, according to a variety of media outlets including The Athletic (paywalled) and Hammers News, who claim that Nottingham Forest have made a bid for his services. That could free up the funds to sign Soler, and it would likely be a good move as Lopetegui looks to strengthen and deepen his midfield.

Letting Ward-Prowse go would divide the fan base to a certain degree. His mastery of the dead ball makes him an extremely potent weapon, and he managed seven goals and seven assists during his first season at the London Stadium, his fourth consecutive season reaching double figures for goal contributions after scoring 27 in three years for Southampton. That he is one of the best set piece takers in world football is indisputable. The issue is that the rest of his game leaves something to be desired.

It’s strange that a player who can whip a stationary ball 50 yards onto a ten pence piece wouldn’t be so effective with a moving one, but he generates as many goals for himself and others from dead balls as he does from open play (0.48 goals each per 90 minutes last season), which is a noticeably lop-sided statistic given how much more time the ball spends in play than it does waiting to be kicked after a foul or a corner. Nor is his broader passing game especially strong – an 83.4% completion rate, for instance, puts him in about the middle of the pack for midfielders in the ‘big five’ leagues.

The larger issue, however, is that he doesn’t offer enough defensive cover to be a top-level option in a double pivot. He only made 40.9% of his tackles last season and that was his best mark in three years – during the 2021/22 season, for instance, he made just 27.1%, an extremely poor number for a player in a defensively critical position. He lacks the positional sense and technical skill to be an effective screen for the centre-backs. Compare his success rate against opposing dribblers to new signing Guido Rodríguez, for instance – the Argentine made 61.8% of his tackles last year for Real Betis, making more than twice as many per match while registering more interceptions, clearances, blocked passes and shots and completing more of his passes. Take away the set pieces, and Ward-Prowse is a considerably less effective deep-lying midfielder.

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All of which explains why Lopetegui wants to make a change, but not why Soler might be an upgrade. Soler is a fine player who was exceptional for Valencia for several seasons, twice hitting double figures for goals in La Liga, was influential in the 2019 Copa del Rey win and was a member of Spain’s 2022 World Cup squad, missing a penalty in the shootout defeat to Morocco – but he’s stagnated after two frustrating seasons at PSG, where the club insisted on using him repeatedly as a winger. Now out of Luis Enrique’s plans entirely, he is more than willing to move on as soon as possible.

But while the last two years has served to prove that he is very much a central midfielder rather than a wide player, he isn’t an especially effective defensive midfielder either – indeed, while he covered a lot of the midfield during his Valencia days, he was seldom looking to press and challenge for the ball but to find space to receive passes. Swapping Soler for Ward-Prowse directly would be a mistake, but instead it would allow West Ham to play Soler as a number ten while Tomáš Souček played deeper.

In both of West Ham’s Premier League games this season, it’s the Czech who has been playing as the furthest midfielder forward, in behind and between the front three and often ahead of the wingers – against Aston Villa, only Michail Antonio had an average position which saw him further downfield. That has involved making Souček play against type. For all that he is a physical aerial threat, he is not a creative player and doesn’t have the passing range or dribbling skills to be a ten for the long haul.

With Soler in the side, Souček, Rodríguez and Lucas Paquetá (who has played alongside the Argentine in the pivot so far this season) would be able to rotate minutes in front of the defence while the 27-year-old Spaniard took on the creative duties further forward. And whichever two players were in that pivot, they would be far more effective defensively than Ward-Prowse was – while Soler should offer much more going forward in open play.

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Soler has the vision, passing range, technique and movement to find space and use it well. He isn’t a huge goalscorer (of his last 25 league goals for Valencia, 15 were penalties) but he is dynamic and unlocks players around him, drawing defenders out of position and generating space for his team-mates while playing accurate long passes to get his team going forward. And while he’s capable of being superb in a team that looks to break forward at pace, he’s also a controlled and composed passer who’s happy to keep it simple when slow possession is called for, shifting into pockets of space all over the middle of the pitch to knock passes around.

The simple fact is that on paper, a midfield without Ward-Prowse but with Soler is more well-rounded, better defensively and more dangerous on the counter-attack, even if you do lose those wonderful set plays, and that will at times feel like a painful concession. That handful of free-kicks sent curling into the top corner every season are hard to replace emotionally, but if more goals are scored and prevented from open play as a result of the change it remains the right thing to do.

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