Sam Allardyce spent four years in the West Ham United dugout but, when asked to reflect on the players who have forced their way out of his roster, the former England manager speaks out on two who actually ended up at Upton Park.
Before taking charge of the Hammers in 2011, dragging a previously underachieving club back to the Premier League at the first time of asking and following that up with a top-ten finish, Allardyce lost a couple of players to his eventual employers.
He had only just been named Newcastle manager before Scott Parker forced through a £7 million move to West Ham United in July 2007.
Three years later, Allardyce green-lit Blackburn Rovers’ £3.5 million sale of Benni McCarthy to the club from East London.
It’s fair to say both men would leave very different legacies in claret and blue. While McCarthy would be labelled West Ham’s worst signing in the Premier League era by the Daily Mail, Parker would play the best football of his career at Upton Park.
He was even named the Football Writers’ Player of the Year in 2011, despite the relegation which saw Allardyce parachuted in.
Sam Allardyce explains why Newcastle sold Scott Parker to West Ham United
The now-Burnley manager could yet have unfinished business, too. Hammers News reported, shortly before Nuno Espirito Santo replaced Graham Potter, that former skipper and now sporting director Mark Noble admires Parker’s impressive track record at Turf Moor.
Speaking on the latest edition of the No Tippy Tappy Football podcast, meanwhile, Allardyce singled out Parker and McCarthy when asked to shed some light on how it feels to see a player force their way out the door.
“Scott did it when I was at Newcastle,” Allardyce says. “It wasn’t too bad. It was a straightforward ‘I need to leave and you need to get rid of me as quick as you possibly can’ [situation].
“I had only been in the job, I don’t know, two days?
“I think there were two reasons [why Parker wanted to go]. I understood the first reason. He felt the Newcastle fans didn’t like him. And the Newcastle fans, if they don’t like what they see, [they] show their disapproval. Rightly so. But they also get behind you extremely well if they do like you.
“I think he had only been there one season. What do you do? Can’t stay here, can’t cope with it, need to move.
“There was another club which had already contacted him, which was West Ham. Because we got the right money, I think it benefitted me because [before Parker left] there wasn’t as much money as I expected to build the team [at Newcastle].
“I would have preferred to have kept Scott Parker, don’t get me wrong.”
Allardyce was happy to let Blackburn Rovers icon Benni McCarthy go to Upton Park
Parker would come to represent £7 million extremely well spent. The same could not be said of McCarthy, and his £3.5 million price-tag.
Blackburn’s third-highest all-time record Premier League marksman would not even get off the mark for the Hammers. McCarthy made only two top-flight starts, failed to score a single goal in 14 matches, and eventually left ahead of schedule when his contract was terminated.
“There were a few of those [players who demanded to be sold, like] Benni McCarthy at Blackburn,” Allardyce adds. “Strangely enough, he went to West Ham as well!
“His agent rang up the [Blackburn] chairman and said, ‘He’s out of the country and he won’t be coming back’.
“So I said, ‘the best thing to do is [to sell] if we have the right price. I think we can cope without him. We’re on a difficult run at Blackburn to try and stay up but, yeah, we can cope with the centre-forwards we’ve got because we can play Chris Samba up front in the end, anyway’.
“So, we sold Benni to West Ham.”
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