All you need to know about Edson Álvarez | Will West Ham’s £35m defensive midfielder be a success?

Will reserve my judgement on Alvarez but I still think we only signed him due to his aerial threat from set-pieces.

Enjoyed that …

I expect him to mostly warming up the bench under this dinosaur moyes 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿⚒⚒

Mexico in the house 🇲🇽

Alvarez is gonna big superb for us …. and even better under the new coach when moyes is gone by September

I’m from Mexico, so I have been watching Álvarez for a long time. I believe I can give you some unbiased views on how he performs.

In short: Thanks to Ajax, Edson has learned a very modern and functional style of how to become a competent and flexible defending midfielder.

Criticism by Ajax fans: A minority of Ajax fans are inflexible in their expectations, and adore players that are elegant, mobile, creative and supremely talented on their footwork (think Frenkie de Jong). Alvarez isn’t this. He’s been called “the vacuum cleaner of Ajax”. He does the dirty, physical work of Ajax. He isn’t as mobile and creative as other players, and some Ajax fans cannot get over this. These are the only real criticisms, and the reasons why they are inconsistent.

The good: As a defensive midfielder, Álvarez is incredibly competent. He looks brilliant in the Dutch league, he looks great in the UCL and he is invaluable for Mexico in the international level. What Álvarez gives you is he makes the opposing midfield disappear, so the offensive players receive no balls from the midfield and become disconnected. This causes the opposing team to be forced into long balls, which facilitates the job of your defenders. Edson is great in recuperating balls relatively high up, he is great in aerial game, be it defensively or offensively in any level you put him against (UCL and international). A good example was against Poland in the World Cup: Álvarez made Piotr Zieliński (Napoli) disappear, so Robert Lewandowski got almost no balls to his feet (and César Montes invalidated Robert Lewandowski whenever he did recieve anything). So between Álvarez and a competent CB, they took Poland’s teeth away. Álvarez is insanely strong mentally and a very hard worker, his level of physical work in the pitch is world class and he never gets injured.

The only scenarios where Álvarez looks bad: When he doesn’t trust the defenders, he compensates for them, plays further back and leaves space for the opposing midfield to appear once more. If Edson feels the need to do more than he should and can, he can’t handle everything (as he shouldn’t be expected to). His priority is making sure his team isn’t scored against, so if the weakest link is in the defence, he pulls himself back to reinforce that, and if he needs to do that, the opposing team can now handle transitions with less opposition and they become more dangerous.

Room to grow? One of the best things about Álvarez is he is still improving at a very fast pace. He learns quickly, trains hard and month to month you can see very clear growth, which makes me think he will have high resell value if that is what you want and West Ham fans will grow to like him more and more because of how much he improves over time. My guess is he will adapt to Moyes’ system better and better as time goes by.

I've seen the statistic saying he makes 9.31 progressive passes per match, and he's was 1st

Lets pray Moyes doesn't ruin another mexican's career

Why should he have more defensive duties? If the template of the West Ham system become so shackled that it is inevitable to at the centre of a crap defence rather than being competitive and actually trying to win the games by actually just for once trying to win them by actually attempting to attack and score goals. Who is this madman we are lumbered with that doesn’t have a clue about creating a well balanced team that needs professional representation that neglects the midfield and striker elements of a sensibly constructed team actually playing every match with the intension of winning.

Heck yeah!’ Perfect pick!!! Will bring a huge Mexican fan base

Upgrade on peclan

I wonder is it time to give the ownership of this club just a little bit of credit! They have pushed this club into being one the best supported clubs in the country, consistently backed their managers with loyalty and substantially bigger transfer budgets than we have EVER seen at this club . Added to this European football for an unprecedented 3rd consecutive season and Silverware to boot ! Mark my words this will be a positive transfer window, we will end up with a well balanced squad of world players with a solid British backbone capable of competing for top 6 or 7 . Might not be popular but its how I feel … COYI

Doesn't matter now if we sell Paqueta!!!