A quarter of a century later, West Ham United icon Joe Cole still cannot help but look back on Davor Suker’s underwhelming spell at Upton Park and wishes things had worked out differently.
As recently as 1997, the Croatia legend was scoring 29 goals in a single season at Real Madrid. He also claimed the Golden Boot at the French World Cup, just two years before one of the finest marksmen of his generation arrived in East London.
It soon became apparent, though, why Davor Suker went from the Santiago Bernabeu to Upton Park in such a short space of time.
“At West Ham United, I was so excited when Davor Suker came in,” Cole would recall 25 years later. “Mate, his hip was so bad. We signed him when he had a dodgy hip!
“That was typical West Ham!”
Suker’s ill-fated spell – just two goals in 11 Premier League appearances – would be something of a precursor to the so-called striker ‘curse’ which has beset the Hammers throughout the 21st century.
Niclas Fullkrug is seemingly the latest victim of that eternal hex. West Ham will be without Fullkrug yet again after the German tore his thigh muscle.
At least, with Victor Boniface a shambling shadow of the centre-forward who tore Bundesliga backlines apart for Bayer Leverkusen, the Londoners appear to have evaded another repeat of those old failings. Lessons belatedly learned, perhaps.
Victor Boniface was a West Ham United target before joining Werder Bremen
West Ham looked into a deal for Victor Boniface shortly before the transfer window closed on September 1st.
There was a reason, though, why Bayer Leverkusen were happy to let the Nigerian go.
After a move to AC Milan collapsed earlier in the summer due to a failed medical, a grisly photo showing Boniface’s injury-ravaged right knee went viral on social media.
In quotes reported by Goal, the Bundesliga champion admitted that he had even considered retirement while battling back from a second ACL rupture in the space of two years.
Had West Ham signed Boniface on the back of his superb debut season at the Bay Arena, when he scored 21 goals for Xabi Alonso – they were linked back then too, it should be said – then this would have been hailed as a coup.
But flash forward to the present day, and as Werder Bremen are finding out, the Victor Boniface of 2025 is not the Victor Boniface of 2023. Or, at least, not yet anyway.
At least his spirit remains strong, even if his body has a long way to go.
“It was clear to us that we might be taking a bit of a risk [signing Boniface] because he’s not at his 100 percent level,” Clemens Fritz, Werder Bremen’s Managing Director of Professional Football, told SPORT1 Doppelpass this month.
“Nevertheless, we have the ambition and conviction that we can get [back to his old self]. He has a few aches and pains in his body, and we have to manage them through workload management. Despite all that, we are confident we can do it.”
Fritz, meanwhile, accepts that if it wasn’t for that second ACL injury, Werder Bremen would not have even entered Boniface’s thinking. Shades of Davor Suker and West Ham, perhaps.
“To be honest, if Victor Boniface had reached his peak performance in the last few weeks and months, we wouldn’t have him in Bremen now,” Fritz says. “It was already clear to us that we had to work with him.”
Boniface ‘struggling’ as Bayer Leverkusen loanee awaits first Bundesliga goal of 2025/26
While Werder Bremen duo Romano Schmid and Samuel Mbangula combined beautifully during a 4-0 crushing of Borussia Monchengladbach in mid-September – the Austrian and the Belgian were linked with West Ham themselves this year – Boniface would step off the bench to provide his first assist in the green shirt.
That, however, is as good as it’s got.
A rare flash of that old brilliance from a footballer who, even at the age of just 24, already has the doubters wondering if his best is a thing of the past. For a West Ham side who witnessed Suker’s struggles, and saw Dean Ashton retire at 26, Boniface’s arrival would certainly have risked triggering past traumas.
No wonder AC Milan backed out of a deal which could have seen them stumping up a permanent fee of £25 million.
“He’s normally [running at] around 33 km/h. But yesterday, he wasn’t even doing 30 km/h,” Germany icon Stefan Effenberg told Sport1 after Boniface missed a glorious chance to open his Werder account during the 1-0 victory over St Pauli last time out.
“When he’s at his absolute top speed and ten percent fitter, he [has the pace to] run straight at the goalkeeper. He’s still struggling a bit.
“But now you have the international break, where you can work on that.”
