It might have brought him fame and fortune, but the move to West Ham was not the one Dimitri Payet really wanted to make. Eighteen months on from his €15 million transfer from Marseille, the Hammers paid an unexpected price: the Frenchman wanted to go home so badly that he told manager Slaven Bilic he would no longer play for the club.
“I have a situation with a player," the Croat sternly admitted, later confessing feelings of anger and disappointment. "It is Dimitri Payet. He wants to leave.
The switch to England was one that the player was never truly comfortable in making. Right up until he had signed the terms to take him to Upton Park, where West Ham were still based at the time, he held out the hope that Marseille would show him the appreciation – and money – he desired.
“It’s like an elephant clinging on to the edge of a cliff by its tail grasping a daisy,” his agent Jacques-Olivier Auguste told RMC at the time, speaking of the 29-year-old’s hope of an eleventh-hour offer from OM.
It No doubt that with the Hammers, Payet gained financially to a greater extent than he ever could have in France, last February signing a bumper deal designed to ward off the Premier League’s big guns from luring him elsewhere. But the pull of Provence has proven too much.
It is a situation he had been in before, and Payet knew all too well that the balance power was in the English side’s hands.
In January 2011, he tried similar strong-arm tactics to engineer a move from Saint-Etienne to PSG but found his route blocked by an obstinate board. “My decision is made, I’ll not be back,” he said on that occasion, only to be forced into an embarrassing apology in front of the whole squad several days later. ver arrived.
“In life, like on the field, he’s a player,” Sainte boss Christophe Galtier commented to L’Equipe at that time. “Sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses. But he always takes responsibility for his actions.”
But when it came to this particular hand of poker with the Hammers, Payet's timing was astute.
Marseille, though struggling in Ligue 1, are now a far more attractive option than they were 18 months ago. Gone is Margerita Louis-Dreyfus’ tight-fisted and ill-planned regime, epitomised by the relatively meagre fee they extracted from the English club for their star player, and in has come the American Frank McCourt, who has brought with him the promise of better days ahead.
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