West Ham secured the loan signing of Athletic Bilbao left-back Adama Boiro late on deadline day.

The deal must’ve gone through very late, as he wasn’t officially announced as a West Ham player till 1 pm today. The media team impressed once again with yet another great announcement video with the defender at the famous East End pie and mash shop G Kelly.

However, the Senegalese-born defender isn’t very well known to Premier League fans; in fact, he isn’t that well-known to many in the football world despite playing for a top European club.

After three seasons in the Spanish second and third tiers at Osasuna, he earned a move to Athletic Bilbao, where he played for the B team in the third tier for a year before being promoted to the first team.

However, since making his debut in 24/25, he’s never become an important player; he has been a rotation option, with Yuri Berchiche the first choice.

In his two seasons with the Bilbao first team, he has made 45 appearances, but a lot of those were from the bench. Over his 45 appearances, he played an average of 62 minutes, so a mix of starts and sub apps.

In terms of style, Adama Boiro will offer a lot more athleticism than our other options – Scarles and Mayers. There are a lot of things this Hammers team is short of, but two of the main ones are athleticism and energy; Adama has those in abundance.

He likes to get up and down the pitch, overlap his winger and get balls into the box. Similar to Diouf in some ways, however, Diouf was at his best crossing from deep; Adama prefers to get it to the byline and hit it across goal.

This could really benefit us with two strikers, Bowen prepared to come inside and Manor Solomon always willing to run into the box for a tap-in, as we saw at Leeds a couple of seasons ago.

His final ball does let him down quite a lot at times, and his positioning can be shaky. He does profile quite similarly to Diouf; however, he is quicker, and that can sometimes cover for those deficiencies, especially in the Championship rather than the Premier League.

I think this is quite a risky signing; it has the potential to be a disaster, but equally it could be a brilliant coup for the Hammers. We do have an option to buy the defender next summer; it’s unclear how much that is currently.

It will be interesting to see how he performs in claret and blue, but he seems buzzing to be here and is exactly the right profile of left-back we needed to sign after Diouf. We will soon find out if he’s cut out for English football.