Diafra Sakho's forgotten Swiss stop-off

The striker England remembers

Diafra Sakho's name is tied forever to a blistering opening act in English football. Signed by West Ham United from Metz in August 2014, he scored in his first six Premier League starts, equalling a record held since 1992, and was named Premier League Player of the Month for October 2014. Injuries chipped away at the rest of his Hammers career, but he still left east London in January 2018 with 24 goals in 71 appearances and a reputation as one of the division's more explosive forwards when fit.

After West Ham, Sakho moved to Rennes, scoring on his debut in a Coupe de la Ligue tie against PSG, before a loan to Turkish side Bursaspor in 2018. Those moves are footnotes in most retellings of his career. But there is one spell even the footnotes tend to skip.

The Swiss interlude

In June 2020, Sakho joined Neuchâtel Xamax of the Swiss Super League on a deal that ran until the end of that season. It was a short, low-key arrangement, arriving at a point in his career when the injuries that had so often disrupted his West Ham years had clearly taken their toll on his output.

The spell did not produce a single goal. Sakho made eight appearances for Xamax and left when his contract expired without having scored once. There is no record of a standout performance, a turning-point match or a highlight reel moment from his time in Neuchâtel, just eight games that came and went, a striker once feared across the Premier League unable to find the net in Swiss football's top flight.

It is the kind of entry that gets swallowed up in a career statistics table: a club name, a date range, zero in the goals column. Compared to the drama of his West Ham arrival, or even the chaos of a collapsed move to West Brom in 2016 after he failed a medical, the Xamax stint has almost nothing to hang a story on beyond the bare fact that it happened and that it brought him no goals.

What came after

Sakho's career continued a little longer after Switzerland. In August 2022 he signed for Nancy in France's third tier, the Championnat National, on a two-year deal. Less than a year later, in July 2023, he announced his retirement from playing.

It is a quiet way for a career to end for a player who once had West Ham's Boleyn Ground believing he might be the real deal, the first Hammers forward to score in six straight Premier League matches, and a World Cup squad member with Senegal in 2018. The Xamax spell, brief and scoreless, is unlikely to feature in any highlight package of his career. But it happened, sandwiched between a Ligue 2 title-winning run at Metz and a final chapter in French football, and it is as much a part of the Diafra Sakho story as the six-game streak everyone remembers.