1987–88 West Ham United F.C. season
season of football team
For the 1987–88 West Ham United F.C. season in English football, West Ham United finished 16th in the league.
Season summary
Again John Lyall waited until three quarters of the season had passed before bringing any new signings to the club. Even so, the two players he did eventually bring in, Julian Dicks and Leroy Rosenior, would play a major part in helping the club to just avoid relegation for the second season running.
Alan Dickens had to play most of the season as a striker as Frank McAvennie had signed for Celtic without a replacement being found until Rosenior's arrival.
West Ham finally finished in 16th place in the First Division.
Stewart Robson, a midfielder, won the club player of the year award, although Tony Cottee continued to score the most goals, with 13 in the league and 15 in all competitions. However, Cottee would be sold to Everton for a national record £2.2 million by the start of the following season, leaving manager Lyall with a big gap to fill in the forward positions as he had lost his two highest goalscorers within a year of each other.
The public source identifies “1987–88 West Ham United F.C. season” as season of football team. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around West, United and season.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 6, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4584250. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “1987–88 West Ham United F.C. season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.