Former Hammer retires and becomes Sporting Director at Serie A club
With a mass exodus underway at West Ham, it's always refreshing when former players like Pedro Fornals celebrates a goal with a Hammers cross during a preseason match versus Arsenal, paying tribute to his former club. Or when you hear Declan Rice checks in with academy coach Mark Phillips and tells him he is a West Ham fan and asks about staff and the club. Another one of those die-hard West Ham alumni is Pedro Obiang, who retired this week and immediately accepted a job as the Sporting Director of Serie A club AC Monza.
Obiang closes the book on a career that took him to Sampdoria, West Ham, Sassuolo, and finally Monza, but for supporters of the club, the news lands as the retirement of one of their own, a player whose four years in East London left a mark well beyond his appearance count.
The 34-year-old now-retired midfielder joined West Ham from Sampdoria in the summer of 2015 and went on to make 116 appearances, establishing himself as a reliable, unglamorous presence in midfield during a period of real transition for the club. Obiang was part of the squad that moved from Upton Park to London Stadium. He was never the player carrying the club's biggest headlines, but he was a dependable, popular figure in the dressing room and with supporters, someone who did the less celebrated defensive-midfield work that let others further forward take the credit. His thunderbolt strike against Tottenham was voted the club's goal of the season for 2017/18. It was proof that even a player known primarily for his positional discipline had more to his game than just doing the dirty work.
When Obiang left for Sassuolo in 2019 for a fee in the region of £7.2m, it wasn't a departure many West Ham fans celebrated. He'd fallen down the pecking order as Rice's emergence changed the shape of the midfield, but plenty of supporters felt his experience and reliability would be missed. That feeling only grew as West Ham struggled defensively in the seasons that followed his exit.
Always loyal
What has set Obiang apart in the years since, though, is that his affection for West Ham never really stopped once he left. Even settled in Serie A with Sassuolo, he continued to speak warmly about his time at the club and kept half an eye on how his old side was getting on. His loyalty has always endeared him to fans and was the kind of lingering attachment that never faded just because a shirt number gets reassigned.
That loyalty produced one of the more understated pieces of transfer business in recent West Ham history. When David Moyes and the club's recruitment team were doing their due diligence on Gianluca Scamacca in the summer of 2022, they turned to Obiang, who was Scamacca's teammate at Sassuolo at the time, for a character reference. Moyes later confirmed as much directly, saying the club had received real encouragement about Scamacca from their former player who had played alongside him at the Mapei Stadium.
Obiang himself went further, saying he'd spoken highly of the club to Scamacca directly and told him he'd have no problems adjusting to the Premier League. It's a small footnote in the wider story of that transfer, but a telling one: years after leaving, and while still on the books of the very club Scamacca was being sold from, Obiang was quietly doing recruitment work for West Ham simply because he still cared.
That's the part of Obiang's story that elevates him above a standard "solid, unspectacular servant" tribute. Plenty of players move on and rarely look back. Obiang left, kept his loyalty intact, and despite the move for Scamacca not working out, it still ended up directly helping bring a high profile transfer to East London. Four years in claret and blue clearly meant something to him that didn't expire when his contract did. As he moves into the next stage of his career, it's fitting that he will be leading recruitment and development at Monza. West Ham supporters have every reason to send him off as one of their own.
