Pretty much all transfer talk involving West Ham this summer has centred around one position – centre-forward – and rightly so.

Rather incredibly, the last striker to score more than 15 goals for West Ham in a Premier League season was Paolo Di Canio in 1999/2000 – including the 32 strikers signed during David Gold and David Sullivan’s tutelage in east London. In fact, that underwhelming rabble have produced just 134 goals between them – averaging just 4.2 each – in nearly seven hundred games.

A star centre-forward is what eluded West Ham last summer as pursuits of Carlos Bacca and Alexandre Lacazette amounted to little, much to their detriment as they finished last season four places and 18 points worse off than the campaign previous, losing talismanic entity Dimitri Payet in the process. David Gold has already hinted signing a goal-scoring centre-forward will be the club’s priority again this summer.

“We are interested in all good players but we have to face the facts here – we have got good midfielders.

“We have got a good defence, we have got good midfielders, we have got good wingers. We need strikers and that is the key to everything for this season so we are focused first and foremost on bringing in two strikers.

“It’s clear to most fans that we are desperate for centre-forwards. Andy Carroll is injury-prone as we know, we have had an injury problem with [Diafra] Sakho and we have just got to bring in centre-forwards. We have got to find the money.

“Without strikers, you struggle in the Premier League. You struggle in any division because strikers are your key players.”

Yet, West Ham face many of the same problems this time around. Everton’s incredible spending shows how difficult it is for the Hammers to compete with those just above them in the table let alone Europe’s biggest clubs, during a transfer window in which Romelu Lukaku has moved to Manchester United for £75million and Arsenal have splashed out £52.7million on Alexandre Lacazette.

A striker merry-go-round is shaping up and unfortunately, there are plenty of clubs higher up in the food chain with more money to spend than West Ham.

However, that doesn’t mean West Ham can’t find a centre-forward before the summer window slams shut – they just have to think a little outside the box and accept this probably isn’t the summer when a long-term front-man capable of firing them up the league table for the next five to ten years comes along. A quality short-term fix is needed and looking around Europe, few options are more impressive than Wolfsburg’s Mario Gomez.

Make no mistake about it, the 32-year-old is a finisher pure and simple – he’s not the kind of forward who can take games by the scruff of the neck and to the opposition defence. His all-round play is limited and lethargic, whilst his mobility was never outstanding even in his younger years.

In fact, since moving to Bayern Munich in 2009, Gomez has averaged just 15.1 passes and 0.7 created chances per match at both club and international level.

Gomez isn’t a superstar, but he’s incredibly effective at what he does – scoring goals. In a career that has spanned five clubs and three top flights (two of which he won the Golden Boot in), the 6 foot 2 striker has produced 281 goals in 498 appearances, failing to reach double figures in the league just twice during the last eleven campaigns – both coming during a difficult, injury-thwarted spell at Fiorentina. His international record isn’t to be sniffed at either; 30 from 70 caps for the German national team.

Indeed, fox-in-the-box and all the clichés accompanying that term apply to Gomez arguably better than any striker in European football. He’s the kind of striker who can spend 89 minutes and 59 seconds of any given game looking like a competition winner thrown onto the pitch and given a jersey, only for the remaining second to produce a match-winning goal. Any frustration in watching Gomez is usually offset come the final whistle, by his world-class knack of being in the right place at exactly the right time.

Rather than a talismanic entity up front, a pure goalscorer is arguably what West Ham need more. Despite scoring only the eleventh-most goals in the Premier League last season they actually created the ninth-most chances; the real problem, especially during the first half of the season when Payet averaged the most created chances per match of any player in the league, was putting them away.

The Hammers don’t have the Frenchman at their disposal anymore, but Manuel Lanzini increasingly grew into the chief creator role at the end of last season and will be desperate for a natural goalscorer to take advantage of the supply he can prove next term.

The real question mark, of course, is how attainable Gomez actually is – one can only imagine the time West Ham wasted last summer targeting strikers they either couldn’t afford or had no real desire to play for them. But at the age of 32, a final chance to test himself in the Premier League could appeal to Gomez – especially in a World Cup year when his place in the German national team is far from certain.

Likewise, current club Wolfsburg are in a much less healthy position than West Ham, having depended on the relegation playoff last season to secure their top-flight status, and Gomez’s contract only has two years remaining, so it’s not as if the Bundesliga outfit have taken huge strides to protect his future.

Transfermarkt value Gomez at £6.38million and even if West Ham end up paying double that sum, that’s a pretty small drop in the ocean compared to many of the deals that will go down in the Premier League this summer.

So, West Ham fans, is a swoop for Gomez the answer to your club’s striker problems? Let us know by voting below…