by Louis Nixon
**West Ham defender El Hadji Malick Diouf has had an excellent start to his time at West Ham, and is already being touted to break a PL record.**
Whilst we in recent years have seen numerous West Ham players break club records, it’s not every day that West Ham and a Premier League record get mentioned within the same sentence.
Despite the Hammers’ dreadful start to the Premier League campaign, one which has seen us out of the Carabao Cup and 19th in the Premier League, a player who’s attracted himself a lot of attention is summer signing Malick Diouf.
The Senegalese wingback has started his Premier League career on the right foot, and the highly rated 21-year-old has previously been of interest to an array of World-class clubs, most recently Bayern Munich before the Hammers swooped in to sign the defender.
Malick Diouf’s contribution to the squad has seen him register three assists within the space of seven fixtures, and if his playmaking form were to continue at the current rate he is on throughout the season, he would beat the record for the most assists a Premier League defender has achieved within a season, which is currently tied between Trent Alexander-Arnold & Antonio Valencia, both with 13.
With over 30 Premier League fixtures remaining and with 10 assists needed to equal the record, it means Diouf would need to average an assist every three matches if he wanted to achieve this goal.
Diouf’s biggest standstill would be the handful of Premier League fixtures that he’d miss due to attending AFCON, but his current form at the moment is better than Trent’s & Valencia’s come the end of the season when he’d tied the record back in the 2019-20 season.
Will Malick Diouf break this Premier League record? Or are we simply living off a fever dream being just seven fixtures in…