• £5m would have secured Everton’s Yakubu
• Marc Wilson of Portsmouth would have cost West Ham £3m

After losing their opening three league games, West Ham’s hopes of avoiding a relegation struggle this season were dealt a further blow by their precarious finances preventing the purchase of Yakubu Ayegbeni and Marc Wilson during the transfer window.

While £5m would have bought Yakubu from Everton, only £3m was required to take Wilson, the Portsmouth captain, to Upton Park as Avram Grant, the manager, sought to strengthen his squad.

Under the Israeli, West Ham have scored only once in the league so far and their next match is the visit of the champions, Chelsea, on Saturday week, which suggests they could reach mid-September still pointless.

Following a net spend during the summer of £6m for the Mexico forward Pablo Barrera, the New Zealand defender Winston Reid and Lyon’s Frédéric Piquionne, loan deals or the sale of an established player were Grant’s only viable options for further recruitment.

Although Liverpool indicated a late interest in Carlton Cole before yesterday’s closing of the transfer window, which may have allowed Ryan Babel to join in his place, Grant’s preference would have been to keep the England striker while also adding a 15-goals-a-season striker to his squad, such as Yakubu.

While Barrera cost £4m and Reid £3m, they are 23 and 22 respectively and Grant has said they may need time to settle in. Piquionne’s ability to score enough goals to support Cole is also moot, after he managed only five in 34 appearances when on loan at Portsmouth last season.

There was better news for Grant, though, after the Premier League confirmed that Lars Jacobsen, a 30-year-old right-back, could join on a one-year deal from Blackburn Rovers after paperwork for the free transfer arrived close to yesterday’s 6pm deadline.

Kieron Dyer, meanwhile, the injury-plagued midfielder who has started West Ham’s last two league games, is confident the club’s form will improve. “We were disappointed again on Saturday,” he told the West Ham website. “Man United away is not going to determine how our season goes but it’s another 3-0 loss. It would have been good to get some kind of result just to get the confidence up. We’ve got two weeks now [ahead of Chelsea] and we’ve got to get the confidence from somewhere because when we do click and get it together, we are not a bad team.”

Dyer, who is now 31, added that Chelsea can be defeated: “We believe we can beat Chelsea. It’s a completely different game, a derby game and form will go out of the window. We’ll have the crowd and it’s one of those games where Scotty [Parker] gets in the tackles and gets the crowd going, so it’s going to be a completely different challenge to Man United. So who knows?

“The manager is trying to change the mentality of players and we have to change it because, like I said, we have to start winning games. We’re obviously playing catch-up already.

“Obviously last season was a massive struggle but where I’m coming from, for me personally, I’m just buzzing to play football again.”

David Sullivan, the co-owner, said tonight he was happy with West Ham’s recruitment he did hint at the club’s financial difficulties. He said: “We have combined youth with experience this window and are pleased with the work we have done, even in these challenging times for the club.”

West Ham UnitedTransfer windowJamie Jacksonguardian.co.uk

• Italian’s stance has shifted over past week
• Manager will seek settlement of up to £1.9m to leave

Gianfranco Zola is set to leave West Ham United at the end of the season but intends to sit down with the owners to secure a dignified, negotiated exit with a payoff rather than quitting as manager.

Zola’s initial intention had been to leave once West Ham had secured their future in the Premier League but his stance is understood to have shifted over the past week and, rather than walking away and appearing to accept full responsibility for this season’s toils, he will now seek a settlement over the remaining two years of a contract worth £1.9m a season.

The Italian’s relationship with the co-owners, David Gold and David Sullivan, has been fractious at best. He has become more defiant in part because of the support he has received from the players and is deeply frustrated by Sullivan’s comments that all of the squad, bar the midfielder Scott Parker, will be available for sale this summer.

Gold said he hoped Zola would stay as manager after Saturday’s win against Wigan Athletic all but mathematically kept West Ham in the top flight for another season. The co-owner was speaking sincerely but the words put the onus on Zola to quit if he were unhappy and the manager is now less minded to do that.

Gold and Sullivan will meet Zola to discuss his future after the final game of the season on 9 May. “Franco has indicated he doesn’t want to discuss his position until the end of the season and that’s fine by us,” said Sullivan, who has yet to indicate publicly whether he wants Zola to stay on. “We shall ask him what he has in mind, we will see what he wants to do.”

There was an indication that West Ham may well be planning for a future without Zola in the £4m bid the club has made for Graham Dorrans, the West Brom midfielder. This was rejected by Jeremy Peace, the West Brom chairman, who said: “As I have stressed several times since we achieved promotion over two weeks ago our aim now is to retain our core players and try to strengthen our squad around them. I want to make it clear again that Graham Dorrans is not for sale.”

With Zola’s future in doubt any interest in Dorrans would surely have been driven by Gold and Sullivan rather than a manager who might soon be leaving.

Zola came close to resigning at the end of last month when he returned to his native Sardinia to consider his position after a run of six consecutive defeats, which threatened West Ham’s Premier League status. But Zola returned to declare he wanted to stay to help West Ham avoid relegation, and his team collected seven points from the next four games to make the club all but secure. The Italian has had a particularly difficult season, with West Ham’s onfield struggles compounded by fragile finances and the criticism players received from Sullivan, who bought West Ham with Gold in January.

Following West Ham’s 3-1 home defeat by Wolverhampton Wanderers on 23 March Sullivan published an open letter on the club’s website in which he described that performance as “shambolic and pathetic”. This caused Zola an unwanted distraction ahead of the following game with Stoke City, which was lost, prompting the manager’s bout of soul-searching in Sardinia.

West Ham’s difficult season was also reflected by Sullivan insistence that only Parker was not for sale. He said: “Other than Scott Parker, there is not a player we wouldn’t sell if it was the right bid. Scott will not be sold and we will be buying more than we are selling. There will be no fire-selling and we will enhance the squad, not diminish it. We will have to shake up the pack because there is no point kidding ourselves otherwise we will be in the same position next year – the table doesn’t lie.”

Hesaid although Matthew Upson would be offered a new contract, his England colleagues Robert Green and Carlton Cole would not. “We’ll make [Upson] a proposal for a new three-year contract. We would give him an offer of a comparable level to what he is on now. But Upson has a year to go so if we get a good offer we will take it.”

Gianfranco ZolaWest Ham UnitedPremier LeagueDominic FifieldJamie Jacksonguardian.co.uk