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When Michail Antonio’s 10-year spell at West Ham ended in 2025, he departed the club as one of the most popular players they have had in recent years.

His years in east London saw him become West Ham’s all-time top scorer in the Premier League, an achievement very few would have expected after his early difficulties in forcing his way into the Hammers side.

Following a memorable debut, the Jamaican international went through a tough start to life in the Premier League, and a funny social media prank summed up how frustrating that beginning was.

“The first game where I got on was at Man City,” Antonio tells FourFourTwo. “I came on at left wing, but I more or less played at left-back because we were under so much pressure, as we were winning 2-1.

“I didn’t get a chance to take anybody on as a winger.”

Antonio did enjoy a winning debut as the Hammers held on for a 2-1 victory, but the forward says that because he did not watch much football on TV, he did not know all the players he was up against.

“Yeah, I went on not really knowing many of City’s players,” he says. “Obviously I knew Yaya Toure and Sergio Aguero, but the players they had just signed, I had no idea.”

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Even though he helped his side take the points on his debut, Antonio then found it much harder to get game time. As he struggled for minutes, former David Gold was fooled into retweeting a search for a missing person, with the picture attached being of Antonio.

“Yeah, it’s all crazy,” he goes on. “After that City game, I sat on the bench for two months and did not get on the pitch.

“On TV, they would show me just sat there, so everyone kept calling me ‘The Hologram’.

“Then someone tweeted a picture of me to David Gold saying ‘Missing person’, and he retweeted it.

“It was hilarious, fans have good banter and that was good, to be fair. It was David Sullivan who signed me, Slaven Bilic didn’t think I was going to be able to handle the Premier League.

“That is probably why I did not play for the first few months, until everybody got injured – then I had to play at right-back.”

Michail Antonio’s autobiography 'Humans Not Robots', published by HarperCollins, is available now

Chris Flanagan Senior Staff Writer