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When Michail Antonio’s decade-long stint at West Ham came to an end in 2025, he left the club as one of their most-loved players in recent years.
His time in east London saw him become the club’s all-time Premier League goalscorer, a feat that few would have predicted following his initial struggles to break into the Hammers’ team.
After a memorable debut, the Jamaican international endured a difficult introduction to Premier League life, with an amusing social media joke capturing his frustrating start.
Antonio on his Premier League debut and social media joke
“The first game where I got on was at Man City,” Antonio recalls to FourFourTwo . “I came on at left wing, but I basically played left-back because we were under that much pressure, as we were winning 2-1.
“I didn’t get an opportunity to take anybody on as a winger.”
Antonio was able to enjoy a successful debut as the Hammers held on to a 2-1 victory, but the forward admits that because he didn’t watch a lot of football on TV, he did not know all of the players he was lining up against.
“Yeah, I went on not really knowing many of City’s players,” he admits. “Obviously I knew Yaya Toure and Sergio Aguero, but the players that they’d just signed, I didn’t have a clue.”
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Despite helping his side earn the points on his debut, Antonio then found playing time harder to come by. As he struggled for minutes, former David Gold was tricked into retweeting a search for a missing person, with the accompanying picture one of Antonio.
“Yeah, it’s all crazy,” he continues. “After that City game, I sat on the bench for two months and didn’t get onto the field.
“On TV, they’d show me just sat there, so everybody kept calling me ‘The Hologram’.
David Gold retweets picture of missing person - turns out to be #WHUFC's Michail Antonio.https://t.co/OyQ6pRFQrE pic.twitter.com/MwT3hxUsyo November 5, 2015
David Gold retweets picture of missing person - turns out to be #WHUFC's Michail Antonio.https://t.co/OyQ6pRFQrE pic.twitter.com/MwT3hxUsyo November 5, 2015
“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’s probably why I didn’t play 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
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