Julien Faubert rejected the advances of several leading European clubs to cross the Channel to join West Ham United from Bordeaux for a £6.1m fee in July 2007.

Born in Le Havre, Faubert headed south in 1998 when he was offered a place at the AS Cannes youth academy, famous for nurturing such talents as Zinedine Zidane, Johan Micoud and Patrick Vieira. But after starting out as a right-back, he soon found himself pushed into midfield, where he went on to make 45 senior appearances for the Cote d'Azur club before moving to Bordeaux in September 2004.

During the subsequent 2005/06 campaign, Faubert collected a runners-up medal after Bordeaux finished second behind Olympique Lyonnais to qualify for the Champions League. The fast and powerful midfielder then earned a call-up to the French national squad following the World Cup finals in Germany and he duly made his international debut against Bosnia on 16 August 2006, becoming the first player to wear the famous number 10 shirt following the retirement of Zidane after his dismissal against winners Italy in the Berlin final.

Certainly Zidane would have been proud of the young pretender, who scored the winning goal in a 2-1 victory, but that strike for Les Bleus meant Faubert's wife was called upon to pay an unusual forfeit - she had to dive fully-clothed into the family swimming pool after losing a bet with her husband that he would score on his international debut.

Faubert went on to make 34 appearances for Bordeaux during the 2006/07 season, scoring five goals, including two in the Champions League, as the French side narrowly missed out on qualification to the last 16 of the competition, from a group that included Liverpool, PSV Eindhoven and Galatasaray. Having scored eleven goals and created countless others in 92 league and cup outings for Bordeaux, Faubert had emerged as one of the hottest properties in French football and Alan Curbishley beat off the attentions of AS Roma and eleventh-hour interest from Rangers to bring him to London in July 2007.

After impressing in a friendly at Dagenham and Redbridge, disaster struck when Faubert ruptured his achilles tendon on 17 July in the club's second pre-season encounter against Czech outfit Sigma Olomouc in Austria. That saw him go under the knife in Strasbourg, where his surgeon had previously undertaken successful operations on French World Cup winners Zidane and Lilian Thuram. After an intensive rehabilitation programme, Faubert made his debut as an 88th-minute substitute in the 2-1 home win against Fulham on 12 January. Five days before, he had impressed in a 45-minute run-out for the reserves at Aston Villa, scoring a superb solo goal just 39 seconds after kick-off.