West Ham United remain favourites to gain promotion back to the Premier League with an impressive summer of business and one of the standout signings that is now beginning to flourish is that of attacker Edvin Austbo.

Following their relegation down to the Championship last season, West Ham were always expected to be title challengers, especially having kept hold of manager Nuno Espirito Santo and captain Jarrod Bowen.

The Hammers did lose some key men in Mateus Fernandes and Crysencio Summerville but most of their squad stayed intact and they were also able to add some quality additions for the level.

Aside from the likes of Joel Veltman, Arne Engels and Joel Piroe; West Ham also completed the signing of Edvin Austbo from Viking just before the close of the summer transfer window and he is beginning to flourish.

Edvin Austbo was a real coup for West Ham

In the 2025 Eliteserien season, Viking produced a surprise to win their first league title since 1991, under the co-management of Bjarte Lunde Aarsheim and Morten Jensen.

With key men such as defender Henrik Falchener and winger Zlatko Tripic, another main man and pillar of their title-winning campaign was Edvin Austbo.

He notched six goals and provides five assists in 27 Eliteserien appearances, as well as scoring a couple of goals in the UEFA Europa Conference League as he established himself as a key first-teamer for the Stavanger-based outfit.

His influence in helping Viking reach the UEFA Champions League this season was also pronounced as he scored in their 3-1 win over Dinamo Zagreb in the second-leg of their play-off round tie back in late-August, just days before completing an £18 million move to East London.

Viking put in a strong performance to share a 3-3 draw with Bayern Munich in the league phase the other day as they continue to build in a similar way to Bodo/Glimt, who reached the round of 16 of that competition last season.

Still young at the age of 21, for West Ham to poach perhaps the brightest spark of the Norway U21 side, a country in the midst of sustaining a so-called ‘golden generation’, and to lure him from the UEFA Champions League to the Championship was already a coup from West Ham – and he is beginning to show his quality or The Irons, too.

Manor Solomon will be a little concerned by the form of Edvin Austbo

Bodo/Glimt’s rise to prominence over the last half a decade or so should have given clubs reservations about signing from Norway, paradoxically.

That is because Bodo’s stars of that time have often failed to deliver when moving abroad and either ended up back in the Arctic Circle or elsewhere, such as Patrick Berg and Jens Petter Hauge – and as is perhaps repeating itself with Kasper Hogh at Celtic.

However, more established as a club, there is less of a unique and club process-driven nature about Viking, and so stars produced from there may well be able to sustain themselves elsewhere – as Austbo is beginning to show.

One man that will be concerned about his continued improvement for The Hammers will be fellow summer signing Manor Solomon.

The Israel international forward, who won the division with Leeds United in the 2024-25 campaign, has himself shown moments of quality and technical ability but his productivity and general effectiveness will be a slight concern, given that he has scored just twice and provided just two assists in nine starts thus far.

In contrast, Austbo has already matched those stats produced by Solomon, having only been given one start by Nuno thus far – in a 3-2 victory at Bolton Wanderers in September.

In that game against The Trotters, Austbo really did show his quality on the ball without having great affect in the final third, something that he has shown with goals and assists in substitute appearances against Derby County and Lincoln City.

Eventually, as the 21-year-old continues to settle into his time in England, it would be no surprise to, at their current trajectories, see Austbo leapfrog Solomon as the out and out go-to starter on the left-wing for Nuno and West Ham.

Edvin Austin is emblematic of West Ham’s ceiling

There is a feeling that Edvin Austbo will soon move his way into the Norway first-team and compete with the likes of Andreas Schjelderup, Oscar Bobb and Antonio Nusa for a spot on the wing for Stale Solbakken’s FIFA World Cup 2026 quarter-finalists.

Still young and raw, the technical side of the game is there with an abundance of potential to come and he is perhaps emblematic of West Ham’s own ceiling as a whole.

West Ham have been left frustrated at times this season with four draws and a defeat in their opening ten games of the season but their other five games have seen them win all five and score 21 goals in the process.

That level of attacking dominance and fluency may feel wholly unsustainable, at least in terms of their goals per game rate, but the standard that they can reach can blow pretty much any team in the Championship away.

As West Ham continue to develop and get into a more consistent groove with that, Austbo may well be key to accelerating their move to the top-of-the-table, where they will be expected to remain.