Moyes shocked to see West Ham's striker joining Ajax this January

The 57-year-old coach says the Hammers didn't anticipate selling Sebastien Haller in the January move window and concedes they are not prepared to get new players. 

The 26-year-old striker left the east London side after only a year and a half at the club, getting back to the

to join

Ajax

in an arrangement worth €22.5 million (£20m/$28m). 

The deal denotes a critical misfortune for the Hammers, who purchased Haller from Eintracht Frankfurt for a £35m ($48m) expense. 

Haller has found the net ten times in 48 appearances in the

, including three goals in 16 fixtures this season; however, Moyes says they didn't anticipate selling the French-born until Ajax made a move.

In spite of making room in the crew, the coach feels it will require some investment for them to orchestrate new signings. 

"I think that the Seb Haller situation was simply that we got an offer, we didn't expect it, we weren’t planning to lose Seb this window," Moyes told reporters.

"He’s done great for us, he's won a few games recently with his goals, so we wish him well.

"I think it's a really good move for him to go to Ajax and it was something which maybe if we didn't take this offer now maybe we would not have got it at a later stage, so we just felt it was the right thing to do, but it certainly wasn't planned.

"You need to make sure that you have spaces to bring people in, if you don't have spaces, then all you do is gather players, and it becomes more difficult.

"So, part of the job is to create room for it, we have now created room that we can bring players in. Are we ready for that? No, not really. But we will go along and we'll do what we can, and we will try and bring in what we think are the right players."

West Ham additionally permitted Robert Snodgrass to take his leave this month, seeing him join West Brom after playing only three brief Premier League games this term.

"Robert Snodgrass was going to be out of contract in the summer and with us having Andriy Yarmolenko and Jarrod Bowen playing in a similar position, it made it something which we wanted to help him with," Moyes said.

"Snoddy’s been fantastic for the club, he is a great character, he’s great around the club, we didn’t want to lose him for those reasons. But also at this moment in time, I couldn’t guarantee him that I was going to give him another contract for next year. So we felt the right thing to do, the fair thing to do, was to allow him to move on."

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