New York Mets star Pete Alonso on his love for Chelsea and Didier Drogba

Baseball’s biggest names have been tasked with winning UK fans over to their sport this summer and they already have a fitting blueprint for success, as devoted converts to the Premier League.

The third running of Major League Baseball’s London Series will see the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies arrive at West Ham for two games in early June.

These two old rivals are charged with growing the sport in Europe and selling out a 60,000-seat stadium - something none of their 30 clubs get close to back home but which was achieved in east London in both 2019 by the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, and last summer when the Chicago Cubs and St Louis Cardinals finally completed a series delayed three years by the pandemic.

While priority number one is gaining bragging rights in Europe against a division rival and erasing any memory of a turbulent 2023 campaign, a large section of the Mets locker room have an eye on the heroes that light up their clubhouse screens every Saturday morning.

Fearsome slugger Pete Alonso is capable of delivering baseballs beyond the fences of any stadium, never mind the slightly more snug ballpark he will enter in London, and his thoughts are locked on starring in the same city as a man born more than 5,000 miles from his native Tampa, Florida.

‘I’m really excited for London - Chelsea is my favorite football club,’ says Alonso. ‘Didier Drogba is my favorite. He’s done now but I think my favorite performance of his was against Bayern Munich in the 2012 Champions League final. The dude is an absolute savage.

‘It started in the 2006 World Cup watching him play for Ivory Coast. Chelsea was his club then and seeing him play, the dude is a very physical player. He’s also a guy that plays with power