da luck： With Raheem Sterling set to leave Anfield this summer for a mind-boggling £50million, surely football has reached its insanity tipping point? Of course not, says Stephen Tudor. Clubs squandering their fortunes is nothing new with desperation and lunacy often the driving force in the transfer market.
da dobrowin： 1/ Per Kroldrup
The warning alarm that David Moyes had dropped an unusual transfer blunder was trilling the moment the gangly Dane walked through the Goodison gates.
Leon Osman tells a startling tale of Moyes taking the 6ft 4in defender aside on the first day of training and teaching him how to head “like you would with a seven-year-old.” This for a supposedly imposing centre-back who cost £5m.
Kroldrup made his debut against John Carew away at Villa. He got annihilated. He never played in England again.
2/ Andrea Silenzi
The summer of 1995 saw a bumper crop of foreign imports arriving to the Premier League and swiftly securing their place in legend. The North-East welcomed David Ginola and Juninho while Highbury soon became smitten by Dennis Bergkamp’s deft majesty.
After flogging Stan Collymore to Liverpool for an eye-watering figure, Nottingham Forest similarly looked far afield to Serie A, bringing in Italian poacher Silenzi for a move that eventually cost them £3m.
With a hairstyle that disagreed with itself and an attitude straight from the Latin book of clichés the ex-Napoli hitman made just 20 appearances, scored twice, and was so relentlessly poor manager Dave Bassett reputedly physically ripped up his contract.
3/ Tore Andre Flo
The tall Norwegian striker became Sunderland’s second most expensive signing in 2002 with Peter Reid desperate to find a replacement for the aging Niall Quinn. Surely Flo – who had enjoyed successful spells at Chelsea and Rangers – fit the bill? Alas no, with the bill eventually coming to £1.7m per league goal.
4/ Gianluigi Lentini
There are times when an extravagant frittering of a transfer budget is not the fault of a misguided board nor even the player who subsequently disappoints. Sometimes fate steps in with the mother of all hangovers and ruins everything.
Lentini was a beguiling winger for Torino who at 23 had the potential to become a Serie A great. So AC Milan’s inevitable swoop came as little surprise. The £13m fee however – an astronomical sum in 1992 that made him the world’s most expensive player – did raise an eyebrow or three.
Playing a key role in Milan snagging the league title put any gripes at his pricetag to bed. That was until a serious car accident a year after his switch changed everything. Lentini resumed playing but his poise and confidence was never the same and soon after this legend-in-the-making was heading to Atalanta on a free.
5/ Winston Bogarde
Having Ajax, Milan, Barcelona and Chelsea on your C.V makes for impressive reading but the Dutch centre-back’s name will always be synonymous with, well, pretty much everything that is wrong with modern day football.
Initially frustrated at his lack of first-team action at the Bridge the cheeky wastrel suddenly realised what a cushy number he was on and turned down chance after chance to leave. “Why should I throw fifteen million Euro away when it is already mine? At the moment I signed it was in fact my money, my contract.”
After just nine appearances in four years he’s now set for life. Enjoy your windfall Winston because your name and reputation is now forever mud.
6/ Gary Megson
Brian Clough had a managerial elixir that made good players great but his ability to spot a talent was often overrated. Nowhere was this more apparent than Forest’s swoop in 1984 for the ginger grinder Megson who failed to impress Old Big Head during his first training session. In fact Clough famously went as far as to tell the press his new defensive midfielder “Couldn’t trap a bag of cement.”
Five months later Megson was gone having not made a single first-team appearance.
7/ Nery Castillo
Newly minted Shakhtar Donetsk splurged twenty million euros on the mercurial Mexican making him the most expensive Ukrainian Premier League signing— and initially all was well, with Castillo swiftly making his mark with a Champion’s League goal. Alas it all unravelled horribly with an infamous penalty in a league encounter with the club that sounds like a sneeze, Naftovyk-Ukrnafta Okhtyrka. Perhaps eager to impress, Castillo insisted on taking it despite not being the designated taker and duly missed infuriating his coach Mircea Lucescu who said menacingly afterwards “There will be measures taken.”
Those measures included a loan spell with pre-takeover Manchester City. Nobody deserves that.
8/ Steve Daley
Once described in the Observer as ‘the biggest waste of money in football history,’ Daley’s £1.4m transfer from Wolves to Manchester City rippled shockwaves through the domestic game and became so notorious all involved argued bitterly for years over who was to blame. Chairman Peter Swales insisted his flamboyant manager Malcolm Allison bumped up the price in one-upmanship at United’s recent record signing of Bryan Robson. Allison meanwhile always swore that the deal was originally done for a million less.
In the middle of course was Daley, a perfectly capable and talented midfielder who was crushed by expectation.
9/ Raheem Sterling
The ‘poorly advised’ 20-year-old has done everything but switch Brendan Rodger’s whitening toothpaste for charcoal and call Robbie Fowler a false idol in order to force an Anfield exit, yet Liverpool refuse to budge on their ludicrous £50m valuation.
When even Manchester City bristle at the price surely we’re through the looking glass here people?