Thought this was an interesting read, on the methodology used Aquilani is the worst signing ever by us, although I could think of a couple of worse player if by opinion alone 
The West Ham one is quite spectacular, Nsereko
what a blunder that was!
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The debates over the worst Premier League signings are as old as the league itself. One of the reasons that it has been difficult to gauge is that obviously the cost of players has increased from 1992 to today. However, in their book “Pay as you play” Paul Tomkins, Graeme Riley and Gary Fulcher have used inflation to create the Current Transfer Purchase Price (CTPP), where all transfers in Premier League history can be viewed by today’s prices.
In celebration of this (and worryingly enough this does get me excited!) OTP chooses the worst signing for each club in the Premier League. Prices are displayed first in original price, and then as they would be today.
Arsenal – Francis Jeffers – £10million – £13.1million
Arsene Wenger is a genius, and has transformed Arsenal, bringing through exceptional foreign talent. He has also, however, signed some absolute rotters. Richard Wright and Jose Antonio Reyes failed to deliver, but it was Franny Jeffers who was the standout mistake.
Dubbed with the ‘fox in the box’ tag, Jeffers soon went about turning that animal to sloth. Jeffers started just two out of 114 games at Arsenal and only ever scored four goals. A disgusting waste of funds, is it any surprise that Wenger now chooses to seek out signings from foreign climes?
Aston Villa – Sasa Curcic – £4million – £10.6million
Aston Villa should probably just stay away from Eastern Europe, and Milan Baros and Bosko Balaban could easily have featured. Curcic played just 22 league games for Villa and was paid twelve grand a week for the pleasure. Just five months after he signed, Curcic declared that he wished to be placed on the transfer list and that the move was “the worst decision of his life”. He criticised manager Brian Little, partied too hard and was eventually sold to Crystal Palace for £1million.
Birmingham City – Luciano Figueroa – £2.5million – £5.1million
Signed from Argentine side Rosario Central in 2003, Figueroa was easily the most disappointing of Steve Bruce’s signings at Birmingham. Indeed, the Argentine failed to make a single start for the club, and his contract was cancelled at the end of one season, with just one substitute appearance under his belt.
Although clearly Figueroa did not adapt, over fifty appearances for Villareal later in his career hints that he did at least have the talent to succeed.
Blackburn Rovers – Paul Warhurst – £2.65mllion – £15.8million
£2.65million might not seem that much, but it certainly was in 1993. And it certainly was on Paul Warhurst, And it certainly was for him to only score four league goals. A signing from Sheffield Wednesday, Warhurst started just 30 of 160 Premier League games for which he was available.
Played so badly up front that he was eventually converted to a centre back!
Blackpool – Chris Basham – £1.2million – £1.2million
Harsh on Blackpool and Basham as the club have only been buying players in the Premier League for two windows and Basham wasn’t particularly expensive.
However, needs must and £1.2million is a lot for a club like Blackpool. Basham has made just one start for the club, in the League Cup, and has had 30 minutes of Premier League action.
Not exactly value for money as yet.
Bolton Wanderers – Dean Holdsworth – £3.5million – £11.8million
To be fair to Bolton, rather then spaff money on poor foreign talent they generally look to get players on free transfers or cheap deals. However, Dean Holdsworth is the sort of journeyman striker that upwards of £3million should never be spent, especially back in 1997.
Although he did score at a half decent rate (39 league goals in 158 games) at the Trotters, he should not have been Bolton’s record signing, and was not included in the starting line up enough to justify that fee.
Chelsea – Andrei Shevchenko – £30.9million – £53.5million
Juan Sebastian Veron, you have gotten away with it sir. A starting rate of 13% and you are still not persona non grata. Adrian Mutu, you are a lucky boy too. And that is solely because of one of the greatest strikers of the modern era.
Shevi just did not adapt. He cost an astronomical amount. He came with a record that was almost unsurpassed at the time. And he disappointed almost beyond belief. He scored less than ten league goals in all of his time at Chelsea, and the allowance of such an expensive player to leave on loan says it all really.
Amazingly, Shevchenko remained at Chelsea until August 2009, when he returned to first club Dynamo Kyiv.
Everton – Per Kroldrup – £5million – £9.1million
Per Kroldrup is a transfer that David Moyes and most Everton fans would rather forget. Signed from Udinese in 2005, Kroldrup started only one league game before he left to join Fiorentina in 2006.
Hopefully Kroldrup was a better player in Italy than he was in England, because he did nothing here.
Fulham – Steve Marlet – £13.5million – £17.7million
Some signings are awful because they did not play many games, some because they didn’t score enough goals. In the case of Steve Marlet, it was because just too much money was spent on them.
Scored eleven goals at a goal every five games, but by then he had played so poorly that he was loaned to Marseille for 18 months with Fulham still paying his wages. Indeed, chairman Al-Fayed tried to take then manager Jean Tigana to court for overpaying for Marlet.
Liverpool – Alberto Aquilani – £20million – £20million
Italian players often struggle to adapt in the English league, and Aquilani is a prime example of this rule. When he joined Liverpool he refuted claims that he was to be a replacement for Xabi Alonso, and he was right. Alonso was decent.
Aquilani scored two goals in his time at Liverpool, and has now been allowed to join Juventus on a season long loan deal. Although he could be seen as unlucky with injuries during his time at Anfield, it is also just as possible to say that he was simply not up to scratch.
Manchester City – Roque Santa Cruz – £17.5million – £17.5million
I know that even transfer fees close to the £20million mark could be regarded as drops in the ocean by Manchester City’s owners, but that doesn’t mean that they deserve to be above criticism. This sort of money for Roque Santa Cruz is silly money even if you have all the money in the (Middle East) world.
Before his loan move to Blackburn, Santa Cruz scored just four goals for City. That’s over £5.8million for each league goal.
Manchester United – Zoran Tosic – £16.3million – £12.8million
It would have been reasonably easy to give Owen Hargreaves the award in this category, but Owen has possibly had enough bad news in the last couple of years without OTP adding to it. That and the fact that Tosic was almost a joke. At a time when Fergie’s decision to sign Bebe looks questionable, this signing takes the biscuit.
Tosic joined in January 2009, but did not start a single Premier League game for the club. What does make the signing slightly more acceptable is that United reportedly managed to gain £6million from CSKA Moscow for the Serb.
Newcastle United – Albert Luque – £9.6million – £17.5million
No club has wasted money on talent that has failed to deliver more than Newcastle: Owen, Martins, Peacock, Pistone, Boumsong, Dyer, Viana, Marcelino, Guivarch, Cort, Andersson. Believe me I could go on.
But Luque. Six league starts at almost three million a pop in CTPP standards. One league goal for an attacker costing that much money makes Luque not just Newcastle’s worst ever, but one of the worst in Premier League history.
Stoke City – Dave Kitson – £5.5million – £4.3million
Aside from a significant outlay on Kenwyne Jones, Stoke’s signings have generally been successful. Whilst Tuncay did not get many starts, Stoke did manage to make profit on him when he was sold.
Dave Kitson, however, offered even less. Signed on the back of a decent season for Reading in the Premier League, Kitson immediately returned to being reminiscent of a Championship player, playing more like David Barry Kitson than Dave. Scored two league goals for Stoke, and has been loaned out on three separate occasions.
Kitson sums it up as thus: “I hold my hands up – it was my fault. I made the decision to go to Stoke, I didn’t have to, no-one forced me to go, and it was a bad decision.”
Sunderland – Emerson Thome – £4.5million – £8.0million
One of the classic things about making such a list is that you can remember old Premier League players, and then scan across and say “He can’t possibly have cost that much?” Step forward Emerson Thome.
Thome played in only 38% of the league games for which he was available at Sunderland, and a percentage of this was because the Mackems did not want to instigate a follow-up fee owed to Chelsea if Thome played fifty games. That Sunderland were so willing to drop Thome for financial reasons probably epitomises his performances. An average player with a relatively crazy fee.
Tottenham – Helder Postiga – £6.25million – £12.6million
Wherever Sergei Rebrov is these days (apart from assisting Arshavin in those ****-awful Meerkat adverts) he owes Postiga at least a couple of vodkas for his lack of appearance in this list.
Whereas Rebrov just didn’t score enough goals, Postiga scored just one. He had gained a reputation under Mourinho at Porto, who probably did well to offload him. Postiga started just nine Premier League games, and somehow Spurs managed to get money for him. It is one of the shockers of the last decade that Postiga has 38 international caps and 14 goals for Portugal, and is still doing so this decade.
West Brom – Leon Barnett – £2.5million – £2.8 million
West Brom are a difficult one, actually. Earnshaw was expensive, but top scored. Ellington was expensive and failed, but somehow the Baggies made money on him. We therefore have dropped down the list to find Leon Barnett.
Cost Albion £2.5million, but only made forty league starts in four years. He made three different loan moves before he was eventually allowed to leave permanently for Norwich in January. Essentially, should never have been a Premier League player, although that’s not Barnett’s fault!
West Ham – Savio Nsereko – £9.0million – £7.0million
Just the worst signing of the last three years. Full stop. A signing that was so kneejerk that his departure was brushed under the rug somehow. You should remember the following facts: West Ham United played £7million (CTPP) for each start that Savio made in the Premier League. He has never even played for the German under 21 team. His contract was last year cancelled by a German second division side.
The worst ever?
Wigan Athletic – Marlon King – £5.0million – £5.6million
Five hundred million pennies is a lot of money to spend on a player that had only ever cut the mustard in the lower leagues, and was a panic buy by Steve Bruce. King only scored one goal for Wigan, and that was a penalty. Suffered a horrible cruciate injury, but had already served jail time when he arrived at Wigan, and his time there ended when he returned to Her Majesty’s special hotel.
Wolverhampton Wanderers – Silas – £1.0million – £2.0million
We have saved the cheapest player on this list until last, but he was truly dreadful.
I will let writer of a Wolves blog Thomas Baugh create the image:
“One million pounds was wasted on Silas, perhaps the most cowardly footballer ever to turn out in the domestic game. He started just two matches, flinched, ducked and dived every time the ball came near him and then vanished, never to be seen at Molineuz again.”
Quite. Now plays for AEL Limassol.
The West Ham one is quite spectacular, Nsereko
what a blunder that was!_____________________________________
The debates over the worst Premier League signings are as old as the league itself. One of the reasons that it has been difficult to gauge is that obviously the cost of players has increased from 1992 to today. However, in their book “Pay as you play” Paul Tomkins, Graeme Riley and Gary Fulcher have used inflation to create the Current Transfer Purchase Price (CTPP), where all transfers in Premier League history can be viewed by today’s prices.
In celebration of this (and worryingly enough this does get me excited!) OTP chooses the worst signing for each club in the Premier League. Prices are displayed first in original price, and then as they would be today.
Arsenal – Francis Jeffers – £10million – £13.1million
Arsene Wenger is a genius, and has transformed Arsenal, bringing through exceptional foreign talent. He has also, however, signed some absolute rotters. Richard Wright and Jose Antonio Reyes failed to deliver, but it was Franny Jeffers who was the standout mistake.
Dubbed with the ‘fox in the box’ tag, Jeffers soon went about turning that animal to sloth. Jeffers started just two out of 114 games at Arsenal and only ever scored four goals. A disgusting waste of funds, is it any surprise that Wenger now chooses to seek out signings from foreign climes?
Aston Villa – Sasa Curcic – £4million – £10.6million
Aston Villa should probably just stay away from Eastern Europe, and Milan Baros and Bosko Balaban could easily have featured. Curcic played just 22 league games for Villa and was paid twelve grand a week for the pleasure. Just five months after he signed, Curcic declared that he wished to be placed on the transfer list and that the move was “the worst decision of his life”. He criticised manager Brian Little, partied too hard and was eventually sold to Crystal Palace for £1million.
Birmingham City – Luciano Figueroa – £2.5million – £5.1million
Signed from Argentine side Rosario Central in 2003, Figueroa was easily the most disappointing of Steve Bruce’s signings at Birmingham. Indeed, the Argentine failed to make a single start for the club, and his contract was cancelled at the end of one season, with just one substitute appearance under his belt.
Although clearly Figueroa did not adapt, over fifty appearances for Villareal later in his career hints that he did at least have the talent to succeed.
Blackburn Rovers – Paul Warhurst – £2.65mllion – £15.8million
£2.65million might not seem that much, but it certainly was in 1993. And it certainly was on Paul Warhurst, And it certainly was for him to only score four league goals. A signing from Sheffield Wednesday, Warhurst started just 30 of 160 Premier League games for which he was available.
Played so badly up front that he was eventually converted to a centre back!
Blackpool – Chris Basham – £1.2million – £1.2million
Harsh on Blackpool and Basham as the club have only been buying players in the Premier League for two windows and Basham wasn’t particularly expensive.
However, needs must and £1.2million is a lot for a club like Blackpool. Basham has made just one start for the club, in the League Cup, and has had 30 minutes of Premier League action.
Not exactly value for money as yet.
Bolton Wanderers – Dean Holdsworth – £3.5million – £11.8million
To be fair to Bolton, rather then spaff money on poor foreign talent they generally look to get players on free transfers or cheap deals. However, Dean Holdsworth is the sort of journeyman striker that upwards of £3million should never be spent, especially back in 1997.
Although he did score at a half decent rate (39 league goals in 158 games) at the Trotters, he should not have been Bolton’s record signing, and was not included in the starting line up enough to justify that fee.
Chelsea – Andrei Shevchenko – £30.9million – £53.5million
Juan Sebastian Veron, you have gotten away with it sir. A starting rate of 13% and you are still not persona non grata. Adrian Mutu, you are a lucky boy too. And that is solely because of one of the greatest strikers of the modern era.
Shevi just did not adapt. He cost an astronomical amount. He came with a record that was almost unsurpassed at the time. And he disappointed almost beyond belief. He scored less than ten league goals in all of his time at Chelsea, and the allowance of such an expensive player to leave on loan says it all really.
Amazingly, Shevchenko remained at Chelsea until August 2009, when he returned to first club Dynamo Kyiv.
Everton – Per Kroldrup – £5million – £9.1million
Per Kroldrup is a transfer that David Moyes and most Everton fans would rather forget. Signed from Udinese in 2005, Kroldrup started only one league game before he left to join Fiorentina in 2006.
Hopefully Kroldrup was a better player in Italy than he was in England, because he did nothing here.
Fulham – Steve Marlet – £13.5million – £17.7million
Some signings are awful because they did not play many games, some because they didn’t score enough goals. In the case of Steve Marlet, it was because just too much money was spent on them.
Scored eleven goals at a goal every five games, but by then he had played so poorly that he was loaned to Marseille for 18 months with Fulham still paying his wages. Indeed, chairman Al-Fayed tried to take then manager Jean Tigana to court for overpaying for Marlet.
Liverpool – Alberto Aquilani – £20million – £20million
Italian players often struggle to adapt in the English league, and Aquilani is a prime example of this rule. When he joined Liverpool he refuted claims that he was to be a replacement for Xabi Alonso, and he was right. Alonso was decent.
Aquilani scored two goals in his time at Liverpool, and has now been allowed to join Juventus on a season long loan deal. Although he could be seen as unlucky with injuries during his time at Anfield, it is also just as possible to say that he was simply not up to scratch.
Manchester City – Roque Santa Cruz – £17.5million – £17.5million
I know that even transfer fees close to the £20million mark could be regarded as drops in the ocean by Manchester City’s owners, but that doesn’t mean that they deserve to be above criticism. This sort of money for Roque Santa Cruz is silly money even if you have all the money in the (Middle East) world.
Before his loan move to Blackburn, Santa Cruz scored just four goals for City. That’s over £5.8million for each league goal.
Manchester United – Zoran Tosic – £16.3million – £12.8million
It would have been reasonably easy to give Owen Hargreaves the award in this category, but Owen has possibly had enough bad news in the last couple of years without OTP adding to it. That and the fact that Tosic was almost a joke. At a time when Fergie’s decision to sign Bebe looks questionable, this signing takes the biscuit.
Tosic joined in January 2009, but did not start a single Premier League game for the club. What does make the signing slightly more acceptable is that United reportedly managed to gain £6million from CSKA Moscow for the Serb.
Newcastle United – Albert Luque – £9.6million – £17.5million
No club has wasted money on talent that has failed to deliver more than Newcastle: Owen, Martins, Peacock, Pistone, Boumsong, Dyer, Viana, Marcelino, Guivarch, Cort, Andersson. Believe me I could go on.
But Luque. Six league starts at almost three million a pop in CTPP standards. One league goal for an attacker costing that much money makes Luque not just Newcastle’s worst ever, but one of the worst in Premier League history.
Stoke City – Dave Kitson – £5.5million – £4.3million
Aside from a significant outlay on Kenwyne Jones, Stoke’s signings have generally been successful. Whilst Tuncay did not get many starts, Stoke did manage to make profit on him when he was sold.
Dave Kitson, however, offered even less. Signed on the back of a decent season for Reading in the Premier League, Kitson immediately returned to being reminiscent of a Championship player, playing more like David Barry Kitson than Dave. Scored two league goals for Stoke, and has been loaned out on three separate occasions.
Kitson sums it up as thus: “I hold my hands up – it was my fault. I made the decision to go to Stoke, I didn’t have to, no-one forced me to go, and it was a bad decision.”
Sunderland – Emerson Thome – £4.5million – £8.0million
One of the classic things about making such a list is that you can remember old Premier League players, and then scan across and say “He can’t possibly have cost that much?” Step forward Emerson Thome.
Thome played in only 38% of the league games for which he was available at Sunderland, and a percentage of this was because the Mackems did not want to instigate a follow-up fee owed to Chelsea if Thome played fifty games. That Sunderland were so willing to drop Thome for financial reasons probably epitomises his performances. An average player with a relatively crazy fee.
Tottenham – Helder Postiga – £6.25million – £12.6million
Wherever Sergei Rebrov is these days (apart from assisting Arshavin in those ****-awful Meerkat adverts) he owes Postiga at least a couple of vodkas for his lack of appearance in this list.
Whereas Rebrov just didn’t score enough goals, Postiga scored just one. He had gained a reputation under Mourinho at Porto, who probably did well to offload him. Postiga started just nine Premier League games, and somehow Spurs managed to get money for him. It is one of the shockers of the last decade that Postiga has 38 international caps and 14 goals for Portugal, and is still doing so this decade.
West Brom – Leon Barnett – £2.5million – £2.8 million
West Brom are a difficult one, actually. Earnshaw was expensive, but top scored. Ellington was expensive and failed, but somehow the Baggies made money on him. We therefore have dropped down the list to find Leon Barnett.
Cost Albion £2.5million, but only made forty league starts in four years. He made three different loan moves before he was eventually allowed to leave permanently for Norwich in January. Essentially, should never have been a Premier League player, although that’s not Barnett’s fault!
West Ham – Savio Nsereko – £9.0million – £7.0million
Just the worst signing of the last three years. Full stop. A signing that was so kneejerk that his departure was brushed under the rug somehow. You should remember the following facts: West Ham United played £7million (CTPP) for each start that Savio made in the Premier League. He has never even played for the German under 21 team. His contract was last year cancelled by a German second division side.
The worst ever?
Wigan Athletic – Marlon King – £5.0million – £5.6million
Five hundred million pennies is a lot of money to spend on a player that had only ever cut the mustard in the lower leagues, and was a panic buy by Steve Bruce. King only scored one goal for Wigan, and that was a penalty. Suffered a horrible cruciate injury, but had already served jail time when he arrived at Wigan, and his time there ended when he returned to Her Majesty’s special hotel.
Wolverhampton Wanderers – Silas – £1.0million – £2.0million
We have saved the cheapest player on this list until last, but he was truly dreadful.
I will let writer of a Wolves blog Thomas Baugh create the image:
“One million pounds was wasted on Silas, perhaps the most cowardly footballer ever to turn out in the domestic game. He started just two matches, flinched, ducked and dived every time the ball came near him and then vanished, never to be seen at Molineuz again.”
Quite. Now plays for AEL Limassol.
I forgot about Keane. He was a worse signing than Aquilani IMO
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