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stevejpos

GREATEST EVER....Transfer Disasters

By stevejpos, in Leicester City Forum

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Jobyfox

Jobyfox

Posted
Posted

I know the two things are interchangeable to some extent, but I think there is a difference between worst ever players and worst ever signings.

 

Junior Lewis, for example, is one of our worst ever players, but I’m not sure he’s one of our worst ever signings when you consider he wouldn’t have cost much. 
 

The worst signings for me are the ones that come with a big fee and high expectation: 

Akinbiyi

Mills

A Silva

Musa

I’d probably even put people like DJ Campbell and Beckford in there. 
 

I also think that in terms of expectation and fitness for purpose then Vestergaard is up there with one of our worst ever signings. He’s an international and experienced PL player, but totally unsuited to our style of play. In the worst injury crisis in my living memory he was still behind midfielders and reserves in terms of getting in the team. Awful signing 

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Captain...

Captain...

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2 hours ago, Jobyfox said:

I know the two things are interchangeable to some extent, but I think there is a difference between worst ever players and worst ever signings.

 

Junior Lewis, for example, is one of our worst ever players, but I’m not sure he’s one of our worst ever signings when you consider he wouldn’t have cost much. 
 

The worst signings for me are the ones that come with a big fee and high expectation: 

Akinbiyi

Mills

A Silva

Musa

I’d probably even put people like DJ Campbell and Beckford in there. 
 

I also think that in terms of expectation and fitness for purpose then Vestergaard is up there with one of our worst ever signings. He’s an international and experienced PL player, but totally unsuited to our style of play. In the worst injury crisis in my living memory he was still behind midfielders and reserves in terms of getting in the team. Awful signing 

But that ignores the context, Vestergaard was an emergency injury cover signing. Junior Lewis was signed to be a first team player, to lead our midfield. Despite the modest transfer fee he was signed and put straight into our midfield. That's what makes it so bad and it saw us go from chasing Europe to relegation form.

 

He was voted the sixth worst premier League player ever!

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Jobyfox

Jobyfox

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4 hours ago, Captain... said:

But that ignores the context, Vestergaard was an emergency injury cover signing. Junior Lewis was signed to be a first team player, to lead our midfield. Despite the modest transfer fee he was signed and put straight into our midfield. That's what makes it so bad and it saw us go from chasing Europe to relegation form.

 

He was voted the sixth worst premier League player ever!

That, if anything, makes it an even worse signing for me. Principle reasons we’ve struggled this season are defence and injuries. We’ve been desperate for someone who could have stepped up and calmed the situation down.

 

As an emergency cover we could have signed a loan. We could have taken a punt on a young player with potential but, instead, we spent millions on an experienced international PL player who isn’t fit for purpose and played almost anyone we had ahead of him. We ended up having a no better squad and snookered ourselves in the January market because we’d wasted any available cash. 
 

(BTW Junior Lewis didn’t have much to do with us going from heroes to zero that season. He was just one of a multitude of incredibly poor signings from a manager out of his depth) 

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Captain...

Captain...

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54 minutes ago, Jobyfox said:

That, if anything, makes it an even worse signing for me. Principle reasons we’ve struggled this season are defence and injuries. We’ve been desperate for someone who could have stepped up and calmed the situation down.

 

As an emergency cover we could have signed a loan. We could have taken a punt on a young player with potential but, instead, we spent millions on an experienced international PL player who isn’t fit for purpose and played almost anyone we had ahead of him. We ended up having a no better squad and snookered ourselves in the January market because we’d wasted any available cash. 
 

(BTW Junior Lewis didn’t have much to do with us going from heroes to zero that season. He was just one of a multitude of incredibly poor signings from a manager out of his depth) 

Junior Lewis as an ever present in that end of season run of W:1 L:9. He was very much a part of it.

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cityfanlee23

cityfanlee23

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I just don't understand people saying that Slimani was a disaster, scored 1 in 3 in all comps when he was played out of position and a style of play that did not suit him whatsoever, constantly devoid of any sort of delivery. 
In the 16/17 season he scored 9 goals in 31 in a season we played like dog water and looked like we could go down with Claudio, Averaged 56 mins per appearance and often coming on as a substitute.
In the 17/18 season he played 775 minutes in 21 appearances, which is 36 minutes on average. No wonder he could not hit form. We completely wasted a decent goalscorer and he has not recovered since. 

I mean sure he never really looked "at home" here, but there were plenty of reasons why not, we really did not help him play to his strengths at all, and he did not really do much wrong. 1 in 3 is a good return given all of the above. I wish Iheanacho could get to those sorts of numbers. The only way I'd consider it a disaster is from the angle that the club spent 30m on a player then completely wasted his attributes. 

Edit - I could be wrong on this one but I distinctly remember that whenever Slimani was on the pitch we would try to play it into his feet to hold the ball up and he would have to almost drop back to midfield to collect the ball to try to play it to Vardy, which was never his style of play, at the time we had one of the best crossers in Europe in our team in Albrighton, yet they never seemed to play together, I even remember one game we needed a goal, and we subbed off Albrighton for Slimani. We really had no ****ing clue that season. 

Edited by cityfanlee23
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Tielemans63

Tielemans63

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Let's be honest, it's Adrien Silva all day long. Everything about that transfer was disastrous for everyone concerned. The missed deadline thing, the fact he wasn't up to it, the £80k a week and £20m he cost us, the loss we made and the way his career has taken a nosedive....one of the worst transfers in football history let alone LCFC's history.

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Jobyfox

Jobyfox

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3 hours ago, Captain... said:

Junior Lewis as an ever present in that end of season run of W:1 L:9. He was very much a part of it.

Junior Lewis cost about £150k from Gillingham. He might never even have been noticed if he’d been signed as a gamble and sat in the reserves with the hope he might one day make the grade. Clubs sign players like that all the time that disappear from history.

 

The stupidness of the signing was Taylor thinking he was a Premier League player and a replacement for someone like Neil Lennon, but he was never going to bankrupt the club like the Akinbiyi signing. Nearly ever player Taylor signed was nowhere near as good as the MON player they replaced.

 

If we’re going to categorise all our most shit players as worst ever signings, without taking into account fee or expectation,  then the list would be endless. 
 

 

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Guest David Oldfields Gate

Guest David Oldfields Gate

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On 27/04/2022 at 12:30, SouthStandUpperTier said:

With Spider Kalac I'll always remember the Bolton League cup game. We played some beautiful stuff and totally dominated, but Bolton won 3-2 thanks to a Spider horror show.

What a night that was.

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Guy

Guy

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On 27/04/2022 at 13:17, Sampson said:

Graham Fenton is a really good shout actually.
 

Was one of our biggest and most hyped signings ever at the time and came with great pedigree as Blackburn’s sub striker behind Shearer and Sutton in their title winning side (and scored a few goals that season), who we were all super excited about. But he was absolutely bloody useless.

 

Think he was either our record signing or 2nd biggest ever signing after Matt Elliott at the time? Can’t remember whether we signed him before or after Elliott.

 

I think he only got like 2 or 3 goals in about 50 odd games.

 

Definitely O’Neill’s worst ever signing at any rate.

Graham Fenton was signed from Blackburn in the 1997 close season a few months after we'd signed Matty Elliott for the same amount of dough the previous season in the January window and he even did ok in the first two or three games from memory, including our win at Anfield early on in 1997-98 season but ultimately was a flop and was never a regular starter under MON anyway. I'd say Arnar Gunnlaugsson was another expensive yet poor MON signing too a season or so later.....  

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Captain...

Captain...

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3 hours ago, Jobyfox said:

Junior Lewis cost about £150k from Gillingham. He might never even have been noticed if he’d been signed as a gamble and sat in the reserves with the hope he might one day make the grade. Clubs sign players like that all the time that disappear from history.

 

The stupidness of the signing was Taylor thinking he was a Premier League player and a replacement for someone like Neil Lennon, but he was never going to bankrupt the club like the Akinbiyi signing. Nearly ever player Taylor signed was nowhere near as good as the MON player they replaced.

 

If we’re going to categorise all our most shit players as worst ever signings, without taking into account fee or expectation,  then the list would be endless. 
 

 

It's not just about the money. Yes we've signed loads of shit players who didn't make it and spent a helluva lot more than 150k on dross, but normally those players don't start every week. It must have been demoralising for the rest of the first team to be playing alongside a competition winner week in week out, it would also have done for their respect for Taylor, who up until that point had been doing pretty well. Yes losing Lennon was a big factor in our decline, but buying and playing consistently someone as bad at football as Lewis was while the club spiralled downwards is what makes it a disaster. You look at the starting 11 for that period the midfield was constantly changing except one consistent player.

 

Everyone who saw him play could see instantly he was so far out of his depth, yet  he started 18 games in a row a run which saw us in freefall into eventual administration.

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Jobyfox

Jobyfox

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8 hours ago, Captain... said:

It's not just about the money. Yes we've signed loads of shit players who didn't make it and spent a helluva lot more than 150k on dross, but normally those players don't start every week. It must have been demoralising for the rest of the first team to be playing alongside a competition winner week in week out, it would also have done for their respect for Taylor, who up until that point had been doing pretty well. Yes losing Lennon was a big factor in our decline, but buying and playing consistently someone as bad at football as Lewis was while the club spiralled downwards is what makes it a disaster. You look at the starting 11 for that period the midfield was constantly changing except one consistent player.

 

Everyone who saw him play could see instantly he was so far out of his depth, yet  he started 18 games in a row a run which saw us in freefall into eventual administration.

Seriously, it’s a bit like us signing somebody from League Two now for about a £1m, putting them straight in our first team and then blaming them for the drop in form when they clearly shouldn’t ever have been put in that position in the first place. 
 

But I’m clearly not going to be on the same wavelength as you on this - so I think I’ll leave it there :wave:

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