Gillingham FC struck gold with club-record Reading FC transfer agreement | OneFootball

When Gillingham paid a club-record transfer fee for Carl Asaba in 1998, they got a striker who would help to fire them to promotion.

When Gillingham paid £590,000 to Reading for Carl Asaba in 1998, they got a striker who would fire them into the second tier for the first time in their history.

For any football club, spending money on a transfer fee is usually a gamble to some degree or other, and the smaller that club gets, the more the element of gamble grows. Every club has that story of the big money signing who never quite worked out. And there is no greater gamble than a record signing. It heaps pressure to perform on both the player concerned and the club. But when it works out, it can take the club to levels they haven't experienced before.

Gillingham had been bought for a nominal sum by businessman Paul Scally in the summer of 1995, when they were close to bankruptcy, and one of his first decisions was to bring Tony Pulis in as their manager. Promotion from Division Three of the Football League - now League Two - followed at the end of their first season together at the club, followed by two comfortable seasons in the middle of Division Two.

Carl Asaba and Robert Taylor were the attacking partnership Gillingham needed

But in the summer of 1998, Gillingham needed a new striker. Ade Akinbiyi had been sold to Bristol City, and with a rather large amount of money burning a hole in their pocket, they needed replacements.

One of the players they settled on was Carl Asaba. Asaba had started his career in the non-league game with Dulwich Hamlet before being picked up by Brentford. Two years (plus a loan spell at Colchester) followed, before a transfer to Reading for the 1997-98 season. Gillingham broke the bank for him, paying £590,000 to take him to Priestfield. His signing was matched with the signing of another striker, Robert Taylor, with whom he had played at Brentford and could form a strike partnership.

But while their first season together saw more improvement for Gillingham, it ended in heartbreak. After finishing fourth in the table, they were 2-0 up in the play-off final against Manchester City - thanks to goals from Asaba and Taylor - before City clawed it back to 2-2 in stoppage-time - with Asaba having already been substituted - and won the resulting penalty shootout, in which the Gills missed three of their four kicks. Asaba ended the season with 20 goals in 42 appearances for them.

It turned out to be second time lucky at Wembley for Gillingham and Carl Asaba

The following season, however, they got it right. Gillingham finished the 1999-2000 season in third place in the table behind Preston North End and Burnley, and as its top scorers. But the experience of the previous year hadn't had a lasting effect on the team. In the semi-finals, they lost their first leg 3-2 to Stoke, but won the return leg 3-0 after extra-time to book themselves a second successive trip to Wembley.

Asaba hadn't been there for much of that season. Speaking to Kent Sports News in 2020, he recounted the issue, an injury which he had spent much of the 1998-99 season playing through: "The last few months of the previous season I knew that I had a bad injury and I was playing with painkillers and coughing up blood after matches, because I was coughing up blood by taking too many on an empty stomach as it was hurting the stomach lining – it was an injury we could play with so long as it was masked."

Taylor scored 18 in 19 games for Gillingham at the start of the 1999-2000 season, but left for Manchester City for £1.5 million that November. But Asaba could only watch on from the sidelines. In total, he only made 11 appearances for them that season, although he was back in time for the play-offs.

Gillingham had no intention of missing out again. They took 40,000 supporters to Wembley to play Wigan Athletic, out of a crowd of 53,000. But Wigan pushed them all the way into extra-time and took a 2-1 lead nine minutes into the first period. But again there was late drama, and this time it was Gillingham who were the beneficiaries of it. Two goals in the last six minutes gave them a 3-2 win and a place in the second tier for the first time in the club's history.

Carl Asaba wouldn't complete Gillingham's first season at that level. He was sold to Sheffield United for £92,500 in March 2001 and didn't take long to make a name for himself at Bramall Lane, scoring the winning goal in a 2-1 win for the Blades in the 100th Steel City Derby and United's first win at Hillsborough in nine years, just a few weeks later. He went on to play for Millwall and Stoke City before retiring in 2006.

Tall, powerful and quick, Asaba was cast from a mould that they don't seem to make strikers like anymore, a truly traditional "Number Nine." And when paired with Robert Taylor, he was absolute dynamite. Gillingham would go on to stay in the second tier until 2005, and they haven't returned since. Sometimes those gambles pay off. The £590,000 that they invested in Carl Asaba would turn out to be a very wise one indeed.