QPR laughed to the bank after Everton FC transfer deal | OneFootball

Josh Bowler was just 18 years old when Everton paid £1.5 million rising to £4.25 million for him, but the winger never played a single game for them.

Everton paid Queens Park Rangers £1.5 million with the potential to rise to £4.25 million for promising teenager Josh Bowler in 2017, but he ended up not making a single appearance for the Merseyside giants.

All transfer fees are a gamble to some extent or another. Vast amounts of money are spent on the unproven and untested in every transfer window, in no small part because the rewards for getting lucky can be so massive.

This can, of course, be crucial for selling clubs. For those in the Championship, where broadcasting revenues are a small fraction of what they are in the Premier League, they can be a lifeline. Many clubs are dependent on being able to bring through young players and sell them on to remain solvent.

Queens Park Rangers are a club who've had their fair share of financial problems, but they have also been capable of selling players on for a handsome profit. And not all of those have worked out for the players who were being sold on or the clubs they were selling them to.

In the case of winger Josh Bowler, Rangers profited massively, picking up a player who'd already been rejected by another London club before selling him on for millions at the very start of his senior professional career.

Everton took big Josh Bowler, QPR transfer gamble

Josh Bowler had already been released by Fulham before he arrived at Loftus Road in 2013 via the newly-created Aldershot Town academy. Bowler was highly-rated, but as the 2016-17 season approached its end, he still hadn't made a single appearance for the Queens Park Rangers first team.

That all changed on the last weekend of the season. Rangers were already safe from relegation for their final day trip to Norwich - a good job, since they'd lost five of their previous six games - when manager Ian Holloway decided to give Bowler his senior debut.

In the 69th minute, with his team already 2-0 down, he was brought on to replace Jack Robinson, but his debut didn't end very successfully, with Norwich adding two late goals to win the match 4-0, leaving QPR in 18th place in the final league table.

This brief appearance, on top of the scouting they'd already done, was enough to persuade Premier League giants Everton to sign Bowler that summer.

Bowler had a reputation as a teenage sensation, and the Toffees agreed to pay Queens Park Rangers £1.5 million, rising to £4.25 million, for the winger's services even though he'd played less than half an hour's worth of senior football.

QPR laughed to the bank at Everton's Josh Bowler transfer - but he can prove doubters wrong at Blackpool

Under the managership of Ronald Koeman, Everton had just finished in 7th place in the Premier League, so breaking through into the first team at Goodison Park was never going to be easy for Josh Bowler. He was put into their under-23s under former star David Unsworth, but by the end of the 2017-18 season he still hadn't progressed to the first team.

Unsworth, as quoted by the Everton fan site Toffeeweb, said: "You can see now the ability we saw,” Unsworth said. “He came in and we had to get him up to speed and he struggled, we’ve got to say it how it is. He struggled to get up to the tempo and speed of it and he didn’t get the run of games his performances in training were showing.

"He’s had to be patient. He’s a great lad, a great pro and what he’s done in the last couple of months is he’s got himself in the team, he’s stayed in the team and though he’s nowhere near the finished article, you can see the quality and the skill, he’s a game-changer. He can go past people, he’s someone who will get better and better."

But Bowler never really progressed beyond the Premier League 2 at Goodison Park, and the total number of appearances that could even be considered to be tangentially close to the first-team came in the form of six appearances in the EFL Trophy over his first two seasons with the club.

He was sent on loan to Hull City in 2019 and finally started to get some game time, finally making his debut for them at the end of October against Derby County, and scoring his first senior goal just nine minutes into his very next match, a 3-0 win away to Fulham the following week. But Hull's form collapsed towards the end of the season and another season in the Premier League 2 followed, back at Everton.

But a hip injury kept him out for much of the season, and by the end of 2020-21 Everton had seen enough and Bowler was released upon the expiry of his contract, joining Blackpool instead. Successful at Bloomfield Road, Nottingham Forest were persuaded to spend £4 million on him at the start of their 2022-23 Premier League season and he was sent out on loan to their sister club Olympiacos.

Again, though, there was no Premier League football for Bowler. He spent time on loan in the EFL back at Blackpool, and then with Cardiff City, Preston North End and Luton Town before signing permanently for Blackpool at the end of the summer 2025 transfer window.

Speaking to The Sun at the time of his loan move to Cardiff in 2023, he told them, "Every night I dream about making my Premier League debut and I don’t think my time is over. It’s important I don’t give up on myself, however tough it is."

Still only 26 years of age, Josh Bowler may yet have the best years of his career ahead of him. He's been a reasonably regular presence in the Blackpool team this season, and there may even be time to impress enough to get a third bite of that Premier League cherry.

But perhaps the biggest winner of all this was Queens Park Rangers, who managed to sell on a player with less than half an hour's first team experience for a seven-digit fee, having paid nothing for his services in the first place. For them, the gamble of selling Josh Bowler while he was still a teenager certainly paid off.