£3.5m Derby County signing never lived up to the hype: View | OneFootball

Derby County have had many players come and go from the club in recent years; some fans will want to forget and some they will cherish for a long time.

It is unclear where the Rams faithful are with former player Kamil Jozwiak, who cost the club £3.5 million and never really made a good impact at the club.

Ahead of the 2020/21 Championship season, Derby County announced the signing of Polish international Kamil Jozwiak.

The Rams signed the winger for Polish side Lech Poznan in a deal that was believed to have cost them £3.5 million.

This was the first time in Jozwiak’s career that he would be playing football in a country other than Poland - he started his career at Falubaz’s under-19s before he joined Lech Poznan’s academy team on a free transfer in 2011.

From then on, he worked his way through the club’s academy, spending six months on loan at GKS Katowice before returning to the club and playing in their first team.

Jozwiak scored 17 goals and recorded 17 assists in over 100 appearances for the Polish side, and that was enough to convince Derby to sign the winger, and for the fee involved - coupled with the fact he was a full international - there was plenty of expectation placed upon his shoulders.

Even in 2020, the average Championship side spending £3.5 million on a player is a lot of money, so when Derby County did this to sign Jozwiak, there was an expectation he was going to come in and make a real difference to the Rams.

However, that wasn’t the case, and it never really was, as the Polish international struggled during his time in England, and looking back, it was a deal that was poorly done by the football club.

Jozwiak spent a season and a half with the Rams, but no matter what was done, he couldn’t replicate his form, which earned him the move in the first place.

In his first season at the club, Jozwiak played 41 times in the Championship, and while he was a regular under then manager Phillip Cocu, he struggled to make an impact in terms of goals and assists.

That season, the winger managed just one goal and three assists, and it didn’t get much better in the next season, as he chipped in with just one assist in 17 league games.

In his first full campaign at the club, Jozwiak only scored one goal, which meant an average goal was coming every 2687 minutes of football, which is very poor for an attacking player.

Furthermore, he was averaging 1.0 shots per game, but only 0.2 were being considered on target, and that left him with a goal conversion rate of 3%, as per Sofascore.com.

For a winger, you would expect Jozwiak to be creating many chances, but in that 2020/21 season, he created just one big chance for his teammates and only managed to notch up 0.6 key passes per match - he finished that campaign with an overall Sofascore rating of 6.63.

As you would expect, many Derby fans were hoping that by signing a player like Jozwiak for the money they did, he would bring that stardust to their attack, offering them something they didn’t have. But it never worked out like that, as he never got going at the club and failed to show any glimpses of why the club decided to buy him in the first place.

It was a poor signing overall for the club, as Jozwiak just never impressed, and when it came to him leaving in 2022, Derby took a hit on the player, as they sold him to MLS side Charlotte for less than they paid for him in 2020 in the midst of their financial struggles, where every penny mattered for the Rams at the time.