Arsenal will always be haunted by £500k Bristol City transfer decision | OneFootball

Andy Cole is second only to Erling Haaland for the most goals scored in one season, but he was once considered surplus to requirements at Highbury.

He's been called "George Graham's greatest mistake", but the former Arsenal manager's 1992 error of judgement over Andy Cole ended up financially benefiting Bristol City.

As the manager who brought the Football League Championship back to Arsenal for the first time in 18 years in 1989 on an unforgettable night at Anfield, George Graham rightfully has a place in the Gunners' hall of fame. But that doesn't mean that he got every call right, and in the case of one particular striker, he got it very wrong indeed.

Born in Nottingham in 1971, Andy Cole signed professional forms with Arsenal shortly after that 1989 title triumph, a year after having joined their youth academy. He went on to make his League debut for them in December of that year, when he was introduced as a substitute during a 4-1 win against Sheffield United at Highbury.

But Cole couldn't break into the Arsenal first team. He only made one further appearance for them, again as a substitute in the 1991 Charity Shield against Spurs at Wembley, and was loaned out to Fulham for the first half of the 1991-92 season, where he scored three goals in 13 games in the Third Division - now League One - before returning to Highbury.

Andy Cole was sold by George Graham because of a perception of "arrogance"

George Graham, however, still considered Cole to be surplus to requirements. After all, they already had Ian Wright, Kevin Campbell and Alan Smith at that time. So the striker was sent out on loan in March 1992, this time to the second-tier Bristol City.

The Robins had been promoted back to Division Two the season before and were fighting to stay up, and Cole's goals helped them to achieve this. He scored eight in 12 games for them throughout the latter stages of that season, and by that summer Bristol City had seen enough of him to pay a then-club record fee of £500,000 to take him to Ashton Gate.

Knowing where Cole's career ended up, it can be clearly be seen that the decision to sell him was a huge error of judgement on the part of the then-Arsenal manager, and the player would later explain how things went wrong for him at Highbury.

Speaking to The Overlap podcast in 2024, Cole claimed that Graham and others within the Arsenal backroom staff failed to give him opportunities because they believed him to be too arrogant. "I wouldn’t say I was lazy," he said. "I think in those days as well they didn’t have a lot of respect for the younger generation as a whole. They’d just like proper mug you off.

"It’s just the way they would just dismiss you," he continued, "Their perception was that you’re not working hard enough, or ‘he’s arrogant, he’s got an attitude,’ and all that kind of stuff. It’s not like they want to get to know the individual, it is just like straight away, the perception is 'this is what we think'."

Andy Cole would go on to almost unimaginable success with Manchester United

Andy Cole would go on to demonstrate what Arsenal were missing the following season. He scored Bristol City's third goal in a 3-3 draw against Portsmouth on the opening day of the season and followed that up by scoring their second in a 3-0 win at Luton Town in their second game.

Although Bristol City continued to be stuck in the middle of what was now called Division One - now the Championship - Cole kept scoring, including a run between the middle of October and the middle of November when he netted in six consecutive league matches.

This was still the pre-transfer window era, and by the following spring Cole's form was by this time attracting the attention of bigger clubs. In March 1993, shortly before the transfer deadline, he was sold to Newcastle United for £1.75 million, a record fee for both clubs at the time.

He would repay his transfer fee almost immediately. Newcastle were locked in a three-way race with West Ham United and Portsmouth for a lucrative place in the Premier League, and Cole scored 12 goals in 12 games as Kevin Keegan's team raced to the title.

The following season, Cole would continue his hot streak with 34 goals in 40 matches, a record for Premier League goal-scoring that would stand until Erling Haaland of Manchester City broke it with 36 in the 2022-23 season. Newcastle finished the season in third place in the table. On the final day of the 1993-94 season, Cole scored the first goal in Newcastle's 2-0 win against the club that let him go, Arsenal. The Gunners finished one place behind Newcastle that season.

Records kept falling the following season. In January 1995, Manchester United stunned football by paying a UK transfer record fee of £7 million to take Andy Cole to Old Trafford. Less than two months after his move, Cole became the first player to score five goals in a Premier League match as United routed Ipswich Town 9-0.

At Manchester United, of course, Cole would go on to almost unimaginable success, forming a lethal strike partnership with Dwight Yorke and winning the Premier League six times, the FA Cup twice and the Champions League before leaving for Blackburn Rovers at the end of 2001.

He'd go on to play for Fulham, Manchester City, Portsmouth, Birmingham City, Sunderland and Burnley before finishing off his career in the city in which he was born with Nottingham Forest, before retiring in 2008. He was inducted into the Premier League Hall of Fame in 2024.

In total, Cole scored 187 Premier League goals, leaving him in 5th place on the all-time list of goalscorers. The only part of his playing career was not successful was with the England national team, for whom he won just 15 caps, scoring once.

Arsenal would go on to build their own greatness with the arrival of Arsene Wenger in 1996, but the first half of the 1990s would be a relatively fallow period for the club. They won the League for the second time in three years in 1991 and claimed the FA Cup in 1993, but it wouldn't be until Wenger's arrival and rebuild that the Arsenal team that would dominate the Premier League alongside Manchester United until the mid-2000s.

George Graham himself was sacked by them less than a fortnight after Andy Cole made his record-breaking move from Newcastle to Manchester United, a transfer which would help to limit the number of trophies that Wenger's team lifted later in the decade.

Selling such a player to an EFL club for half a million pounds may have been a club record for Bristol City, but they more than trebled their money on selling him to Newcastle and Arsenal may always regret letting such a talented player go for what was for them a relatively trifling amount of money. He might well have been "George Graham's greatest mistake."