Controversial £1m Bristol City transfer that Swansea City hero must still regret - 'It was a difficult decision' | OneFootball

Lee Trundle's 2007 transfer from Swansea City to Bristol City ruffled some feathers, but two years later he was back at The Liberty Stadium.

Lee Trundle was a fiery striker who seemed to have found his perfect home at Swansea City, but two years after a controversial transfer away from The Liberty Stadium to Bristol City, he was back.

Sometimes, it can take a clearly talented player to get an opportunity to shine in the professional game.

This is what happened to Lee Trundle, a non-league striker who made it as far as the Championship before ending up back where he started, though he did end up playing until not that far short of 50 years of age.

Trundle's golden years came at Swansea City, where he ended up playing for four years, scoring 86 goals in 178 games and scoring more than 20 goals every season in League Two and League One, but when it came to making another step up to the Championship, he fell slightly short.

And that particular transfer wasn't one that came without a degree of controversy, just as a not insubstantial amount of his playing career did.

Lee Trundle quickly became a fan favourite at Swansea City

By the time Lee Trundle made his league debut for Wrexham in February 2001, he was already 24 years old and had spent most of the previous six years on the non-league circuit in the north-west of England.

But it was in the League of Wales playing for Rhyl where he caught the eye. After scoring 15 in 18 games for them throughout the first half of the 2000-01 season, he caught the attention of Wrexham manager Bryan Flynn and transferred to the Racecourse Ground.

By the summer of 2003, however, Flynn had left Wrexham for Swansea City and Trundle teamed up with him again.

He scored on his debut for the Swans, bagged a hat-trick in his next appearance, and from there a Swansea legend was born. Mixing a deadly eye for goal with occasional bouts of audacious showboating, he soon became a fan favourite.

Over the next four years, he'd score 86 goals for the club, never failing to manage less than twenty in all competitions in a season. Swansea were promoted to League One in 2005 and the goals just kept flowing.

In 2006, the Swans were at Wembley to win the Football League Trophy, beating Carlisle United 2-1.

Trundle opened the scoring, though he did end up getting arrested and released over the t-shirt he was wearing that day. This, of course, only cemented his legendary status with Swansea fans.

Lee Trundle's big Bristol City move didn't work out for the player or his new club

This sort of form was always likely to attract the attention of other clubs, and in 2007 a Championship club with ambitions of their own came calling.

By the end of the 2006-07 season, ambitious Bristol City were looking upward. They'd just been promoted to the Championship and needed reinforcements in attack, and Trundle had just scored 20 goals in 41 appearances for Swansea.

But their move didn't come without controversy. In terms of local rivalries, Swansea's main focus is Cardiff City, but that doesn't mean that they didn't have a certain amount of derision reserved for the clubs that played just the other side of the Severn Bridge in England.

In addition to that, Swansea really didn't want to sell. By the time Bristol City offered the £1 million for Trundle that got the player his move, it was their fourth bid for the player, while by this time Trundle himself had put in a written transfer request.

His first season with his new club was their first since the 1998-99 season and they acquitted themselves extremely well, finishing fourth place in the Championship and only denied promotion to the Premier League at the last, after losing that season's play-off final to Hull City at Wembley.

But 2007-08 was less of a success for Trundle on a personal level. He could only manage five goals in 41 appearances in all competitions for them, and the following season didn't start any better either.

He didn't get on the pitch for their first five League matches and he was loaned to Leeds United for a couple of months at the start of 2009, returning to Ashton Gate in March, where he made only a couple of brief and uneventful cameo appearances before the end of the season.

In the summer of 2009 came a homecoming of sorts. Trundle returned to Swansea on loan, and the loan was extended to the full season. But he could only manage five goals in 20 appearances - none of which lasted a full 90 minutes - for the Swans this time around and, having turned down a coaching position because he wanted to carry on playing, signed for League of Wales club Neath instead.

Neath had been flashing cash that they didn't really have. They qualified for the Europa League through play-offs, but their run in that competition didn't last very long, comfortably beaten at the first hurdle by the Norwegian club Aalesunds FK. And for all that money, they couldn't finish higher than third in the table and folded completely in the summer of 2012.

Trundle returned to the EFL with Preston North End on a year-long contract, but a knee injury kept him out for four months and his contract was terminated by mutual consent at the start of 2013.

After a couple of seasons in the non-league game, he retired at the age of 36, only to come out of retirement a couple of years later and keep playing in the League of Wales with Llanelli Town and Haverfordwest County. It was only in October 2025 that he actually seemed to have finally ended his playing career, and even then it was to focus on boxing instead, at the age of 49.

Speaking exclusively to Football League World in September 2024, Lee Trundle admitted that his decision to move to Bristol City had been "a difficult decision" and that "Swansea always had a place in my heart."

Trundle always cut an idiosyncratic figure, lavishly talented and very aware of it, with a sharp eye for goal and a tendency to the flamboyant. Small wonder Swansea City fans loved him, even though his transfer from the club was characteristically controversial.