Rotherham United's £0 signing of ex-Nottingham Forest & QPR star was a total disaster | OneFootball

A former Premier League star on a free transfer turned out to be too good to be true for Rotherham United in 2016.

When former Premier League star and Championship mainstay Dexter Blackstock became available on a free transfer in 2016, Rotherham United thought they'd hit the jackpot. They couldn't have been more wrong.

By the end of the 2015-16 season, Rotherham United had been through a second successive narrow escape in the Championship.

Two consecutive promotions had carried them there from League Two by 2014, but the new, higher level was a whole different matter, and the Millers had spent the previous two seasons fighting against relegation, finishing 21st - just one place above the drop zone - on each occasion.

And the club had been through a lot.

They'd left their Millmoor home in 2008 after filing to agree a lease with the family who owned it, spending four years at the wholly inappropriate Don Valley Stadium in nearby Sheffield before returning to a new community stadium in 2012. The first of those two successive promotions had come at the end of their first season in their new home.

Dexter Blackstock was a last-minute panic buy for Rotherham

In the summer of 2016, Rotherham were alerted to the availability of a player who seemed to tick a lot of the right boxes.

Blackstock had started his professional career in the Premier League in 2004 with Southampton, but they were relegated at the end of his first season as a senior player.

Blackstock would become a familiar face in the Championship for the next decade, on loan from the Saints at first, but then with QPR and Nottingham Forest, also picking up six international caps for Antigua and Barbuda.

The striker signed for Rotherham at the start of September 2016, with the club having seen several other attempts to land forwards fit for the Championship fail.

He was expensive, but it was difficult to see what they were getting for their reported £10,000-a-week. Blackstock didn't even get into the first team under manager Alan Stubbs, and scored his first goal for the Millers in a 3-1 defeat in the middle of October. A week later, with Stubbs having been dismissed, he made his first start for the club.

But Rotherham and Blackstock were not working out. There were complaints about his lack of effort and attitude, and that goal at Norwich would turn out to be his only one for the club. He would turn out to only make 17 appearances for the club, the last of which came with a four-minute cameo in a 4-2 defeat at Brentford at the end of February 2017. By the following month, the club chairman Tony Stewart was openly questioning the wisdom of having brought him in.

Rotherham's 2016-17 season was a historically bad one for the club

By May 2017, Rotherham's Championship season lay in ruins. They were relegated in bottom place, 19 points clear of second from bottom Wigan Athletic and an astonishing 28 points from safety. They'd managed just five wins from 46 League matches, and the 23 points they ran up was the lowest total they'd managed in their 89 years in the League, a figure all the more remarkable because the first 66 of those years had come under two points for a win.

Dexter Blackstock left the club at the end of that season and retired from playing altogether. Reflecting on Blackstock's time at the club, manager Paul Warne would later say: "He wasn't a bad lad. He wasn't bad around the training ground. His opinion of how to play football was different to mine." Blackstock moved into business, first as a landlord - with mixed results - and then with somewhat more success, after moving into the pharmaceuticals business.

Rotherham United, meanwhile, would get promoted back to the Championship at the first attempt and have been yo-yoing between the second and third tiers of the game ever since. Even an in-form Dexter Blackstock probably wouldn't have spared them from relegation in 2017, but an out-of-form and disinterested one ranks as one of the worst signings in the history of the club.