Sheffield Wednesday thought they signed £750k bargain based on Ipswich Town evidence | OneFootball

Francis Jeffers went on to flop at Sheffield Wednesday after his £750,000 move, following an impressive loan stint at Ipswich Town.

In June 2001, Francis Jeffers was deemed one of the most exciting prospects in English football, and the Premier League’s 2000/01 runners’ up Arsenal bought into the hype.

The Gunners brought Jeffers in for a fee believed to be around £8 million after he had shown immense promise and potential at Everton, having become a professional with the Toffees in the 1997/98 campaign.

Whilst on Merseyside, Jeffers had scored six goals in each of the 1998/99 and 1999/00 campaigns, before he then netted an impressive six times in 12 2000/01 appearances as Everton narrowly avoided relegation from the Premier League.

Ankle and shoulder injuries had begun to hamper Jeffers’ overall involvement and contribution to the side, but they weren’t enough to put Arsene Wenger and the Gunners off bringing him in to Highbury.

His time at Arsenal was not a good one, despite it seeing him make an England debut that he scored on, in his only game for The Three Lions, as well as being at the club as the won the domestic double in his first season, but not making enough appearances to get a Premier League winners’ medal, despite scoring twice that season.

Injury and being taken over by Thierry Henry and Sylvain Wiltord saw Jeffers’ time at Arsenal fizzle out very quickly, and the one-time teenage sensation saw himself bounce around back to Everton and then Charlton Athletic, Rangers and Blackburn Rovers before finding a spark at Ipswich Town – but it was to be a shortlived spark that conned Sheffield Wednesday.

Sheffield Wednesday tried to benefit from his form at Ipswich Town

In a loan stint at Ipswich Town towards the back end o the 2006/07 season, Jeffers appeared to rediscover what had earned him the reputation for being a so-called ‘fox in he box’.

In his first start for the Tractor Boys, Jeffers scored and assisted as Ipswich defeated Hull City away from home, but his lively start was imminently curtailed when he suffered a hamstring injury in the 27th minute of their eventual 2-0 loss at home to Southend United a week later.

Typical for Jeffers, just as form may have been found, he was injured, but he returned back to Ipswich from Blackburn to finish the season and again shone for Town, scoring three more goals, as well as getting a couple more assists, in six appearances.

Having bounced around disappointing Premier League stints, Jeffers had finally at last shown that he remained capable of being a striker perhaps too good for the second-tier.

However, warning signs remained with the injury mid-way through the spell showing that the good times may not necessarily be sustainable for Jeffers, as they hadn’t throughout his career.

Despite those signs, Sheffield Wednesday still opted to pursue the former Everton man and bring him in to Hillsborough, beating off Ipswich, for a fee believed to be in the region of £750,000.

It was to be a gamble that really did not pay off at all, though, and a three-year contract was regrettably handed out, with the Owls falling into the same hype trap that several other clubs, including Arsenal, had fallen into, with Jeffers’ first season a very good encapsulation of his career.

Some high energy pressing work from Jeffers was entirely undermined on the opening day as Wednesday lost 4-1 to the Ipswich side he had just left, and that was to be the first of six successive defeats to start the campaign.

Wednesday’s first a win, a Yorkshire derby 1-0 victory against Hull City, saw Jeffers score the only goal of the game and begin to show signs of what he could be again.

A knee injury meant that Jeffers would play just two of Wednesday’s final 35 matches that season, with one of those two appearances seeing Jeffers score a crucial 82nd minute winner in a come from behind 2-1 victory over Preston North End on New Year’s Day.

Jeffers had again shown immense promise in the time he had on the field for Wednesday, but again it was to be almost entirely undermined by his woeful injury record, as Wednesday drifted to a mid-table finish.

Francis Jeffers tried but just couldn’t stay fit at Hillsborough

In the 2008/09 campaign, Jeffers began the season injured, and then upon his return had found himself in the position of needing to be eased back in.

This often led to a lack of fluency to his game, but was also completely understandable for a striker that was so often just moments away from injury.

Over the course of the season, he mad just 20 starts and scored just three goals, but he did eventually improve in the final couple of months when given a run in the side, scoring a last gasp equaliser at

Vicarage Road against Watford in mid-March, a week after scoring in a 1-1 draw against Preston, which had been just his 13th start of the season.

Jeffers had managed to keep himself more or less fully fit for the 2009/10 season, but it was more of a tactical decision by Brian Laws and then his mid-season replacement, Alan Irvine, to limit his appearance tally to just 13, in which he failed to score as Wednesday were relegated from the Championship on the final day of the season.

Jeffers left in the summer of 2010 for the Newcastle Jets in the Australian A-League, before stints at Motherwell, Floriana and then Accrington Stanley by 2013.

The one-time sensation that had made significant headlines in the early 2000’s was brought in by Wednesday as a gamble to be the main man that could potentially fire them back to the top-flight, where they have still not returned to this day.

Instead, though, a mixture of injuries and an eventual lack of trust in him, saw his Wednesday career fade out to obscurity with the club actually relegated to League One, with Jeffers notching just five goals in 60 appearances across all competitions in a three-year stint.