Southampton FC will always regret £19m transfer mistake – It was a bizarre signing | OneFootball

Southampton made a major error with the initially bizarre £19 million signing of striker Guido Carrillo from Monaco.

Southampton were a Premier League stalwart during the 2010s and they made some excellent signings whilst producing some brilliant young players, but the big money signing of Guido Carrillo was always a strange one – and his stint at St Mary’s only made it more peculiar.

Ever since they gained promotion back to the Premier League in 2012, Southampton did often suffer from their big-money signings underwhelming and eventually fading away without making much of an impact at St Mary’s.

From Gaston Ramirez in the summer of 2012, a club-record deal at the time, to Dani Osvaldo a year later and then both Sofiane Boufal and Manolo Gabbiardini in the 2016/17 season, Saints had often failed with their more ambitious additions, with more then-under-the-radar recruits such as Sadio Mané, Virgil Van Dijk and Victor Wanyama representing finer business.

They had gained a reputation for the development of young players, and the way in which they sold so many players for big fees was a good example of that, which is why the arrival of Guido Carrillo was always a risky one right from the start.

Guido Carrillo hadn’t done much before his Southampton move

For a fee believed to be in the region of £19 million, Southampton brought in Argentine forward Guido Carrillo from Monaco, and it was not a successful stint.

Carrillo had come through the academy at Estudiantes, where he worked under the manager who brought him to Southampton in Mauricio Pellegrino, and moved to France at the age of 24, initially being a part of Monaco’s B team setup before a swift promotion into their first-team.

A striker, Carrillo possessed some reasonable link-up skills but even they weren’t necessarily enough to ensure the Monégasque persisted with him in their attack due to an underwhelming goal scoring record.

Having managed just 21 goals in 95 appearances for Monaco, he eventually departed the principality with a Premier League club willing to pay £19 million for him – which appeared foolish investment at the time, and it certainly proved to be the case.

Saints had been struggling through the season and Carrillo was brought in to challenge fellow attackers Charlie Austin, Shane Long and the aforementioned Gabbiadini.

They did manage to stave off the drop on the final day of the season, finishing 17th, but it was by no means as a result of the major and ill-thought-through outlay put into the arrival of Carrillo.

Guido Carrillo continued to struggle at Southampton and after his departure

In the second-half of the 2018/19 season, with Carrillo brought in to be a point of difference for struggling Saints, the Argentine attacker managed to make just seven appearances for the club.

He started five of those games in which Southampton managed just one victory, before Mark Hughes replaced Pellegrino in the dugout down on the south coast.

A seven-minute substitute appearance in a 3-0 loss to West Ham United was all that Hughes afforded Carrillo, with the Argentine left out of the squad for all but one of their remaining fixtures under Hughes, with that other game seeing him be an unused substitute anyway.

For what was a club-record fee, Southampton brought in a striker who played just seven times for the club, with Carrillo eventually loaned out to Leganes for a couple of years and then leaving permanently for Elche in 2020.

He has since gone on to become a squad player for Estudiantes once again, but it is a move that seemed unusually dim-witted anyway, and has since become even more baffling ever since.