Swansea City may always have £4m transfer regret - 19-cap Dutch international left for nothing | OneFootball

Swansea City splashed out £4 million on the Dutch winger Luciano Narsingh in 2017, but the transfer didn't work as anyone would have hoped.

The signing of Dutch international winger Luciano Narsingh for £4 million in 2017 looked like a signal of intent from Swansea City, but this turned out to be a signing that went very wrong indeed.

By January 2017, Swansea City had been a Premier League club for six years and were looking pretty well-established in the top flight. The Swans had been a mid-table club throughout this time and also claimed their first piece of major silverware in the form of the 2013 League Cup.

But the 2016-17 season had been a slog. By the start of the new year, the Swans were bottom of the Premier League with just three wins from their first 19 games of the season. They'd already burned through two managers, with Francesco Guidolin lasting until the end of October, and his replacement Bob Bradley lasting until just after Christmas.

Dave Clement was hired on the 3rd January 2017, and his target was clear; keep Swansea in the Premier League. And Clement had one factor very heavily in his favour; he had the whole of the January transfer window to play with and, as a club that had been in the Premier League for a few seasons, they could be a pull for elite level players, while also having the money to fund whatever expenditure they needed.

Luciano Narsingh looked like a good option for a struggling Swansea City team

By the half-way point of the season, only three Premier League clubs had scored fewer than the Swans, and it was clear that they needed fresh attacking options. Luciano Narsingh seemed to tick a lot of boxes. He'd been with the Dutch giants PSV for five years after signing for them from Heerenveen, and had also picked up 19 caps for the Dutch national team, scoring four goals. Narsingh signed for the club on the 12th January, just nine days after Clement's appointment.

Swansea finished the 2016-17 season in 15th place in the Premier League, but Narsingh's role in that recovery was peripheral. He made 13 appearances throughout the second half of that season, mostly from the bench, and failed to score, though he did at least manage to chip in with three assists.

But the following season, the wheels fell off Swansea's place in the Premier League. Dave Clement lasted until five days before Christmas, and by this time they were back at the bottom of the table, with a very similar record to that which they'd had when he was appointed in the first place. Clement had tweaked Swansea's formation and Narsingh struggled to fit into it.

Swansea City went down, and Luciano Narsingh's time with the club came to an end

On this occasion there would be no great escape. Clement's replacement was Carlos Carvahal, but although he had a bit of a honeymoon period as their manager, losing just one of his first seven games in charge, the team soon fell back into a rut. A 4-1 win against West Ham at the start of March turned out to be their last win of the season, and the Swans were relegated at the end of the season, in 18th place in the table.

Again, Luciano Narsingh was only a bit-part player. He made 18 appearances for Swansea that season, but only one of them was for a full 90 minutes, and he increasingly looked like a square peg in a round hole, stuck out on the right wing to very little effect indeed.

Life got even more difficult for him in the Championship. Carvahal had gone at the end of the 2017-18 season, replaced by a young upstart by the name of Graham Potter, and Potter didn't have any apparent interest in giving Narsingh much of a chance. He made only two appearances throughout the 2018-19 season, both from the bench, and was frozen out of the first-team squad most of the time. Swansea finished the season in 10th place in the Championship. In total, Narsingh made just 33 League appearances for the club over that time, 31 of which came in the Premier League.

At the end of the season, Narsingh was released by the club. His two-and-a-half-year contract was at an end, and in May 2019 it was confirmed that he was leaving. He didn't have any huge injury problems throughout his time with Swansea; he was just the wrong fit for them, and while his £30,000-a-week earnings dropped to £24,000-a-week upon relegation from the Premier League, he was still earning Premier League money at a mid-table Championship club by the end of the 2018-19 season and, faced with the choice of either offering him a new contract or releasing him, the latter option seemed the more prudent for the Swans to take up.

Narsingh moved on to Feyenoord that summer and is still in the twilight years of his playing career now, with the Cypriot club Nea Salamina. Swansea City, meanwhile, were left to count the cost of a £4 million gamble that could have worked, but didn't. They haven't played in the Premier League again since.