Swansea City took £2m transfer gamble - They were repaid with 46 goals and a huge profit | OneFootball

The Swans were certainly rewarded for the gamble they took in signing this striker.

When Swansea City first signed Joel Piroe back in 2021, few Championship fans would ever have heard of the striker.

The Dutchman stepped outside of his homeland for the first time in his fledgling career when he joined the Swans, who opted to bring him in despite a relatively slow start to his professional career.

Swansea paid PSV Eindhoven £2m to secure his services, in what was seen as a significant gamble by the Welsh outfit at the time.

However, Piroe repaid the club’s faith in him with countless goals, and he became a hugely valuable part of a Swansea side that arguably underachieved throughout his two full seasons with the club.

He then netted the club a substantial profit when he moved to Leeds United at the start of the 2023/24 campaign, which surely stands him as one of Swansea’s best pieces of business in recent years.

Piroe was a huge gamble for Swansea

When Swansea signed Piroe from PSV back in the summer of 2021, the striker had only just broken into the first-team squad at the Dutch giants.

At 21, barring a brief loan in the Eredivisie with Sparta Rotterdam in the 2019/20 season, he had played his entire career up until that point with PSV’s B team, Jong PSV, who play in the second tier of Dutch football.

Even there, his goalscoring record hadn’t been remarkable. The frontman had scored 16 goals from 57 games for the reserve team, and when he moved up to join the first-team squad in 2020/21, he made just 11 Eredivisie appearances all season, and all of them came from the bench.

Therefore, it is understandable why eyebrows were raised around the Championship when Swansea parted with £2m to bring him to South Wales.

However, the Swans trusted their instincts and were ultimately rewarded for doing so. Piroe’s signing was reminiscent of Swansea’s early Premier League years, when they became renowned for finding value in players from obscure footballing backgrounds.

The frontman scored on his debut in the EFL Cup and went on to notch 22 goals and six assists throughout his first campaign at the Swansea.com Stadium, despite Russell Martin’s side labouring to a 15th-placed finish.

Only four Championship players notched more goal contributions than Piroe that year, and he enjoyed a similar level of success in the following campaign as well.

The Dutchman hit 19 league strikes in 2022/23, which helped his final tally for the Swans to a very respectable 46 goals in 96 games in all competitions.

Swansea are still profiting from Piroe’s signing now

After just three games of the 2023/24 Championship season, Piroe sealed a move to promotion-chasing Leeds United for a reported £10m.

While Swansea would no doubt have been disappointed to lose their talisman and a man who had been their top scorer in each of the previous two seasons, it surely would have been hard for a club competing in the middle of the Championship to turn down that kind of money.

Piroe struck 14 league goals for the Whites last season, as they agonisingly missed out on promotion in the play-off final. This season, however, both he and Daniel Farke’s team have gone one better.

The former Netherlands youth international hit 19 goals and seven assists. Nobody in the division scored more goals or recorded more goal contributions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the amount of quality they have been able to add around Piroe, Leeds raced to the Championship title with 100 points. Meaning that Piroe could now be set for his first ever taste of the Premier League at the age of 25.

Swansea are still reaping the rewards from their gamble. Having already netted an impressive £8m profit on their former star, Leeds’ promotion also triggered a clause which saw them gain a further £2m, which has only served to reinforce the fact that he represented a hugely successful piece of business for the Welsh outfit.

Having been a hugely important player for the club and then secured them a massive return on their investment, you can’t ask for much more from a signing than what Piroe provided Swansea.

While the Swans have lost their way in the transfer market at times in recent years, the gamble to sign Piroe was one that they judged to perfection and is the type of signing that all clubs strive to make.