Watford stole £1.7m from Ipswich Town in striker transfer deal - then signed the bargain of the century | OneFootball

Watford sold striker Tamas Priskin for £1.7 million to Ipswich and signed his replacement for one-fifth the amount of money.

Ipswich Town paid Watford £1.7 million for a striker with a growing reputation in 2008; not only did it not work out for them, but the Hornets didn't even need to spend any money on a more than adequate replacement.

Both Ipswich and Watford had a slightly underwhelming 2008-09 season, with the Tractor Boys finishing in ninth place in the Championship and the Hornets finishing 13th.

But Watford had something - or rather, someone - that Ipswich wanted. The Hungarian striker Tamas Priskin had arrived at Vicarage Road three years earlier. He'd been a bit-part player throughout the first two of those three years, but in the third he grew wings, with 12 Championship goals being one of the highlights of an otherwise moribund season.

But Priskin evidently wanted out of Vicarage Road, and declined to sign a new contract with Watford. With time starting to run out before his contract expired, when they received a £1.7 million offer from Ipswich for the striker, they had little choice but to accept it.

Priskin could never quite get his goalscoring momentum going at Ipswich

By the time he arrived at Ipswich, Priskin was an established player who'd been playing international football for Hungary for the previous four years.

But despite scoring his first goal for them less than three weeks after arriving in the League Cup, Priskin couldn't build up the required momentum and was sent out on loan to Queens Park Rangers.

This became the pattern of his entire stay at Ipswich; spells on loan at other clubs mixed with trying to break into the first team without grabbing the goals. Over three years with them, he was sent out on loan on three separate occasions. His best season at Ipswich came in 2010-11, when he managed 32 appearances for them but could only score four goals.

In January 2012, after three and a half years without any real success in Suffolk, he was released from his contract and left to play in Russia for Alania Vladikavkaz. His most memorable moment in an Ipswich shirt came when he scored the winning goal in the first leg of a Carling Cup semi-final against Arsenal, but the Gunners won the return leg 3-0 to render his first-leg winner ultimately fairly meaningless.

Watford found a more than adequate replacement for Priskin in the bargain basement

But what of Watford? How did they recover from the loss of Tamas Priskin?

Pretty well, as it goes. They identified Carlisle United's Danny Graham as a replacement, and a tribunal required them to pay up to £350,000 for his services, depending on appearances. Graham would go on to be a Vicarage Road hit. He ended his first season there as their top scorer with 14 goals.

And the next season, he caught fire. From December through to January, he scored in seven successive games, breaking Watford's record. By the end of the season he'd scored 24 League goals, was Watford's Player of the Year, and had earned himself a place in the PFA's Championship Team of the Season.

That summer he was sold to Swansea City for £3.5 million, to add to the £1.35 million profit they made on buying him and selling Tamas Priskin, albeit less the £470,000 due to his former club. Carlisle made more from their 15% sell-on clause than they did from the original sale. It's not difficult to see who got the better end of that deal.