Wigan Athletic: £6.5m punt was a disaster - Is it the club's worst in recent times? | OneFootball

Much was expected from Mauro Boselli when the Argentine made the switch to Wigan, but his transfer proved to be an abject failure

Moving from Argentina to Wigan certainly wouldn't be every young Argentine's dream, but that was reality in 2010 for a then 25-year-old Mauro Boselli.

Swapping La Plate for Wigan, Boselli got his dream break in the Premier League at a time where Latics were branching out into South America looking for emerging talent from those nations.

That model largely worked for Wigan, who recruited the relatively unknown quantities of Antonio Valencia, Antolin Alcaraz and Hugo Rodallega, who all represented South American nations.

All three of those names had successful careers with Wigan, with Valencia going on to play for Manchester United, while Alcaraz actually won the FA Cup with Wigan.

But for all those positive transfers, there's always likely to be one that doesn't quite go to plan, and unfortunately for Wigan, that was the signing of Boselli, who they spent a reported £6.5m on.

He still ranks among Latics' record signings, but unfortunately, he'll always go down as one of the biggest flops.

Boselli arrived with great goalscoring pedigree

A product of the Boca Juniors academy, where he'd been since he was 11, Boselli made a name for himself playing for Estudiantes, where he scored 49 goals in 92 appearances in his first spell at the club.

Then Wigan boss Roberto Martinez described Boselli: "Mauro is a goalscorer, who lives to put the ball in the back of the net, and he is somebody we have been looking at for a long time."

He went on to say: "At 25-years-old he is at a perfect moment in his career to come and play in the Premier League, and he has all the right qualities to make his mark at this level."

But in reality, Martinez's assessment couldn't have been further from the truth.

Boselli never scored a single Premier League goal in 15 top-flight appearances, with his only goals for the club - a whopping five of them - all coming in cup competitions.

One of those came in the 2012/13 FA Cup, so incredibly, despite Boselli's time at Wigan being a complete failure, he actually left the North West as an FA Cup winner, though it remains unclear whether he received a medal for his contributions or not.

Boselli was back in the goals after leaving Wigan

Sometimes, for whatever reason, things don't really work out for certain players at certain clubs, and it's fair to say Boselli and Wigan weren't a match made in heaven.

Boselli left Wigan on loan three times, heading to Genoa, back to Estudiantes and to Palermo is a desperate bid for Latics to bolster his transfer value, but it never really worked out for Boselli at any club besides Estudiantes.

The Argentine eventually found a home at Club Leon in Mexico, where he rattled in 130 goals in 221 games, leaving Wigan fans wondering just what they'd missed out on.

Perhaps fittingly, it was at Estudiantes where Boselli called time on his career, retiring at the end of 2023.

Although Wigan fans certainly won't look back on Boselli's time with fond memories, the Argentina cap scored a whopping 271 career goals, so it does make you wonder just why it never worked out for him.

Wigan never truly got any on-field benefit from their five-goal man, and they had nothing off-field either as they moved him on for a fee believed to be less than a third of what they paid for him, earmarking him as one of the worst signings in club history, if not recent times.