Prolific international striker should've been Derby County great - luck wasn't on his side at Pride Park | OneFootball

Derby County were getting a striker with an outstanding goalscoring record in 1999 when they signed Branko Strupar, but injuries got in the way.

Branko Strupar arrived at Derby County with a fearsome reputation in front of goal in 1999, but by the time he left again four years later, his career had been derailed by injury.

By the end of 1999, Derby County were an established top-flight club again. They'd been promoted into the Premier League in 1996, and their first three seasons there had ended with them finishing 12th, 9th and 8th in the table. Pride Park opened in 1997. With the team struggling near the foot of the table in the 1999-2000 season, though, the time had come to upgrade their attacking options, and one name stood out on the list of available players.

Croatian by birth, Branko Strupar had earned himself a fearsome reputation in Belgium. He'd won the League with Genk earlier that year and the Belgian Cup with them a year earlier, while finishing as the country's top scorer in the League, with 22 goals in 31 games. A deal to sign the player for £3 million was agreed with Genk.

Branko Strupar could be an impactful player for Derby

It took Strupar a couple of games to get going, but when he did, the impact was obvious. 103 seconds into his third appearance for the Rams against Watford he scored the first Premier League goal of the new millennium, adding another 18 minutes from time to give the Rams a 2-0 home win. The three points lifted Derby out of the Premier League's bottom three for the first time in two months.

He only scored three more League goals that season, but Derby accomplished their main mission of achieving Premier League safety, eventually clambering their way up to 16th place in the table, and the following season started he excellently for him too, scoring in each of Derby's first four League games of the season.

But then the injuries escalated, primarily to his knee. After scoring for the fourth straight game, against Middlesbrough in a 3-3 draw on the 6th September 2000, he only played five more games throughout the entire 2000-01 season, although he did mark both another return from injury and what turned out to be his final appearance of that season by scoring a brace in a 2-1 win against Spurs.

That win came in March 2001, but Strupar wouldn't play for Derby again until February 2002, although he did mark his return by scoring in a 3-0 win at Leicester. He scored three more goals for Derby that season, and played in every match, but the season ended with them relegated in 19th place, ten points from safety.

But their 1-1 draw against Sunderland on the final day of the 2001-02 season turned out to be Strupar's final game for the club. The injury problems weren't letting up, and this wasn't the only issue. Derby had been relegated at the worst possible time. A few weeks prior to their relegation from the Premier League, ITV Digital, who'd signed a lucrative television deal with the Football League a couple of years earlier but who had struggled for subscribers, collapsed completely, sending a tremor through the transfer market and the entire League into a panic.

Clubs which had already started spending this ITV Digital money had to stop very suddenly. Between May and December 2002, six clubs went into administration. And Derby were suffering, too. These were the pre-parachute payment days, and contracts were less likely to contain clauses reducing wages in the event of relegation than they are now.

Branko Strupar reached the end of his contract at the end of the 2002-03 season, having only played five games throughout it, all of them by the end of the first week in September. Derby had little choice but to let him go, not that it made any difference to them in the overall scheme of things. By October 2003, they were in administration themselves.

Strupar returned to his home city of Zagreb and played 14 games for them before calling it a day, and Derby County were left wondering what they might have managed, had he remained fit, throughout his three and a half years with the club. This was a transfer that looked like it could be good for all parties concerned. In the event, it turned out to have been bad for them.