The ten worst January signings made by Premier League clubs, with toxic Man Utd-Arsenal swap at 2) | OneFootball

One club and their transfer curse cannot be beaten for January incompetence. It is the only which saves that doomed swap between Arsenal and Man United.

For something a little cheerier, do consider every current Premier League club’s greatest January signing ever. These do not feature.

10) Chris Samba (QPR – £12.5m, 2013)

Samba would be a lot higher on this list had QPR not somehow managed to persuade Anzhi Makhachkala to pay £12m to re-sign the central defender six months after they had themselves somehow persuaded QPR to pay £12.5m for him.

It’s funny how both of those clubs ended up a financial clusterf***, isn’t it? A real puzzle.

The QPR manager at the time was, of course, Harry Redknapp. Having only weeks earlier explained how “you shouldn’t be paying massive wages when you’ve got a stadium that holds 18,000 people,” a pay packet of £100,000 a week was sanctioned for Samba, who the boss called “a monster” and “proper centre-half” who would shore the club’s defence up and move them away from relegation trouble.

Samba played 10 matches in which QPR conceded 19 times, failed to keep a clean sheet after his debut and told supporters to “get over” how much he was paid after conceding a penalty and being at fault for another goal in a 3-2 defeat to Fulham.

QPR were relegated soon after and the Arsenal transfer legend was on his way.

9) Kostas Mitroglou (Fulham – £13m, 2014)

The Premier League did not see the best of Mitroglou. The Premier League did not see much of Mitroglou at all. A player previously known as ‘Mitrogoals’ for his scoring record would have been better rechristened with team-mate Steve Sidwell’s fond nickname: “This f***er.”

Having scored 41 times in 92 league games for an Olympiacos side which walked the Greek league, Fulham spent £13m – a club record fee at the time – to bring Mitroglou to England and save them from relegation.

He would start one league game between his arrival and Fulham’s relegation in May, playing 151 minutes in total.

By August, Mitroglou had gone back on loan to Olympiacos and the next month scored the winner against Atletico Madrid in the Champions League. The following night, Fulham lost 5-3 away at Nottingham Forest to a Britt Assombalonga hat-trick to leave them bottom of the Championship.

8) Jean Makoun (Aston Villa – £6m, 2011)

No list of shonky transfer decision-making is complete without some pre-Emery Aston Villa. They form the January transfer idiocy trifecta with QPR and West Ham.

Makoun arrived from Lyon as a highly-rated midfielder. He was aged 27 and had played 36 times in the Champions League in the previous six seasons. He had started victories over Real Madrid, Liverpool, Manchester United and Milan in the competition.

“He is an experienced player. He is a proper link between the midfield and the strikers,” manager Gerard Houllier said. “He has played in the Champions League. He’ll be a good asset for the future.”

Makoun looked sloppy on his debut, got a straight red card for a dreadful tackle a fortnight later and played only five times in the league before the end of the season. He never played for Villa again, and yet only left on a permanent deal in July 2013.

7) Afonso Alves (Middlesbrough – £12.7m, 2008)

Ah Afonso, the striker now doomed forever to be held up as the example of why you should beware when buying strikers from the Eredivisie.

As with Samba, the Brazilian would have threatened the top three but for a significant and inexplicable recouping of transfer outlay. In this instance, Middlesbrough somehow persuaded Qatar’s Al-Sadd to part with £7m for him.

But that does not spare enough of the embarrassment Boro are still made to feel almost 20 years on every time someone throws money at PSV or Ajax or Feyenoord for a striker.

His 13 goals in 49 games included a hat-trick in that absurd 8-1 win over Manchester City, a penalty, and an FA Cup brace at home to Barrow. Boro were relegated – and Alves left – at the end of his only full season at the Riverside, with the Brazilian perhaps forever destined to be seen as the worst signing in the club’s history.

6) Fernando Torres (Chelsea – £50m, 2011) and Andy Carroll (Liverpool – £35m, 2011)

While only one of these qualifies as the worst January signing in their club’s history, the fact both are so inextricably and inexplicably tied makes it easier for them to land a spot in the top ten.

Torres, having already endured a general loss of form linked to an increasing list of physical issues built up over a career of playing ludicrously often since he was a teenager, was nevertheless identified by Chelsea as “one of the best players in the world with his peak years ahead of him” when they made what was then the fourth-biggest transfer in world football.

For £50m they might well have expected 20 goals for the rest of the 2010/11 season. They received as many in the Premier League, but across his entire 172-game career for the Blues instead.

His effect on Gary Neville and direct contribution to the three trophies he won at Stamford Bridge aside, it was a stunning failure Liverpool felt compelled to match.

The majority of their £50m windfall was redirected to Newcastle for a player with 14 goals in 37 top-flight career games, who hoped to “fail” his medical.

That he likely would have at any other point during an 18-month Liverpool career in which he scored 11 goals in 58 games will not be lost on the Anfield faithful. The Reds took a £20m hit when selling Carroll; to be fair, Torres left Chelsea as a 30-year-old free agent who by that point was still the most expensive player ever transferred between two Premier League clubs.

5) Benni McCarthy (West Ham – £2.5m, 2010)

The West Ham striker curse continues to strike over a decade and a half later, but McCarthy was among the first proper victims upon his move from Blackburn in 2010.

The Golden Boot runner-up to Didier Drogba only a couple of seasons prior, McCarthy had also cracked double figures for goals in 2008/09. But after falling out of favour with a series of managers he sought solace at Upton Park, joining on the same day as Mido and Ilan.

The South Africa legend did not score in his 14 appearances for West Ham before having his contract terminated by mutual consent in April 2011, a month before they slid into the Championship.

4) Guido Carrillo (Southampton – £19.2m, 2018)

There was little logic apparent in Southampton chucking a club-record £19.2m Monaco’s way for their fourth-choice forward in January 2018, beyond the forlorn hope that some residual Kylian Mbappe had rubbed off on Carrillo.

It had not. Signed as a show of faith in manager Mauricio Pellegrino, Carrillo played eight times under the manager before his mid-March sacking. Replacement Mark Hughes curiously did not have quite the same level of belief in the Argentinean striker, who only played twice more in his first half-season.

Nothing had changed by the summer and so Carrillo was loaned out to Leganes – the club Pellegrino took over after leaving the south coast. That loan was renewed a year later and by complete coincidence they were relegated from La Liga in 2020.

Carrillo played his first game for Southampton on January 27, 2018 and his last on March 31 of the same year, failing to score and only eventually leaving permanently, on a free, two-and-a-half years later.

3) Jean-Alain Boumsong (Newcastle – £8m, 2005)

It’s a pretty spectacular example of Newcastle-style long-term planning. In the summer of 2004, Boumsong was available on a free transfer and eventually joined Rangers. Four months later, Newcastle paid £8m to sign a central defender that nobody else was in for and who Newcastle themselves had shown no interest in signing on a free.

Even if Boumsong had been decent, it would have been a cock-up.

He wasn’t. In fact, the transfer was one of the deals raised by the Stevens Inquiry as being potentially suspect, with inconsistencies between the evidence given by manager Graeme Souness and Freddy Shepherd. The inquiry eventually decided that neither party, nor risible football agent Willie McKay, had a case to answer. Always a result when you manage to evade awkward questions because people are perfectly willing to accept you are just that incompetent.

2) Alexis Sanchez (Manchester United – swap, 2018) and Henrikh Mkhitaryan (Arsenal – swap, 2018)

Swap deals and part-exchanges used to be all the rage in transfer gossip columns and speculatory circles but such spurious stories don’t tend to see the light of day anymore. A genuine theory: it’s because Alexis Sanchez and Henrikh Mkhitaryan ruined them for everyone by accidentally actually happening and highlighting why they never really actually had much before.

It is difficult to quantify the sheer dreadfulness endured by literally every party involved in the transfer. Neither player enjoyed themselves in new surroundings. Neither club benefited. Both of the managers who sanctioned the deal were gone by the end of the year, Jose Mourinho pushed by Manchester United whereas Arsene Wenger jumped from Arsenal. The fans had almost nothing to celebrate beyond Sanchez’s piano-playing announcement video and Mkhitaryan’s assist-laden debut.

Manchester United ran up an absurd wage bill for five goals in 45 games before discovering no-one fancied helping them shift that burden. Arsenal at least avoided that ignominy – Mkhitaryan was roughly OK and earned far less. But both players eventually left on free transfers for a reason, so cursed was this swap.

1) Savio Nsereko (West Ham – £9m, 2009)

Just a very sad story. Having sold Craig Bellamy to Manchester City for £14m, West Ham reinvested most of the proceeds in Savio, a German striker from Serie B side Brescia. Nsereko had scored three career league goals, all in the second tier.

Savio played ten league games for West Ham but only ever started one match and never scored. Not only was his shooting awry, his physical presence was that of a dormouse. West Ham sold him to Fiorentina for just £3m less than seven months after signing him, taking a £1m loss per month on the initial outlay.

From then on, Savio declined rapidly. He moved through lower-league clubs in Germany and Italy before moving through Kazakhstan, Bulgaria and Lithuania. There was also an arrest for faking his own kidnapping in Thailand, and reports of mental health issues along the way.

“I made a lot of mistakes. In fact, I did everything wrong that I could,” he told Bild in 2013, retiring seven years later having long faded from view.