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Liverpool should look to the transfer mistakes of Chelsea and Manchester City if they want to know what not to do as champions in the transfer market. The best XI signed by Premier League champions offers Liverpool hope but this sorry lot provides a warning. GOALKEEPER: Mark Bosnich ‘We had a bad period trying to replace Peter Schmeichel,’ said Sir Alex Ferguson of a succession line which has made the ongoing search for his managerial heir look some way competent.
Manchester United had ample time to find the inheritor of Schmeichel’s gloves after the Dane announced in November 1998 his intention to leave the following summer. The best the club could come up with was to bring back Bosnich on a free from Aston Villa in a move which went so well Massimo Taibi had to be drafted in soon after. Taibi was dreadful but those ties were mutually severed within four games and he was shipped back to Italy with both parties accepting it was simply a poor fit.
Bosnich had no such excuse over adaptation and acculturation yet still turned up to his first training session overweight and three hours late and never came close to pushing off from that wrong-footed start. He was perhaps the worst signing in Manchester United history , usurped by perennial understudy Raimond van der Gouw towards the end of his first and only season in the starting line-up. RIGHT-BACK: Davide Zappacosta Antonio Conte once described himself as “a bit of a disaster” at “convincing the club to buy players,” and the season he spent as a Premier League champion with Chelsea is a compelling case in point.
From a position of supposed strength the Blues spent almost £240m on Willy Caballero, Antonio Rudiger, Tiemoue Bakayoko, Alvaro Morata, Danny Drinkwater, Ross Barkley, Emerson Palmieri, Olivier Giroud and the eminently forgettable Zappacosta. That is an impressively poor hit rate. It is genuinely difficult to think of a single moment of note from the Italian’s 52 appearances, which apparently included a substitute cameo in the Europa League final win over Arsenal in 2019 and an alleged Mo Salah Special of a goal and an assist in a Champions League thrashing of Qarabag.
CENTRE-HALF: Papy Djilobodji Conte learned from the best when it came to the delicate art of demanding and then disowning transfers . “It was not my choice,” said Jose Mourinho. “It was the choice of somebody I trust completely.
I don’t know every player. My job doesn’t allow me to travel, doesn’t allow me to spend hours and hours watching players. In some moments of the market, under certain circumstances are moments where you have to trust or not the people that you work with.
” A Chelsea career consisting of an entire 59 seconds of a League Cup win over Walsall suggests Mourinho should choose his friends more wisely. The centre-half was almost immediately ostracised and omitted from the club’s Champions League squad the day after he signed for £2.7m, although Chelsea still tripled their money – because Sunderland – when Djilobodji was sold eight months after the Portuguese was sacked.
CENTRE-HALF: Michael Hector It is difficult to ever feel a great degree of sympathy for Mourinho but Chelsea were determined to test that theory in the summer of 2015. The manager wanted John Stones but after four separate low-balled bids did nothing to budge Everton, alternatives had to be sourced. Perhaps the hope was that the unknown Djilobodji and Football League specialist Hector could merge together to form one semi-decent centre-half but sending the latter straight back to Reading for the season suggested a curious long-term play.
That was the first of four loans Hector endured while contracted to Chelsea, for whom he did not play a single competitive match. CENTRE-HALF: Eliaquim Mangala There cannot be many players to have featured for Everton and won a Premier League title in the same season, nor trained with both Pep Guardiola and Sam Allardyce within a 24-hour window. But then Mangala’s was never an ordinary case.
Even his transfer fee was shrouded in mystery, sitting somewhere between £31m and £41m due to confusion over split ownership and economic rights. It was a significant amount of money either way for a sub-optimal return. The Frenchman played regularly in the final days of Manuel Pellegrini but was predictably put to one side by Guardiola, who did throw him some cursory minutes in 2017/18 when Vincent Kompany started to break before that loan to Goodison Park.
Nothing sums up Mangala’s time at the Etihad better than Manchester City extending his contract in March 2019 to protect the value of a player they let go to Valencia for free five months later. LEFT-BACK: Abdul Baba Rahman Perhaps Mourinho really did have the patience of a saint. It is ludicrous to think one of his Chelsea signings was around long enough to be sold by Mauricio Pochettino but Baba Rahman joined from Augsburg for £22m in August 2015, made 23 appearances in his first season and left without improving on that mark seven years and as many loans later.
CENTRE-MIDFIELDER: Jack Rodwell The most unworthy Premier League title winner in history was the first signing Manchester City ever made as modern-day champions, and until the capture of Javi Gracia on deadline day their most expensive that summer. “I would probably say don’t sign now, I’d say get as much football as you can,” Rodwell would later observe of apparently mutually exclusive options which will simultaneously infuriate Sunderland supporters. CENTRE-MIDFIELDER: Kalvin Phillips ‘How did Manchester City manage to sign Kalvin Phillips, a highly-rated England international, for just £42 million, plus another three in add-ons?’ reads the opening line in an extensive Athletic explainer from July 2022.
More apt questions almost three years later would be how Leeds managed to extract so much from the champions, and whether those add-ons have been activated. There cannot have been many transfers which have so conclusively ruined a player. Phillips was a well-respected, highly-rated 23-cap England international who had starred for his country at a European Championship and established himself as one of the best central midfielders in the Premier League.
It was not enough for Guardiola, who felt Phillips struggled to understand the intricacies of the Rodri role and ensured the confidence of Marcelo Bielsa’s favourite son was shattered further with some questionable public comments about his weight . Not even loans increasingly lower down the ladder have saved Phillips from this inexorable slump. He has started more Premier League games for West Ham and Ipswich as a Manchester City player and still three years remain on his Etihad contract.
CENTRE-MIDFIELDER: Danny Drinkwater ‘This for both parties was a business move gone wrong, it’s as black and white as that. To the Chelsea fans I apologise for how this has turned out,’ wrote Drinkwater when the five-year deal he signed at Stamford Bridge in summer 2017 was allowed to finally run to expiration. Outside of a half-hour Community Shield cameo in August 2018, the midfielder had not played for the Blues since the March before.
The reasons for his struggles ranged from injury to an unsuitability to Maurizio Sarri’s system, to a significant drink-driving ban and an altercation in a nightclub. Drinkwater himself called his post-Leicester career “a shambles” and himself a “loaf of bread” who found no solace on loan at Burnley, Aston Villa, Kasimpasa or Reading. If anything, the Villa spell in particular only caused things to spiral further when he headbutted teammate Jota in training .
All in all, including his transfer fee and wages, Drinkwater cost Chelsea about £50m for 23 appearances, 12 starts and a fair amount of hassle. CENTRE-FORWARD: Andriy Shevchenko The most chastening of palindromic careers took Shevchenko from Champions League-dominating, Ballon d’Or-worthy heights to the lows of being weaponised in the power struggle between Mourinho and Roman Abramovich. By the time Shevchenko returned to AC Milan and Dynamo Kyiv he was a shadow of his former self, irrevocably broken by Jerzy Dudek.
The £30.8m spent in summer 2006 makes Shevchenko one of the most expensive players in Premier League history when inflation is taken into account, and his career in the competition ended with as many goals as Titi Camara in four more games. CENTRE-FORWARD: Ahmed Musa If a new Leicester signing is going to compare himself to one of his new teammates then Musa at least picked the right one.
“I think I am like Jamie Vardy. I have speed, I like to work hard, we are similar in lots of things,” the Nigerian once said, not understanding the complexities of a Red Bull and Skittles vodka diet. He was one of three club-record signings Leicester made in the summer they spent as Premier League champions, and neither Nampalys Mendy nor Islam Slimani fared particularly well either.
But Musa barely made a wave at the King Power, playing 33 times in 18 months before being shipped out on loan and then permanently at a loss. READ NEXT : Federico Chiesa joins Poborsky in transfer flop Premier League champions list.
