The Premiership is full of quality players these days - having all been attracted by the moolah that floats around so easily. But in the early days of the Premiership, managers didn’t seem to even care about researching a player. They could have signed the Queen Mum for all they knew. Here’s my top 5 Premiership flops…
5. Margo Boogers: Where on earth did West Ham find this guy? He stepped out of a caravan, onto the pitch with crazed-looking eyes and went lunging two-footed into someone’s leg. He was given a red card and walked back into his caravan, never to be seen again. Not that the Hammers have a reputation for buying dross at over-inflated prices.
4. Winston Bogarde: You have to take your hat off to old Winston - he probably wasn’t even a footballer, you know, but he made Chelsea honour his contract of 40k a week for what seemed like an entire age, without kicking a football. OK, he played 11 games. Nobody would touch him after that, but he didn’t seem to care - he had millions stuffed away in his bank account and apparently he was boss at Football Manager.
3. Steve Marlet: Marlet was never really that bad - it was just the 11.5m price tag that turned a few heads and got people thinking “Hey - have Fulham really found a decent player here?” No they blood hadn’t! He was worth about 1.5m, but Al Fayed wasn’t thinking straight and mucked the cheque up. Marlet came, played a little, left little impression - and left.
2. Jean-Alain Boumsong: This must be a joke, yes? Jean-Alain Boumsong, so bad that he looks like his manager has made him sit in a swivel chair, rotated him 100 times and sent him out onto the pitch for a dare, signs for Juventus? After being rotten for Newcastle 92 minutes out of 90 every week? This is amazing.
1. Ali Dia: So funny that the story of Ali Dia should be incorporated in the National Anthem, and serves as a stark reminder to any club chairman that hiring Graeme Souness can be horribly, horribly bad for your club’s health. It’s strange to think that Souness kept walking into jobs even before this debacle, especially as he had mangled Liverpool beforehand. Ali Dia, to cut a long story short, was not the cousin of George Weah, but some scammer who convinced the aforementioned Scot that he was great. So without watching him play, Souness throws him on as a substitute, and then hauls him off. Hilarious.
Can you think of any worse players than these five? Go on, let me know!