We just placed 1st...
Posted: 04 Jan 2024, 15:36
"....in a Football 365 article listing the Top 10 Worst January Transfers. My personal recollection of this was being on a skiiing holiday in Italy and getting a txt from the lovely Sully the Dog to tell we had signed Saviola and thinking WOW. The extra 'la' turned out to be very important :-) 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 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, but almost a decade later, his career is still not back on track. After all the promise of his youth career at 1860 Munich, only sadness and regret remain."