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Top Four Worst Transfers Made By Tottenham In The Last Decade Featuring This £26m Striker

Ouch! The Failure Of Transfers – Top Four Worst Transfers Made By Tottenham Hotspur In The Last Ten Years

The transfer period can be a tricky one for a club. You invest heavily on a player hoping that he would turn your team into the best, and very easily, he can turn out to be a dud, while at the same time, you get someone for hardly nothing and he turns out to be a huge impact player. The transfer business is fraught with risk and all the clubs go through their fair share of great signings and at the same time experience the other side of the coin as well.

Tottenham Hotspur too have had their brush with some very poor transfers in recent years and here we take a look at four of the worst transfers that the club have made in the last ten years.

Roberto Soldado 

Tottenham broke their record fee spent over a player on three occasions in the summer of 2013 and it was Roberto Soldado who became the most expensive player to have been signed by the North Londoners. 

Bought from Valencia for £26million, great things were expected from the Spaniard, but he turned out to be a massive disappointment for the club. The striker struggled to adapt to the ways and style of the English game in his first year at the club and finished with just 6 goals – only two of which came from open play.  

His second term with the Lilywhites would turn out to be much worse as he managed just a solitary goal in 24 league appearances. Soldado’s confidence was taken to the cleaners and the prolific Spaniard looked like a pale shadow of his past self. After two very underwhelming years in North London, Soldado decided to go back to Spain and has managed to revive himself at Villarreal ever since. But this was easily a blunder by Tottenham in recent years. 

Paulinho 

Another transfer that happened in the summer of 2013, under the tenure of Andre Villas Boas, Paulinho arrived at North London after a strong campaign in the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup in his homeland of Brazil. 

The midfielder joined Spurs for a fee of £17million from Corinthians and his signing was met with a lot of excitement from the supporters. After having lost Luka Modric to Real Madrid, it was expected that the Brazilian will turn out to be the heartbeat of Spurs’ midfield. But unfortunately, it was not to be. 

Paulinho started off fairly well, but soon, his performances began to waiver and he ended up losing his place in the side to a couple of green youngsters from the Tottenham academy in Ryan Mason and Nabil Bentaleb. After two years of consistent lacklustre performances, the Brazilian was sold to Chinese Super League side Guangzhou Evergrande in 2015, where he has resurrected himself.

Darren Bent 

Signed from Charlton Athletic ten years ago in 2007, for what was then a club record fee of £16.5million, things never took off for Darren Bent at Tottenham. A more than decent striker with a good goal-scoring record throughout his career, the Englishman had to endure a tough time at the White Hart Lane.

The forward earned a reputation of missing easy chances during his spell with Spurs. One of his lowest points came when he had missed an open goal in the final minutes of a league game against Portmouth that ended in a draw. Then Spurs manager, Harry Redknapp wasn’t pleased with his striker’s efforts and went on to say (after the game),

You`ll never get a better chance to win a match than that. My missus could have scored that one.”

Bent was eventually loaded off to Sunderland a couple of years later.

Moussa Sissoko 

The club’s record signing, Sissoko arrived on the deadline day of last summer, from Newcastle United for a fee of £30million. But he has failed to live up to the billing.  

The Frenchman was signed by current manager Mauricio Pochettino to add that extra firepower and bite in the attacking third, following his strong showing in the UEFA Euro 2016 for the French national team, but he has turned out to be a huge dud as he struggled to make it into the playing XI on a regular basis under the Argentine. The 27-year old made 34 appearances for the North London outfit in all competitions last season with just 4 assists to show for in return.

The midfielder never looked like he fit into the way the team operated under Pochettino. And having struggled to make any sort of impact, it seems certain that Sissoko is on his way out of the club just a year after his arrival.