Flashlights

There’s a lot of money being splashed around the Premiership these days, and most of it on foreign players. In most cases, managers know who they are signing, but in the first fledgling years of the Premiership, it could have been anyone. 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. Tomas Brolin: It’s sad to think of Brolin – but he does tend to be thought of as a “before” and “after” player – in other words – before he came to Leeds, he was one of the world’s greatest footballers. After he went to Leeds, he was a fat waster that not even Crystal Palace could put up with for more than a couple of months. What did he do? Go out on the lash with Lee Bowyer? It’s so sad – he cost 4.5m and repaid absolutely none of it. Useless.

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: How? Seriously – how? The question will probably remain for the rest of footballing history – how did this guy EVER get signed to Juventus? After being torn apart by Alan Hansen week in, week out on Match of the Day, this guy, having proven himself to be the single worst defender to have stepped foot on English soil, goes and plays for Juve. 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 anyone worse than this lot? Give me a shout!

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