Per game most pricey player

[lackedpunch]

I've just been thinking about Islam Slimani and Ahmed Musa, who cost Leicester City a total of £44 million and who are both now on loan at other clubs, having spent 18 months at Leicester and hardly getting a game between them.

This is your challenge:

Find the player who cost the most and played the fewest full games for a club. So a player who cost £10 million and only played 10 full games for a club would be £1 million a game. You cannot count appearances as a substitute, only a full 90 minutes.

Who is it?

[treibeis]

Twenty-odd years ago, Martin Zafirov moved from Spartak Warna to HSV for 200,000-plus quid/marks/euros. He played one game for them, in which he got sent off in the 87th minute.

Old money, I know, but still expensive.

[Wouter D]

Ivan Gabrich. One single full game for Ajax (plus nine appearances as a sub). Costs: nine million guilders.

[cantagalo]

I thought Jack Rodwell would be a contender but I discover that he’s actually played 67 times for Sunderland.

Still, £10m/67 is £149,000 a game. And considerably more if you factor in wages.

Wikipedia also tells me he went 1370 days without appearing on the winning side (though that may say just as much about Sunderland as Rodwell).

[Ek weet nie]

Technically, the likes of Nikolay Mihaylov cost a fee and did not make an appearance so therefore is infinite by your measure.

[ursus arctos]

James Rodriguez cost Real Madrid between 75 and 80 million euro and made 77 appearances for them (a good number of which were a substitute)

[blameless]

The answer to this question is always Gianluigi Lentini - cost £13 million at 1992 prices (so basically the equivalent of Neymar today), and soon afterwards crashed his Porsche at over 100mph and was almost killed. Survived, but was never the same player again and made only 70-odd appearances for Milan before moving on to Atalanta for buttons.

[caja-dglh]

I get free transfer Winston Bogarde to costing 693k per game at Chelsea (if you take the games played as 12); wikipedia's 9 would put you at 924k. Obviously that is all based on salary which is a hard mark to do apples-to-apples on.

[Janik]

I've just been thinking about Islam Slimani and Ahmed Musa, who cost Leicester City a total of £44 million and who are both now on loan at other clubs, having spent 18 months at Leicester and hardly getting a game between them.

It is actually surprising how often both played for Leicester. Musa made 33 appearances in all competitions (all but one of them last season), Slimani 44. Mostly as a sub though, so if you did it by the minute and divided by 90 they might total only 1/4 of those numbers in terms as 'complete games'. If you were to try and measure it in terms of impact...

[Etienne]

Di Maria cost Manchester United 57m and made 27 appearances.

[lackedpunch]

It is actually surprising how often both played for Leicester. Musa made 33 appearances in all competitions (all but one of them last season), Slimani 44. Mostly as a sub though, so if you did it by the minute and divided by 90 they might total only 1/4 of those numbers in terms as 'complete games'. If you were to try and measure it in terms of impact...

The impact was so negligible you'd need an electron microscope to measure it!

[Antepli Ejderha]

Didn't George Burley sign a few contenders for Ipswich?

[Antepli Ejderha]

Baston and Mesa at Swansea?

[Nefertiti2]

Oxford United signed Ray Gaston from Coleraine for £12500 in 1968. Their biggest transfer fee at the time. He only made 12 appearances.

£1000 a game

[Pérou Flaquettes]

I remember writing on perma crock Kieron Dyer at West Ham on this issue given that he cost West Ham over £20m in transfer fee + wages + image rights (!) + loyalty fees (!!!) in 4 seasons, and never played a full game for the Hammers; 22 appearances only, so that's nearly £1m per game = 60K a week x 52 x 4 (£12,5m) + £6m transfer fee + £2.1m in image rights & loyalty fees over 4 seasons = £20.6 million divided by 22 = £936K per game.


(it says £450K in his wiki but I worked it out as much higher than that, their calculations must be without the wages and extra bells & whistles).

He was often replaced by Junior Stanislas, who was on £1,000 a week...

Dyer completed a move to West Ham on 16 August 2007 for £6 million, signing a four-year deal. He made his debut for West Ham in the 1–0 away win at Birmingham City on 18 August 2007.[26] However, this has been one of the few positives in Dyer's time at West Ham as he has since been blighted by injury.[13][27] Just ten days after his debut, he was stretchered off after a tackle by Joe Jacobson in a League Cup match against Bristol Rovers that resulted in his right leg being broken in two places.[28] Dyer subsequently missed the rest of the 2007–08 season.[13] His injury was re-assessed in August 2008, when it was decided that a six-week specialist rehabilitation programme was required before he began pre-season training.[29]

During this time, Dyer's slow recovery from his injury sparked widespread speculation that his career may be over.[30]

On 3 January 2009, Dyer made his comeback for West Ham after 17 months out, coming on as a second-half substitute against Barnsley in the FA Cup third round tie at the Boleyn Ground.[31] Dyer's injuries continued in May 2009 when he was ruled out with a hamstring injury.[32] He played in West Ham's first match of the 2009–10 season against Wolverhampton Wanderers, but had problems with injuries after the match.[32][33] He managed only one more match, away to Blackburn Rovers, before hamstring problems hit again. He returned for two further matches before another injury in September kept him out until returning in a reserve match against Stoke City in November when he scored two goals.[33][34]

After taking over West Ham in January 2010, David Sullivan revealed the full extent of the club's debts, which totalled £110 million.[35] Shortly afterwards, in addition to the swingeing cuts being made by vice-chairman Karren Brady, Sullivan suggested that Dyer should follow Dean Ashton into retirement; Sullivan expressed the club's frustration that Dyer, who was earning £60,000 per week, had only played 18 matches in three years.[27] Ipswich town had expressed an interest in re-signing Dyer, but the move stalled amid reports Dyer had demanded a £1 million pay-off from West Ham; the media had also speculated about whether Dyer could actually pass a medical.[27]

In May 2010, figures in The Daily Telegraph stated that Dyer, who had made only 22 appearances and had never played a full 90 minutes for West Ham, was the club's top earner on £83,000-a-week. His deal included £424,000-a-season for image rights and £100,000 in loyalty fees.[36] Dyer was released by West Ham at the end of the 2010–11 season, after costing the club around £450,000 for every match he played in.[37]

[3 Colours Red]

Robbie Keane must have cost Liverpool at least a million per game?

[Patrick Thistle]

I saw Kieran Dyer get sent off for fighting David Batty Lee Bowyer. My only time at a Newcastle game. Before the punching started, the woman behind me loudly declaimed that Dyer was "too fancy for me, too fancy!"

'Too fancy!" has become a stock in-joke for me and Mrs Thistle ever since.

EDITED because my memory is obviously faulty

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Someone I know very well worked with a young woman who went out with Kieron Dyer on and off for a good two years when he was a Mag. I met her a few times in pubs/functions in connection with this person's work and while it's fair to say that she may not have been the coldest beer in the fridge as the Aussies say, she was a lovely, fairly quiet lass. She also had a loose tongue when a little sozzled and told me and her work colleagues some right goss about him and other Mags... I can't obviously say much on here but let's that say that he didn't plough much of his earnings back into this particular relationship, he was tight as a gnat's chuff as they said in Viz, and he wanted to indulge in some very, hmm, how shall I say..., oh well I'll leave that to your imagination.

[beak]

I saw Kieran Dyer get sent off for fighting David Batty.

Lee Bowyer, shurely? Who was only doing what nearly everybody in the crowd had been dreaming of doing for yonks.

I can't obviously say much on here

Oh, I'm sure you can find it within yourself to do so. Go on. Go oooooonnnnn.

[blameless]

'Twas indeed Bowyer - Batty fought Graeme Le Saux.

And in both cases, their hard-man image took a severe dent when it became clear that the supposed lightweights they were scrapping with were in no way whatsoever intimidated by them.

[Patrick Thistle]

Yes of course it was Bowyer. I'd conflated the incidents.

Another guy got sent off as well. I think it was Stephen Taylor. Handball on the line and pretended he'd taken a shot to the chest. But couldn't fool the referee.

[tee rex]

There must be quite a few Clive Allens - signed and soon sold, without a single appearance. So we'd probably have to make playing a full game one of the criteria, though getting subbed off in stoppage time could rule out a few.

[Giggler]

Immediate thought was Adrian Randall (£140,000 for 34 games) before Gary Brabin dredged himself from the recesses of my unconsciousness. One hundred and twenty five thousand pounds for five games, including one in which he was sent off. Yet we sold him to Blackpool for £140,000!

[elguapo4]

If there were any Real Madrid otfers they'd be putting forward a certain Jonathon Woodgate at this stage

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Another guy got sent off as well. I think it was Stephen Taylor. Handball on the line and pretended he'd taken a shot to the chest. But couldn't fool the referee.

I miss those. He did that a couple of times and I've got to say they were the best thing about football in that decade.