10 of the worst strikers to have played in the Premier League

#6 Afonso Alves (Middlesbrough)

Alves was unable to replicate his performances for Malmo and Heerenveen at the Riverside Stadium

To be fair to the Brazilian, he had been in a phenomenal goalscoring form since breaking into the Malmo starting line-up in 2004. Alves had scored an incredible 80 goals in 115 appearances across all competitions for Malmo and subsequently Heerenveen before Middlesbrough came calling in the winter transfer window of the 2007-08 season.

After their 7th placed finish in the 2004-05 season, Boro had fallen down the pecking order in English football after having finished 14th and 12th in the 2005-06 and 2006-07 season and were in desperate to bring a striker of substantial quality. When the club signed Alves for the then club record fee of £12.5 million in January, it was believed that he was the right man to transform the side into a feared unit.

However, those claims proved to be unfounded in a very short span of time as not only did Alves fail to impress, he was actually very poor almost every time he featured. While he did score a hattrick on the final day of his first season in England, it was against a hapless Manchester City side (they were not the footballing power that they are at the moment).

Any hopes of him becoming a club legend were squashed in the subsequent season in which he failed to make any real impact as he scored just 7 goals in 34 appearances and was subsequently sold to the Qatari club Al-Sadd.