10 players whose transfer fee didn't match their talents

#9 Denilson - £21.5m (Sao Paulo to Real Betis, 1998)

Denilson failed to justify his world-record transfer fee at Betis

Back in the 1990s, the world record transfer fee tended to mark out players who were thought to be the best – or at least one of the best – in the world at the time.

The decade saw the record broken 9 times, and all of the players who held the record – outside of Gianluigi Lentini, whose career was wrecked by a car accident – would now be considered legends of the game.

The only exception would be Brazilian winger Denilson, who moved from boyhood club Sao Paulo to Real Betis in the summer of 1998 for a world record fee of £21.5m. The flashy 20-year-old had broken into Sao Paulo’s first team as a 17-year-old, but despite showing an array of tricks and flicks, realistically it didn’t make a lot of sense for the Spanish side to pay more than Inter had paid Barcelona for the great Ronaldo Nazario a year earlier.

Sure enough, Denilson simply couldn’t live up to the huge transfer fee, and ended up scoring just 5 goals over the course of his first two seasons at the club, with the end of the second one seeing Betis relegated into Spain’s Segunda Division.

The Brazilian remained at the Andalusian club until the 2004-05 campaign, but by that point he’d faded out and was merely a fringe player, and after a brief period in France with Bordeaux, Denilson became a journeyman of sorts, playing in Saudi Arabia, the USA, Greece and even Vietnam.

He never did fulfil the potential he’d once shown – seemingly a victim of Betis paying a fee for him that simply didn’t match his talents at the time.