The Premier League is one of the most closely-contested and intense footballing leagues on the planet, with the winner notoriously difficult to predict these days, Leicester’s dream run last year a case in point.
A look at the statistics is all it takes to realise that almost all the title winning teams these past few years have one thing in common – a striker who regularly bangs in goals and turns those dreary losses into draws, and closely fought draws into wins for his team.
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Jamie Vardy’s goals were invaluable for the Foxes last season, as were Diego Costa’s, Sergio Aguero’s and Robin van Persie’s strikes in each of Chelsea’s, Manchester City’s and Manchester United’s title-winning campaigns.
Also read: Top 5 underrated strikers in the EPL right now
Therefore, it’s hardly a surprise to see teams splash the cash on a frontman that could possibly lead them to glory; and while there are the obvious success stories, there have also been some true horror transfers for teams over the years.
Here is our take on who we believe are the worst strikers to have ever graced the Premier League.
#5 Andriy Shevchenko
Andriy Shevchenko arrived at Chelsea – much to the chagrin of Jose Mourinho – as a Champions League and Ballon d'Or winner. He was one of the hottest imports into the Premier League, and for good reason. The Ukrainian had won a plethora of individual honours during his time at Milan and Dynamo Kyiv and was one of the deadliest marksmen in the world, having scored over 250 goals during his time with the aforementioned clubs.
Chelsea had splashed an English record sum of nearly €44 million for the striker, but Shevchenko seemed to have already lost all the sharpness and pace that had made him a deadly marksman. He managed to score just nine goals in 47 appearances for the Blues in the league – which amounts to almost €5 million per goal – before he was loaned back to Milan, where he would again fail to score for a further 18 games.
While he will go down as one of the best strikers to have played the game, his time in the Premier League was a more than forgettable one.
#4 Diego Forlan
Forlan won the Pichichi top goalscorer award in the La Liga twice, the European Golden Shoe and the World Cup Golden Ball with Uruguay, but his time in the English top-flight with Manchester United can’t be classified as anything other than miserable.
Forlan earned a fearsome reputation in Argentina with Independiente, having scored an impressive 40 goals in just 91 games. His form attracted the attention of the Red Devils, and he moved to Manchester in 2001 for nearly £7 million.
At a time when United were fighting it out with Arsenal for the title and desperately needed someone to carry the goalscoring burden of the team, it took the striker an astonishing eight months and 29 games to break his duck. He managed to score a meagre 10 goals in a total of 63 appearances in the league.
While Forlan’s top-flight journey was largely forgettable, he would go on to much greater things in Spain with the likes of Villarreal and Atletico Madrid.
#3 Afonso Alves
The 6’1 Brazilian striker excelled in the Eredivisie with Heerenveen, bagging an incredible 34 goals in just 31 games in his first season the Dutch top-flight, and bagging a further 11 in just 8 appearances the next season – taking his tally to 45 league goals in 39 appearances; numbers that one usually associate with the likes of Messi and Ronaldo.
His goalscoring form saw Middlesbrough splash the cash for him midway through the 2007-08 season in a bid to escape the relegation scrap. He would score a brace in a 2-2 draw with Manchester United and a hat-trick in the infamous 8-1 win over Manchester City by the end of the season, but that’s as good as it got for the Brazilian.
He would only score four goals in 31 appearances for the club the next season as Middlesbrough were relegated to the Championship, taking his tally to a miserly 10 in 42 appearances. What made this all the more shocking was the fact that he was on nearly £50000 a week.
Relegation saw him being offloaded to Qatari side Al Sadd, and he spent the rest of his career in the Qatari league before eventually retiring from the game in 2015.
#2 Jozy Altidore
Jozy Altidore has amassed a century of caps and scored 37 goals for the US national team, but never truly managed to find his feet on English shores across two separate spells with Hull City and Sunderland.
The American scored 15 times in 37 appearances after he started out as a 16-year-old with New York Red Bull before moving to Spain with Villarreal. However, he truly made his mark in the Dutch league with AZ Alkmaar, scoring 39 league goals in two seasons with the club, including the all-important winner in the Dutch Cup final against PSV.
While his form would earn him a move to perennial strugglers, Sunderland, his previous spell in the English top-flight with Hull in 2009 was an unmitigated disaster. He scored only one goal in 28 appearances for the Tigers as they were relegated to the Championship.
While he looked to set things right during his second spell, things arguably got worse for him. He scored just a solitary goal in 42 appearances for the Mackems and was offloaded to the MLS once again – this time with Toronto FC, where he seems to have rediscovered a semblance of form once again.
#1 Ricky van Wolfswinkel
Ricky van Wolfswinkel, who joined Norwich City from Sporting CP for a fee of around £8.5 million before the 2013/14 season, was expected to lead from the front in the Canaries’ fight against relegation but that was not the case.
The Dutchman is yet another on the list of players who thrived in the Eredivisie, but utterly flopped when it came to life in the Premier League. Popularly nicknamed ‘the big bad wolf,’ he was in excellent goal-scoring form in the Eredivisie with Vitesse and Utrecht, scoring 34 goals in 99 games as a youngster.
He eventually moved to Portugal to play for Sporting, where his exploits would eventually earn him a move to English shores.
While he made an immediate impact with a goal on debut against Everton in the league, it all went downhill from there, with the striker failing to score in any of his further 24 appearances in the league that season – despite being given plenty of chances.
Norwich would end up getting relegated at the end of the season and ‘the wolf’ would be loaned out to Ligue 1 with Saint-Etienne.
He has now returned to his homeland and plays for Vitesse, the club that initially handed him his debut.
