You always suspect that vanity is at work when a manager persuades his club to invest a fortune on the grounds that he can wring rewarding performance out of a player who has exasperated others.

Brendan Rodgers, for instance, may have imagined himself as a young King Arthur last summer, about to pull the sword from the Mario Balotelli stone to the astonished admiration of veteran knights such as José Mourinho and Roberto Mancini. But sadly it hasn’t worked out like that, to no one’s astonishment.

Before that Mauricio Pochettino’s Southampton forked out £15m – almost as much as Liverpool paid for Balotelli – on Dani Osvaldo, making the Italy international the club’s record signing. Osvaldo, whose contract at St Mary’s was terminated on Wednesday two years early, went on to make Balotelli look a bargain.

In fairness to Pochettino, he had a good reason to be confident of honing Osvaldo’s spiky talent. After all, he had already done so once: the striker plundered 22 goals in 47 appearances for Espanyol under the Argentinian manager. He was also prolific at Roma, but the reason so many clubs steered clear of him, and why Southampton were able to get him, was that he didn’t just hit the net, he also hit team-mates. That turned out to be a habit he hadn’t got rid of.

When at Bologna Osvaldo decked Nicola Mingazzini in a pre-season training session and, in 2011, he was fined and suspended for clobbering his Roma colleague Erik Lamela, apparently because the now Tottenham player eschewed an easy pass to him. “He will not bite anyone like Luis Suárez – but he does have fire,” quipped Pochettino in December 2013.

The manager said that with the same affectionate, almost paternal understanding with which Mancini and Rodgers would speak of Balotelli, and no wonder there was a tinge of pride to his tone – Osvaldo had just flummoxed Vincent Kompany on the way to scoring an exquisite lob for Southampton against Manchester City. Pochettino’s faith in the striker seemed set to be rewarded.

“He has a reputation and he deserves it,” continued Pochettino. “He is a player of character, with a lot of passion, a lot of heart and who is very emotional. But he is growing every day and we are happy with how he is doing and with his behaviour. He is a friendly guy and a good team-mate.”

But not for long.

It was a pity that Osvaldo came to blows with José Fonte just as he seemed to be getting to grips with the Premier League. His goal against City, his third in 12 Premier League games for Southampton up to that point, was not the catalyst to the striker’s conquest of England.

He played only one more game for the club before a headbutt at training left Fonte with a black eye and Southampton looking for someone to take Osvaldo off their hands. Juventus eventually did so on loan, before Internazionale and Boca Juniors also harboured him for spells.

Intended as the long-term replacement for Rickie Lambert, Osvaldo was himself replaced within a few months, as Southampton went back into the transfer market last summer to sign Graziano Pellè. How Saints could have done with both their Italian international strikers in the second half of last season, if Osvaldo had progressed rather than relapsed, as the over-reliance on Pellè proved to be one of the factors in Ronald Koeman’s side fading slightly towards the end of an otherwise excellent campaign.

Koeman will likely strengthen his strikeforce further this summer, there having been no expectation that Osvaldo would return from loan to uplift the squad.

While at Inter he was banned for missing training and shunned by team-mates for trying to fight Mauro Icardi, and a breach of discipline in the team hotel led to him being chastised before his first match for Boca. In the end, it seems that no one has been sufficiently convinced of his quality, or his ability to subdue the fire to which Pochettino referred, to offer Southampton a significant transfer fee. So the club just cut their losses.

It could have been worse for Southampton. Three other clubs who also made monumental misjudgments on strikers in the 2013-14 season wound up paying for it with their Premier League places, as Fulham, Norwich City and Cardiff City were relegated while ruing record investments in Mitroglou, Ricky van Wolfswinkel and Andreas Cornelius.

In an era when Southampton are widely lauded for the calibre of their player development and the shrewdness of their recruitment, they can choose to regard their record signing as being a bit like one of those mistakes in Persian rugs, evidence that nobody is perfect.

Pochettino, meanwhile, might wish that he could plead trickery in the same way that one of his predecessors at Southampton, Graeme Souness, could after the club’s most memorable botched signing.

But Osvaldo is no Ali Dia. Which, of course, means that someone else is going to take a chance on him soon.