There have been some dreadful club record signings in Premier League history. The broadcast TV deals of this era have granted football clubs Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth. Unfortunately, this has often left them with more money than sense as they recklessly invest vast sums into players with a wanton disregard for the consequences, effectively lighting their cigars with rolled up £50 notes like cartoon villains. Although there are many instances of clubs splashing cash on players who turned out to be utterly useless for them, there is one example that stands head and shoulders above the rest. Step forward Savio Nsereko.

January 2009 was a relatively exciting period of time at West Ham. They were still owned by the Icelandic consortium headed by Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson and the club was a few months into the reign of Gianfranco Zola, who had been appointed manager after Alan Curbishley’s resignation the previous September. Although there were were apprehensions from fans about the appointment, the Italian was beginning to win over fans by playing an expansive and creative brand of football.

Zola joined West Ham after the closure of the summer transfer window, so January brought his first foray into the market. There was an element of unrest among fans when the club decided to sell their record signing, Craig Bellamy, to Manchester City for £14m halfway through the window. The fans were promised that the money would be reinvested in a new forward. A week later, West Ham announced they had broken their transfer record to sign Nsereko, a Uganda-born German striker, from Brescia for a fee upwards of £9m.

Needless to say, a few eyebrows were raised. Nsereko was an unknown quantity for the vast majority of fans and there was understandable scepticism given that the club had committed to their biggest transfer outlay of all time on a player who had made just 23 league appearances and scored three senior goals for a team playing in Serie B.

Still, plenty of players have been plucked from relative obscurity and gone on to have successful careers in England, and Nsereko came with a good reputation after being named player of the tournament in the European Under-19 Championship in 2008. He was given the No10 shirt vacated by Bellamy and there was a sense of quiet anticipation around Upton Park as their new forward made his debut from the bench against Hull City two days after signing.

While hardly setting the world alight in his brief cameo as a substitute, he showed a few signs of promise. It was clear that he was technically competent and showed a sharpness of mind and foot that suggested he might be able to compensate for his physical deficiencies. You could see that perhaps the West Ham manager saw something of himself in the young German – a diminutive, creative forward who relied on guile rather than brute force; someone to pick the lock rather than batter the door down.

As time went on, it became increasingly clear that his physical fragility was going to prove too big an obstacle for him to overcome. He struggled to dislodge Carlton Cole and David Di Michele from the first team, which meant he was limited to appearances from the bench. He failed to impact games as a substitute and, despite being tidy in possession, he was a Jenga tower of a forward player – he often looked unsteady and was liable to be sprawled across the floor following the merest contact. Something was evidently not right.

Savio Nsereko spent much of his time at West Ham on the bench as he struggled to make an impact. Photograph: Hamish Blair/Getty Images

Clubs employ a variety of responses when their big-money acquisitions aren’t working out. Some clubs pigheadedly persevere with their player, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the reality of the situation, like a doctor desperately performing CPR long after the patient has stopped breathing. Others simply freeze them out and let them rot in the reserves. Then there are those who simply cut their losses and sell to whoever is willing to buy, even if it means a reduction in transfer fee. West Ham took the final option when it came to Nsereko.

They shipped him off to Fiorentina after just six months for a fee reported to be £3m, with Portuguese centre-half Manuel da Costa moving the other way as part of the deal. He made only 10 appearances in claret and blue, only one of which was a start, and he failed to score for the club. While his time in east London was undeniably disappointing, he was hardly the first player to fail to settle in England, and nor was he the first player to struggle to adapt to the physical demands of the Premier League, so a move back to Italy, where he had shown promise as a teenager at Brescia, seemed like a viable opportunity for him to get his career back on track.

It did not work out that way though. Nobody could have predicted how spectacularly Nsereko’s career would derail from this point forward. In Florence he once again found himself stuck on the periphery of the first team. Five moths after returning to Italy he found himself out on loan at Bologna. His time there was unproductive though, managing only two games in a six-month spell before returning to his parent club.

His spell at Bologna was to be a portent of things to come, as Nsereko spent the remaining years of his Fiorentina contract on a series of loans at clubs across Europe. He returned to Germany to play for 1860 Munich in the second tier, before going to Chernomorets Burgas in Bulgaria, Juve Stabia in Serie B and then to FC Vaslui in Romania, before a final loan spell back in Munich, this time in the third division with SpVgg Unterhaching, where he would eventually sign a permanent free transfer.

Nsereko showed glimpses of potential, but failed to register a single goal for West Ham before returning to Italy. Photograph: Hamish Blair/Getty Images

In all of these loan periods over the course of three seasons, he only played more than two league games for Chernomorets Burgas in Bulgaria. This lack of appearances and failure to settle anywhere seemed to be a product of the plague of personal problems that seemed to follow the striker wherever he went.

His contracts at 1860 and Juve Stabia were both cancelled after he went AWOL and he was released from SpVgg Unterhaching after just two months for a breach of contract. The nadir of his personal issues came in 2012 when he was arrested by Thai authorities and sent to jail for weeks after faking his own kidnapping in an attempt to ransom money from his own family.

After his release from Unterhaching, Nsereko embarked on a nomadic career that would rival that of Trevor Benjamin. He racked up a handful of games in regional German football for FC Viktoria Köln, as well as for Hapoel Ironi Akko in Israel, before finding his way to Kazakhstan. He signed for FC Atyrau in 2014, a team that had finished 11th in the Kazakhstan Premier League in the previous season and marked his debut with a goal in a 1-0 victory that was voted goal of the season by the club’s fans. Staggeringly, it was the first professional goal he had scored since he was a teenager at Brescia in January 2009.

To put that into context, before his goal for Atyrau, the last time Nsereko scored George W Bush was still US president, Portsmouth were the holders of the FA Cup and Justin Bieber had yet to release his first single. It was a goal worthy of the accolade too, as he collected the ball on the left touchline, cut inside and rode a challenge before rifling a shot in from 35 yards: a tantalising glimpse of his capabilities. He left the club in June 2014 after just 10 appearances and had been without a club for over a year when he signed for Beroe Stara Zagora of the Bulgarian Premier League, where he played his mandatory handful of games before being released in July 2015. He is currently a free agent.

So what went wrong? In 2012, Karren Brady announced she was going to investigate the Nsereko deal that the previous board had overseen, citing the huge financial loss West Ham incurred by selling the player for so cheap just six months into his contract. With hindsight, perhaps she was right to be suspicious. West Ham’s technical director at the time, Gianluca Nani, had pre-existing relationships with Nsereko and Brescia – he had brokered the deal that took the player to Brescia from Hertha Berlin at the age of 16, and was the son-in-law of Brescia president Luigi Corioni. The findings of Brady’s investigation were never made public and the club has not elaborated on the deal since then.

Perhaps Nsereko was simply not that talented in the first place and was the victim of an artificially inflated transfer fee. Still, he clearly had some ability as he was a member of a Germany Under-19 team that won the European Championship for their age group, a side that featured both Bender brothers, who went on to be full senior internationals.

It seems that the cause of his downfall had more to do with his newfound levels of fame and fortune than anything else. In 2013, Nsereko admitted that he had “lost grip with reality” when it came to the vast wealth he found at his disposal and his botched fake kidnapping was a way to pay off his debts and sustain his extravagant lifestyle. In this regard, his story could act as a cautionary tale for young footballers who suddenly find themselves wildly rich.

Nsereko is still only 26 and there is still time for him to turn things around, however unlikely that may seem given his past. If nothing else, he has a strong claim to be the worst record signing in Premier League history.

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