Arsenal legend and Man Utd mainstay among 10 Premier League mega-flops who proved people wrong

Richarlison scored two goals in his first 39 Premier League appearances for Spurs – and one of those a tragicomic late equaliser at Liverpool followed by an even later winner for the home side.

He’s now scored six in his last six Premier League appearances for Spurs and is on a path that could earn him a place on this list of Barclays flops turned good…

10) Michail Antonio (West Ham)

The West Ham striker curse is real and long established. When did they last sign a good one? Don’t try and think of one. It’s a trick question, because they have never signed a striker who turned out to be good. What they did with Antonio was cleverly circumvent the curse by signing a utility player who could and has played in just about every position on both flanks from right-back to left-wing and then turning him into a striker.

Ingenious really, and a policy the Hammers have gone for again now with Jarrod Bowen, albeit without so much of the ‘early struggles in the wide positions despite somehow scoring goals at a rate that hints at untapped potential’.

9) Laurent Koscielny (Arsenal)

The France defender had one of the great inauspicious introductions to Our League thanks to a red card at Anfield on the opening day of the 2010/11 season. And Koscielny enjoyed getting sent off in injury time on his first Premier League appearance so much that he did it again in his eighth game at Newcastle.

And these weren’t even the most memorable calamities of his first season in England, thanks to a ludicrous last-minute mix-up with Wojciech Szczesny that allowed Obafemi Martins to score the winner for Birmingham in the League Cup final and extend what was by now a six-year trophy drought for the Gunners.

But Koscielny’s quality was clear enough between the calamities, and he became a key figure in a team that would end that trophy drought by commandeering the FA Cup with wins in 2014, 2015 and 2017. Koscielny did manage to get himself banned from the 2017 final thanks to a red card on the final day of the Premier League season – old habits die hard.

On the subject of final days of Premier League seasons, Koscielny also had a curious but happy knack of scoring on them to help Arsenal secure Champions League football, doing so in both 2012 and 2013.

8) Fabinho (Liverpool)

For most players on this list, it’s a tale of a year or two – or more of struggle – before redemption and success and garlands and plaudits, but Fabinho managed to condense the whole thing into a single season after arriving to much fanfare from Monaco in the summer of 2018.

By mid-October he was still awaiting a Premier League debut with rumours swirling that PSG might try and bring the unhappy Brazilian back to France when the transfer window opened. By the time the transfer window opened, this would look like an absurd suggestion with Fabinho having firmly ensconced himself in Liverpool’s midfield, where he would largely remain for the next four years apart from the frequent and occasionally lengthy spells where he was required to fill in at centre-back which he also did astonishingly well.

His first season ended with the most absurd near-miss in Premier League title history but a Champions League medal to soften the blow. His second saw Liverpool end their long wait for a Premier League title. His will not be the first name that comes to mind when the successes of Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool side is talked about in years to come, but he was a hugely significant part of it.

READ: Top 10 Premier League teams of all time

7) David De Gea (Manchester United)

It started and ended badly, but there really was a quite lengthy spell in the middle there where David De Gea was the Premier League’s best goalkeeper and a quite alarming number of times when Manchester United would have been entirely lost without Dave Saves keeping their heads above water.

Many of his early struggles were pinned on his appearance. He was only 20 when he joined United for a British record fee at the time for a goalkeeper of £18.9m. Which was another factor. It was an awful lot of money for an awfully young goalkeeper, especially one as slight as De Gea, whose skinny frame, patchy beard and slightly dazed expression gave him the overall vibe of a bashful werewolf in a teen horror-comedy. It was not a sight to inspire confidence at a club more used to seeing a Peter Schmeichel or Edwin van der Sar in its goal.

Unlike those literal and metaphorical giants, De Gea looked small and made the goal look big. His early work at United included watching Manchester City flash six goals past him at Old Trafford and De Gea subsequently admitted he thought about leaving after that first season.

Slowly but surely, as his confidence grew and he physically matured, De Gea established himself as the best in the league. The next time he thought about leaving it was because Real Madrid were keen, but so the story goes a fax machine had other ideas. The timid boy he first appeared in the United goal would eventually be named in the Premier League team of the year five times, and four times be named United’s players’ player of the year before his departure last summer. Still a free agent, which is faintly nutty.

READ: Man Utd goalkeepers ranked: De Gea in top three behind Champions League winners…

6) Granit Xhaka (Arsenal)

Declan Rice left a relegation-battling West Ham who are now in the top six to join a title-challenging Arsenal side who have subsequently got worse having allowed Granit Xhaka to leave for a Bayer Leverkusen side now threatening to inflict the biggest banter of Harry Kane’s career to date. These are facts. Selective and misleading facts, sure, but facts nonetheless.

Xhaka was not far off a figure of fun for large swathes of his Arsenal career, a red card in waiting, the football equivalent of that bit in The Simpsons where everyone at the power plant is stood watching and waiting for Homer to do something stupid. And Xhaka’s fondue was constantly ready. He is Swiss, after all.

Yet slowly but surely, Xhaka transformed himself from a player whose substitution was once cheered by his own supporters into an integral part of one of the Barclays’ most thrillingly unexpected title challenges, missing only one game all season and scoring a career-high seven goals from midfield as he finally brought his international form to the Emirates stage.

5) Jamie Vardy (Leicester)

Not often that a £1m move to a Championship club generates much attention, but Vardy’s move to Leicester from Fleetwood Town represented a record fee for a non-league player and inevitably caught the eye. Four goals in 26 Championship games in his first season was less eye-catching, and left Vardy doubting he had what it took to succeed at that level, never mind higher. He had to be talked out of leaving the club after that first season. Leicester got their promotion, but Vardy was a bit-part player until he wasn’t, scoring five goals in the memorable great escape of 2014/15.

What happened next was quite good. Vardy scored 24 goals in 2015/16. Also, Leicester won the league just as everyone predicted after they dodged the drop the previous year. Vardy will forever be associated with that one absurd season, because how could he not? But while it was a little bit flash-in-the-pan for the club, it most certainly wasn’t for Vardy himself.

Any suggestion of that season being a fluke or outlier is undone by the 20 goals he scored in 2017/18, the 18 in 2018/19 and especially the Golden Boot-nabbing 23 he managed in 2019/20. There were further solid goalscoring seasons in 2021 and 2022 and only in Leicester’s miserable relegation campaign did Vardy’s numbers regress to anything like what might have been expected on the back of that first second-tier campaign.

In all, a player who didn’t kick a ball in the Premier League until he was 27 finished up (we assume) with 136 goals in the Barclays – more than Robbie Keane, Dwight Yorke, Romelu Lukaku or Ian Wright.

4) Jordan Henderson (Liverpool)

You all know what we think of him now, but he was a fine leader and midfield stalwart for one of the greatest Premier League teams of all time, which was an outcome roughly as likely as ‘p*ssing away the entirety of reputation hard-won over the course of a decade-long career by going to Saudi Arabia for five months’ during his early days at Anfield following a big-money move from Sunderland.

One of Brendan Rodgers’ first acts as Liverpool manager in 2012 was to try and sell an unwanted Henderson to Fulham, only for the player himself to reject the move and vow to fight for his future at Liverpool. Three years later, Henderson replaced Steven Gerrard as Liverpool captain. Four years after that, he lifted the Champions League trophy. A year after that, the Premier League trophy in a season where he was named Liverpool’s fans’ player of the year and also snaffled the FWA Footballer of the Year trophy. Oh, Brendan.

3) Gareth Bale (Tottenham)

Richarlison may have six goals in his last six games, but he’s still got some way to travel to match Spurs’ most compelling zero-to-hero tale of the Premier League era. Bale has a strong case to be considered the most extreme example of the phenomenon anywhere in the last 30 years, given the sheer scale of his early struggles with form and fitness and those rumoured £3m departures to your Nottingham Forests or Birmingham Citys before he started simply scoring absurd Roy of the Rovers goals every single week, earning every individual accolade going and eventually a world-record £86m move to Real Madrid.

Bale famously didn’t win a Premier League game at Spurs until his 26th attempt and, while it would clearly be entirely unfair to pin that stat entirely on a  young injury-riddled left-back, it’s also impossible to imagine the player he would become a few years down the line allowing that many games to pass without winning a dozen or so of them single-handed by simply scoring with an unstoppable 30-yard thunderbolt or running through the entire opposition defence before clipping one over the keeper for an injury-time winner.

Some people are still a bit sniffy about the player of the year awards Bale collected at Spurs given the lack of team honours. To those people we say this: Google ‘Gareth Bale goals 2010 to 2013’. The man was a living, breathing highlights reel.

Even his vaguely underwhelming return to the club on loan several years later delivered a return of 11 Premier League goals in 20 games, a total bettered in only three out of nine Premier League seasons by…

2) Didier Drogba (Chelsea)

Flop would be an over-the-top description of a first season in the Premier League that would end with Drogba a proud part of a Chelsea team that won the league by a dozen points, but a player who arrived with a hefty reputation still contributed only 10 goals to the cause and was outscored by midfielder Frank Lampard and the rarely-prolific Eidur Gudjohnsen. It was at best a low pass on an individual basis, and contained only the briefest hint of a clue to the force he would become.

The following season delivered only 12 Premier League goals but an eye-catching number of assists showed his growing importance. In 2006/7, Drogba scored 20 goals while it was in the 2009/10 title-winning team that he truly excelled with 29 goals in 32 games and another double-figure haul for assists.

But really it was never about the numbers with Drogba. His final, bald Chelsea stats tell you he scored 164 goals in 381 games for the club. Those are the numbers of a solidly decent long-serving forward. Drogba, clearly, was much more than that. Because football isn’t just about how many goals you score but when you score them, and Drogba scored an awful lot of awfully important ones.

1) Dennis Bergkamp (Arsenal)

‘What a waste of money’ was a familiar refrain during seven goalless games at the start of Bergkamp’s Arsenal career as an undoubtedly brilliant player battled to restore the confidence dented by a miserably unhappy spell at Inter. It’s been almost entirely memory-holed now, but the always hilarious British tabloids had within the space of those seven games decided he was a worthy subject for ridicule, in part because of his failure to be a foreign superstar making an instant impact in north London akin to Jurgen Klinsmann’s at Tottenham 12 months earlier.

But while Klinsmann had buggered off back to Germany after just that single admittedly brilliant campaign for Spurs, Bergkamp was in for the long haul. And what a haul.

Arsene Wenger’s arrival at Arsenal a year later in 1996 was, it would be fair to say, a pretty significant moment in Premier League history and Arsenal history. It was also a pretty major one in Bergkamp’s career as he became a cornerstone of Wenger’s great team. A scorer of great goals rather than a great goalscorer, Bergkamp’s creative genius flourished alongside Thierry Henry and the British media and fans simply pretended they had never took the p*ss, actually.

The seven-game flop now has a statue outside the Emirates. It is one of the most potent last laughs in Barclays history.