Over the years, the Swans have pulled off a number of astute transactions, but not all of them have been profitable.
Swansea City has made a number of bad buys throughout the years, so their transfer business hasn’t always been fruitful.
The team signed Roque Mesa, Wilfried Bony, Sam Clucas, and Borja Baston, but none of them were successful.
These players didn’t have a big effect at Swa, had injury problems, or had trouble adjusting to English football.
Swansea City has a reputation for making astute transfer transactions over the years, particularly since their ascent through the EFL ranks and into the Premier League. The £2 million deal that brought Michu to South Wales is among the most well-known.
However, the Swans haven’t been flawless during the transfer window like any other team, especially when they have the Premier League’s financial resources at their disposal.
Let’s examine FOUR instances over the years where the Welsh company made grave mistakes in their transactions.
Because Swansea had experience in the Spanish market and had managed and played with Roberto Martinez in the past, there was a great level of trust placed in their transfer moves in that region of the world by 2017.
Additionally, the Swans splurge out before the 2017–18 campaign started, paying £11 million for the services of 28-year-old Roque Mesa, a diminutive midfielder from Las Palmas.
As a potential improved Leon Britton, Mesa was meant to keep things moving in midfield, but in actuality, he found it difficult to adjust to the demands of English football.
After participating in 11 Premier League games during the first half of the season, Mesa had already left for Spain in February 2018 after Sevilla agreed to a loan agreement.
That quickly turned into a permanent arrangement, and to be fair, Mesa has been playing in Spain’s top league rather regularly ever since. At the time, he wasn’t the right fit for Swansea.
For his first season at Swansea, Bony is a cult hero, but things could not have gone worse for him in his second term.
After signing a £12 million contract from Vitesse in 2013, Bony scored 34 goals in 70 appearances, making him a highly sought-after player by larger teams. In January 2015, Man City made an accepted £28 million bid for the player.
However, Bony was let to leave the Etihad Stadium after just 18 months of service. Following a disastrous loan stint at Stoke, he heroically returned to Swansea in 2017.
Swansea paid £12 million for the Ivorian’s talents once more, but he wasn’t as successful this time around. In February 2018, he suffered an ACL rupture that forced him to miss a significant amount of time due to niggling ailments during the 2017–18 season.
After Bony recovered, City returned to the Championship; however, he only made seven appearances in the lower division before his contract expired in January 2019 and he was loaned to Al-Arabi of Qatar.
The strong striker’s supporters will always be grateful for what he accomplished in his first 18 months, but his second stint was financially disastrous; at 34, Bony is currently without a club. He most recently played for Always Ready in Bolivia.
Clucas was another poor acquisition, although at least City received a portion of the money they paid for him.
Clucas rose through non-league and lower leagues rather quickly to the top tier. Following his Premier League season with Hull City in 2016–17, Swansea chose to invest over £16.5 million on a midfield player who scored just four goals in that campaign.
Clucas was a member of a team that was ultimately demoted from the top division in his first year at the Swans, despite the fact that he frequently started for the team.
Clucas ultimately stayed in the Championship in 2018 after Stoke City paid £6 million for his services; although Swansea was able to recoup some of their losses, they still suffered a significant loss on a player who had little meaningful influence. Clucas is currently with Rotherham United.
With the signing of the three players before and the acquisition of Baston from Atletico Madrid the year before, Swansea had a terrible summer transfer window in 2017.
The Spanish striker came with a respectable reputation, having scored 18 goals on loan for Eibar in La Liga the season before, and cost the club a club record £15.5 million.
However, Baston was unable to adapt that to English football, as he scored just once in 18 Premier League games during his rookie campaign. He then spent the following two years playing on loan for Malaga and Alaves in Spain.
Baston attempted to make a go of things with Swansea in the Championship in 2019 with one year remaining on his contract. However, after scoring six goals in the first half of the season, he secured a temporary transfer to Aston Villa of the Premier League, with the Midlands club paying no transfer fee for his services.
Baston, who is currently in his early 30s and plays for Real Oviedo in the second division of Spain, was another player that Swansea squandered a lot of money on over a two-year period that isn’t remembered very positively.
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