Eric Cantona might be the most audacious signing, Vincent Kompany the best value – but nobody comes close to this man in the greatest signing in Premier League history debate
Maybe it’s a shame that the case for the most value for money signing ever to play Premier League football should start with a technicality and an argument but that’s just the way it is. For the answer to a question that could keep you going all night round a pub table is clear. It’s Jamie Vardy.
Already I can hear the sound of grumpy fingers hitting keyboards. Leicester weren’t in the Premier League when they paid just £1m to sign Vardy from Fleetwood in May 2012. In fact they weren’t to be promoted from the Championship for another two years.
But that doesn’t really matter. In terms of impact and legacy and value and the small matter of rerouting and indeed rewriting the history of a football club and indeed the city in which it sits, nobody really comes close to Vardy and his 24-goal part in Leicester’s 2016 Premier League title win.
Leicester’s triumph is, beyond doubt, the greatest Premier League story ever told and without Vardy i would not have happened.
Leicester’s recruitment was something to behold at the time. Riyad Mahrez cost £400,000 and was later sold for £60m. N’Golo Kante cost £5.5m.
Eric Cantona was the most audacious but not the greatest Premier League signing
But Vardy did more than score the goals for Claudio Ranieri’s team. In a side built around him, he was fundamental to Leicester’s counter punching style of play. He worried opponents beyond measure and directly influenced how they set out trying to stifle Ranieri’s buccaneers.
He was the figurehead of a miracle and he cost a simple £1m at a time when players were already being traded across Europe and England for 20 and 30 times as much.
Devotees of Eric Cantona will baulk at all of this. To many, the Frenchman’s £1.2m move from Leeds to Manchester United in November 1992 – there was no transfer window at the start of the Premier League era – remains the most audacious and canny piece of business ever made in the modern English game.
It’s a strong argument and the story remains rich in the telling. A phone call from Leeds chairman Bill Fotherby to his Old Trafford counterpart Martin Edwards to unsuccessfully enquire about United left-back Dennis Irwin ends with the Yorkshire club – league champions at the time – selling Cantona to one of their great rivals.
That very season United were to break a title-winning duck stretching back 26 years and Cantona was to help them to three more in the following four years before he retired in 1997.
It was some impact and some story. Manager Sir Alex Ferguson and indeed the United players of the time still credit the forward with adding the ingredient they needed to get them over the line after a missing out to Leeds the season before.
But the truth is that United would in all likelihood have won a title sooner rather than later.
Cantona certainly helped them get there but suggestions they would not have managed it without him have always felt a little fanciful given the quality of the squad that had been assembled by Ferguson.
Jamie Vardy, pictured with the Premier League trophy in 2016, was the figurehead of a miracle
It’s also worth noting he left two years before United won the modern Champions League for the first time and that Cantona also cost more than £1m at a time when the British record was ‘just’ £3.6m (Alan Shearer from Southampton to Blackburn the previous summer).
United’s own record stood at £1.5m at that time so perhaps, viewed over time, it was a smart, intuitive and rather ballsy piece of work by United rather than an absolute steal.
Across the landscape of the modern top flight’s 34-year lifetime, there have been many other smart pieces of work.
The current summer window that closed last night may have been conducted with all the precision and intelligence of a stag party in a casino but it was not always that way.
Liverpool, for example, paid Inter a modest £8.5m for Philippe Coutinho in 2012, sold him for £142 to Barcelona in 2018 and managed to buy half a Champions League winning team with the proceeds.
Andy Robertson was part of that squad, of course, and he cost just £8m. His replacement at Anfield – Milos Kerkez – cost £40m. That’s 500 per cent more.
Still in the north-west, the £6m Manchester City gave Hamburg for Vincent Kompany in 2008 may modestly be described as ‘value’, as could Nicolas Anelka’s £500,000 switch to Arsenal from PSG in 1997, Patrick Vieira’s arrival at Highbury from Milan for £3.5m a year earlier and Cesar Azpilicueta’s transfer from Marseille to Chelsea in 2012.
That quintet of players – Robertson, Kompany, Anelka, Vieira and Azpilicueta – won 35 trophies between them at those particular clubs.
Vardy only won two – that 2016 Premier League and the FA Cup that followed five years later – but in doing so helped change the cultural reference points of a whole city.
Not bad for guy when first offered the transfer from Fleetwood more than 14 years ago, said he didn’t really fancy it.
