Birmingham City thought they’d hit the jackpot with Senegal international - he ended up being a total flop | OneFootball

Cheikh N'Doye was supposed to be the heart of Birmingham's midfield. Instead, he became a symbol of the club's mismanagement at the time.

When Birmingham City signed an established international midfielder on a free transfer in July 2017, they thought they'd bagged a bargain, but instead the player became a symbol of the club's muddled transfer policies of the time.

By the summer of 2017, Birmingham City had been out of the Premier League for four years, but they seemed to still be going backwards, having finished the 2016-17 season in 19th place in Championship.

Manager Harry Redknapp had a simple message for the club's new sporting director, Jeff Vetere: "Find me a new Papa Bouba Diop". The manager had decided that he wanted to build his team around a new, tough-tackling midfielder who could also score goals.

Chiekh N'doye looked like the answer to Harry Redknapp's prayers at Birmingham City

Vetere went away and came back with Cheikh N'Doye, who was playing for the French club Angers. Ndoye had been playing for the Senegal national team for the previous three years, and was just the sort of muscular midfield presence that Redknapp seemed to want.

Perhaps more importantly than anything else, N'Doye was just out of contract and available on a free transfer. He seemed like a perfect solution. He was even a goalscorer, having scored 14 league goals for Angers over the previous two seasons, and 32 goals in 109 League games for Créteil, the club from whom Angers had signed him.

N'doye flopped at Birmingham City

Cheikh N'Doye played 37 games for Birmingham City throughout the 2017/18 season, but if anything, his defining moment in a blue shirt came in an away derby match at Aston Villa in February 2018 when, deep into stoppage-time and with the Blues already 2-0 down, he grabbed John Terry by the throat and put him in a headlock, and found himself getting dismissed for a second yellow card.

Matters weren't helped by a terrible start to the League season, and Birmingham were one place off the bottom of the table when Redknapp was sacked and replaced by Steve Cotterill in the middle of September. Cotterill steadied the ship a little, but he was sacked himself in March 2018, along with the entire rest of the backroom staff and Jeff Vetere.

Garry Monk was the new manager, and Birmingham ended the season in 19th place again, albeit with seven points fewer than the season before. For the second year in a row, they needed a win on the last day of the season to ensure surviving relegation.

By the end of the 2017/18 season, N'Doye had become a bit of a joke among Birmingham supporters. When he finally scored for them, a penalty in a pre-season friendly away to Cheltenham Town, the away fans ironically cheered him for finally finding the back of the net.

But Birmingham's wild overspending was catching up with them. The club's financial results were issued at the start of the year, showing that they'd lost more in the previous six months than they had in the twelve prior to that. A transfer embargo limited them to five new signings in the summer of 2018, and expensively paid players had to be shifted from their books. They ended up picking up a nine-point deduction over it.

N'Doye was sent back to his former club Angers on loan in September 2018, and would never return to the club. His contract expired in the summer of 2019, and he joined Red Star, a Parisian club in the Championnat National (the third tier of the French league system) on a free transfer. He scored 31 goals in his first four seasons with the club. They won the Championnat National title in 24, the only honour of his career.

Birmingham City, meanwhile, would take until new ownership arrived in 2023 before they started to turn their fortunes, and even then it only came following a relegation that didn't quite happen even in 2018, when the club was being so badly run that it looked at times as though they might not pull through.

And Cheikh N'Doye, the goal-scoring midfielder who couldn't score goals, would end up best-remembered as one of the more notable failures of Harry Redknapp's unhappy stay at St Andrew's.