£1.1m Peterborough United signing has to be regarded as one of their worst: View | OneFootball

Peterborough United have earned themselves a reputation for being shrewd movers in the transfer market over recent years, with The Posh always likely to pick up a gem of a player that goes on to blossom at London Road.

With the likes of Ivan Toney, Dwight Gayle and Britt Assombalonga all using the League One side as a springboard for their respective careers, United fans are well within their rights to expect plenty from the latest striker to walk through the doors.

The anticipation levels would increase tenfold when the club broke it’s record-fee for a player in bringing Tyrone Barnett to the club in 2012, with the striker joining the club from an upwardly mobile Crawley Town side.

A reported fee of £1.1 million was a vast sum of money for a player that had played much of his career outside the Football League up until then, but Peterborough are a club that puts faith in nurturing non-league talents more than most.

Although it is a gamble that has paid off with the likes of Gayle, Craig Mackail-Smith and Aaron McLean over the years, the hefty fortune outlaid didn’t work out with Barnett, despite the forward showing plenty of promise in his first few showings for his new side.

Tyrone Barnett Peterborough United career

After spells with a number of clubs in the non-league circuit, Barnett made the move to the EFL to join Macclesfield Town at the age of 24, before going on to score 13 times in his first full season of professional football for the Silkmen.

Crawley then made a quick buck on the striker, having bought him for a reported fee of £200,000 in the summer of 2011, before selling him for a figure more than five times that less than a year later.

Needless to say expectations were through the roof for their new freescoring marksman to hit the ground running, and the early signs were promising when he netted on debut to grab his side a point in a 1-1 draw with Doncaster Rovers.

As has so often been the case with Posh over recent history, the team that would so often waltz to League One promotion would be struggling at the bottom of the Championship table, meaning chances for goals were at something of a premium for their new attacker.

There were glimpses of what Barnett could unleash during those first few appearances though; with a headed effort breaking the deadlock against Blackpool before consequent strikes against Ipswich Town and Reading seeing him find the net in three consecutive matches during his fledgling Posh career.

That was about as good as it got for the striker in Cambridgeshire though, with another season at Championship level yielding just a single strike, as Posh saw their two-year spell in the second tier come to an end.

A stint in League One seemed to revitalise the striker at the start of the next campaign, with five goals in nine matches to kick off the season, but the sight of Barnett drawing a blank became all to familiar for the London Road faithful.

Not to say it wasn’t for the want of trying though, with the frontman huffing and puffing across the frontline in search of finding a way of finding the back of the net, but ultimately falling short time and time again, with the likes of Assombalonga and Lee Tomlin climbing above him in the pecking order.

With game time becoming scarcer by the game, Bristol City seized the chance to make the striker their’s for the latter part of the 2013/14 campaign, although his fortunes didn’t change with just a single goal in 17 league appearances.

Oxford United were the next team to temporarily take the striker off of Peterborough’s hands, with owner Darragh MacAnthony unlikely to be wanting a misfiring frontman from sucking up his wage bill, before Shrewsbury Town eventually bit the bullet and signed him permanently the following season.

Tyrone Barnett returns to non-league circuit

After a career that packed plenty of promise, Barnett’s life as an EFL striker slowly meandered down a well-trodden path; from team to team slowly down the pyramid, before finally returning to the non-league game in 2019, where he would feature for National League side Eastleigh for three seasons: netting 31 league goals in the process.

Eager to make the most of his playing career, the striker is still plying his trade for Leamington in the Southern League Premier Division Central; the seventh tier of English football, having also enjoyed a spell at Hereford United.

Football is a game of taking gambles in the transfer market, and Peterborough United prosper in taking risks more often than not, but with Barnett they came unstuck when the house was holding all the aces.

With finances always having to be delicately balanced at London Road, a seven-figure fee flop is not something to be taken lightly, and Posh will have lived to regret such a major outlay for a player that failed to deliver the goods.

Luckily for us EFL fans, that hasn’t deterred them from dipping into the market since, with plenty of talents being given their chance to make their mark on the Football League over the past decade, and we are all better off for it.