Coventry City made history with £800k transfer - He was a major Sky Blues flop | OneFootball

Coventry City brought the first Ukrainian to play in the Premier League in 1997, but it turned out to be a disaster for both the player and the club.

Coventry City splashed out to bring the first Ukrainian to play in the Premier League in 1997, but his signing turned out to be a disaster for both the player and the club.

By the time that Oleksandr Yevtushok first signed for Coventry City at the end of the January 1997 transfer window in a reported £800,000 deal, there was plenty of cause to believe that he would be an excellent signing for the club.

Central defender Yevtushok had earned positive reviews while playing in his home country for Naftovyk Okhtyrka, Karpaty Lviv and Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, and had made his debut for the national team in 1994, but there was little to suggest what would happen once he arrived at Highfield Road.

Oleksandr Yevtushok's Coventry debut couldn't have gone much worse

It was just over a month after arriving before Yevtushok made his debut for Coventry, and there couldn't have been a much more daunting place to make it; Old Trafford, home of the Manchester United team who'd won the double at the end of the previous season. By this time, Coventry were sliding towards a relegation battle. They arrived in Manchester fifth-bottom in the Premier League table, and just four points above the relegation places.

But by the time half an hour had been played, Coventry's afternoon was going very badly wrong indeed. They were already 2-0 down by this time, thanks to two own goals in the first five minutes from Gary Breen and Eoin Jess, when manager Gordon Strachan decided that he'd seen enough and replaced Yevtushok with Peter Ndlovu. United went on to win the game 3-1 regardless.

Opportunities would be limited after the Old Trafford debacle

Yevtushok would only get two further chances to prove himself in a Coventry shirt. A week after the United debacle, he was back in the first team and played a full 90 minutes in a goalless home draw with Leicester City.

But this would turn out to be the only full 90 minutes that he played for the club. A week after this game, he was in the starting eleven for a trip to Newcastle United, only to be withdrawn at half-time and replaced by Brian Burrows at half-time with the team already 2-0 down. They ended up losing this match 4-0.

And throughout the remainder of the season he was largely frozen out of the team, appearing on their team-sheet just once more, as an unused substitute in a 1-1 draw against Arsenal. But if Coventry's aim for the 1996/97 season was to preserve Premier League football, they did at least achieve that. On the final day of the season, a 2-1 win at Spurs kept them up, relegating Middlesbrough and Sunderland instead.

Yevtushok was released at the end of the season and returned to Ukraine, but he never fulfilled the promise of his earlier career. He rejoined Karpaty Lviv and later played for CSKA Kyiv, but retired from playing in 2000. Gordon Strachan, meanwhile, remained the Coventry manager until September 2001.

And Coventry City's bank balance certainly took a hit from this failed experiment. £800,000 is a lot of money to spend on a footballer who only makes three appearances for your club, even in the Premier League.