Record £3.5m Huddersfield Town signing never hit the heights: View | OneFootball

The summer of 2017 was certainly an exciting period for Huddersfield Town, for understandable reasons.

Just a few weeks earlier, the club had beaten Reading 4-3 on penalties in the Championship play-off final.

In doing so, the Yorkshire club secured promotion to the Premier League for the very first time in their history.

Given the major financial rewards that come with making the step-up to the top-flight of English, there will have been an expectation on the Yorkshire club to invest more heavily then they might have done in the past.

By the end of that particular summer transfer window, Huddersfield Town had certainly done that.

Promotion led to investment for the Terriers

Following their promotion in the summer of 2017, Huddersfield did put plenty of money into their preparations for their first season in the top-flight since the 1971/72 season.

That saw them break their transfer record on more than one occasion during that particular market.

One of those who they did do just that with, was Laurent Depoitre. The striker joined Huddersfield from Porto, after a season in which he had made just 13 appearances and scored twice for the Portuguese giants.

Prior to that though, he had enjoyed a more productive period in his native Belgium, scoring 30 goals in 84 top-flight matches for Oostende and Gent in his home country.

It was reported that the Terriers paid somewhere in the region of £3.5million to complete the signing of Depoitre.

Sadly for those at The John Smith's Stadium though, that was not an investment that exactly paid off.

Depoitre struggled for goals at Huddersfield Town

Initially, things started rather well for Depoitre when he first began life with the Terriers, with the Belgian scoring five goals in the first half of his debut season in the Premier League.

That came amid an impressive start to the campaign for Huddersfield, that saw them claim some eye-catching wins, and look well on track to establish themselves in the top-flight.

However, after the turn of the year, from 2017 to 2018, things began to go in the opposite direction for both Huddersfield and Depoitre.

While the striker lost his scoring touch, the Terriers began to find wins hard to come by, and the slid down the table, finding themselves dangerously close to the relegation zone.

Eventually, Depoitre would find the way to goal at just the right time. In the penultimate game of the season, the striker scored his first goal in over four months to secure a 1-1 draw at Chelsea that confirmed Huddersfield's Premier League status for another season.

Even so, that run during the latter stages of the 2017/18 season, proved to be an unfortunate sign of things to come for Huddersfield.

Throughout the course of the 2018/19 campaign, Depoitre failed to score a single goal in 23 Premier League appearances, as the Terriers plummeted out of the division.

With the likes of the Belgian unable to make any sort of impact, the Yorkshire club endured a miserable campaign.

They picked up just three wins and claimed only 16 points across their 38 games - the third-lowest points tally in top-flight history.

To add insult to injury, Depoitre was then released by Huddersfield in the summer of 2019 following that relegation, allowing him to leave the club on a free transfer.

As a result, not only did the striker not make the overall impact in front of goal that Huddersfield would have wanted and needed from him after a promising start to life at the club, but they also missed out on any return what was by their standards a significant investment in him.

Huddersfield Town, never worked out in the way they might have initially hoped it would have done.