Bradford City never saw return on big Arsenal FC transfer gamble | OneFootball

Isaiah Rankin once joined Bradford City from Arsenal for a club record deal but he never fulfilled his potential with the Bantams.

Back in the summer of 1998, Bradford City broke their club-record fee to bring in striker Isaiah Rankin from Arsenal, but it was a deal that never really paid off for the Bantams.

Exactly a week prior to the arrival of Rankin in August ’98, Bradford had signed Lee Mills from Port Vale for a fee believed to be around £1 million and the forward went on to fire Bradford into the Premier League with 24 goals in 44 First Division appearances in the 1998/99 campaign.

Rankin joined for a fee of £1.3 million, but he did not hit the same heights, despite contributions to their promotion-winning campaign of 98/99, and he went on a long journeyman career that did not see him fulfil his potential.

The Edmonton-born forward, who had won the 1993/94 FA Youth Cup with Arsenal, notched just 75 goals in his 376-game career, with only five of those goals coming at City.

Rankin’s poor spell at Bradford

When Rankin arrived as their club record signing, there was a lot of excitement at Valley Parade as they sought to gain promotion to the top-flight for the first time since the 1921/22 campaign.

Under the management of Paul Jewell, they very much did that as they finished runners-up to Sunderland in the second-tier, gaining an unfancied promotion to the Premier League, where they spent two seasons with a 17th-placed finish being followed up by finishing rock-bottom and relegation.

Rankin and Mills both scored their first goals for the club in the same game as they shared a 2-2 draw with Bolton Wanderers at Bradford, as part of a run of form whereby they collected just five points from their opening seven games of the season.

Mills would continue to score consistently, whilst Rankin would only notch three more strikes in the league that season, all coming in successive matches through late-October and early-November.

Rankin’s only other goal for the club came just four days after he had signed, when he notched the winner of their League Cup first round tie against Lincoln City at Sincil Bank.

Not only did Bradford not get their money back, or even close to it, for Rankin, but they certainly didn’t get their money’s worth, as he went on to play just ten times in the following campaign before a loan move to Birmingham City and then just once in the 2000/01 season before a loan move to Bolton Wanderers.

What followed for Rankin and Bradford

After that fairly unsuccessful spell at Sam Allardyce’s Bolton, Rankin did earn himself a permanent contract for Barnsley but barely featured in the first three years at Oakwell, which saw them relegated to the third-tier, before a more positive start to the 2003/04 campaign, which was followed by a move to Grimsby Town midway through the campaign.

That summer he moved back down to London and spent two seasons in League One with Brentford before dropping down a division again to spend two seasons at Grimsby, the first of which included a loan spell at Macclesfield Town and the second of which saw him depart half-way through the season for Stevenage Borough.

He finished the 2007/08 campaign with Stevenage and then spent a further two seasons in the Conference with Crawley Town and Forest Green Rovers before finishing what was a career that showed so much promise to have made him the subject of significant financial outlay with a two-and-a-bit-year spell in the Isthmian League Premier with Hendon.

Bradford also declined through the leagues with their Premier League relegation in 2001 being followed by back-to-back bottom-half finishes in the second-tier and then relegation from the First Division in 2004. After three seasons in what's now League One, they were then relegated to the fourth-tier of English football in 2007, suffering a third relegation in just six years.

Their Premier League legacy following those two seasons in the top-flight either side of the Millennium is practically nothing, with Bradford failing to build and falling back through the EFL to establish themselves only in the lower echelons. Whilst Rankin was a part of the squad that won promotion, his lack of impact and failure to make anything of a mid-to-long-term impact at the club meant that as Bradford fell back into the EFL, their squad wasn't set-up to bounce straight back as we see so often now.