Record breaking Huddersfield Town transfer was a masterstroke for under £2m | OneFootball

In the summer of 2016, Huddersfield Town broke their club record fee to bring in centre-back Christopher Schindler who would go on to be key.

Back in the summer of 2016, Huddersfield Town built a squad under the management of David Wagner that would eventually win the play-offs and gain promotion to the top-flight for the first time in the Premier League era and for the first time since 1972.

The Terriers, who had Stuart Webber as their Director of Football at the time before his move to Norwich City in 2017 where he reunited with Wagner in the summer of 2023, took a broadened approach to their recruitment policy.

Shifting away from the United Kingdom, they targeted players primarily playing in Germany as well as starlets from leading clubs in England on loan to build a squad for Wagner to attack the Championship with.

Those loanees included the likes of Danny Ward, Kasey Palmer and Aaron Mooy from Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester City respectively; whilst their scouting abroad saw them bring in the likes of Michael Hefele, Chris Lowe and Jan Gorenc Stankovic.

Arguably the standout signing that summer, though, was the arrival of centre-back Christopher Schindler for a club record fee believed to be in the region of £1.8 million from German side 1860 Munich.

Not much would have been known about Schindler and many of their arrivals by Huddersfield supporters at the time but what they had witnessed was the signing of a future cult hero.

Christopher Schindler’s rise with Huddersfield Town

Christopher Schindler came through the academy at 1860 Munich and had played made 166 appearances for the Bavarians before his move to West Yorkshire in July 2016.

A fulcrum of Wagner’s back-line and imperative to the high-intensity high-line that the former United States international would implement during his time at Huddersfield, Schindler was instrumental in their eventual promotion.

The year before, Huddersfield had finished 19th in the Championship and conceded 70 goals in the process with Wagner taking charge in the November of that campaign.

Once Schindler and the other members of Huddersfield’s recruitment drive had arrived, though, they went on to finish fifth and concede 12 goals fewer than the year before.

The standout individual performances of that season from a Huddersfield perspective perhaps came when it mattered most and were delivered by Schindler as he marshalled their back-line to play-off victories against Sheffield Wednesday and Reading in the semi-finals and final respectively with both victories coming via a penalty shootout having conceded just one goal in those three crunch clashes.

Huddersfield Town's situation almost a decade on

Schindler went on to play 74 games across two seasons in the Premier League and was one of the few players that remained a key man until their relegation at the end of the 2018/19 season.

He returned to Germany in the summer of 2021 and spent three seasons at Nuremberg back in Bavaria before his retirement from football at the age of 34 last summer.

However, the former Germany youth international has left behind Huddersfield supporters that are yearning for a return to the forward thinking that took him to the John Smith’s Stadium.

With club legend Jon Worthington at the helm on an interim basis, Huddersfield have slipped into the middle-of-the-table and away from the top six and the play-off places following the sacking of Michael Duff in mid-March.

Tipped to challenge for the title at the start of the season and still in automatic promotion contention in the winter transfer window when they brought in the likes of Joe Taylor and Dion Charles, it has been a miserable end to the campaign for Huddersfield with just five successive defeats meaning they have now managed just six victories in 24 League One matches since defeating Stockport County by a goal to nil on Boxing Day.

Huddersfield will once again head into the summer expecting to build a squad that is capable of automatic promotion from League One next season but there is a lot of work to be done.