How Coventry City lost £1m from risky Arsenal FC transfer gamble | OneFootball

Jay Bothroyd's move to Coventry City from Arsenal was always risky for the Sky Blues and it failed in the end.

At the turn of the century, Coventry City made a high risk move to bring Jay Bothroyd to Highfield Road, but it was a deal that they would live to regret as they shelled out seven figures and were still subsequently relegated from the Premier League.

Coventry had been a club stagnating for a while before the summer of 2000, but under the management of Gordon Strachan they sought to change that to try and shake things up and move themselves back towards the top-half of the top-flight.

An addition they made was to bring in Jay Bothroyd for a fee believed to be in the region of £1 million; Bothroyd a player that had, at that stage, never played first-team football anywhere.

Fresh off the back of a fall out at Arsenal, Bothroyd’s move to Coventry was disastrous for the club, and also set him back in a career that went on to become nomadic and intriguing, as well as outright bizarre.

Bothroyd struggled at Coventry despite their investment

Despite having joined for such a substantial transfer fee, Bothroyd didn’t make his Sky Blues league debut until the November of the 2000/01 season, having simply been overlooked by Strachan.

Coventry went on to finish 19th in the Premier League and endured early exits from both the FA Cup and the League Cup with a lack of goal scoring a consistent issue, with Craig Bellamy, John Hartson and Moustapha Hadji their joint top scorers for the league campaign with just six goals apiece.

In his eight Premier League appearances that season, Bothroyd failed to score for the club, and it was already looking like a busted flush, despite natural hope he would cut it at a lower level.

That hope was ignited further in August 2001 when he scored his first goal for the club in a loss to Bradford City in the second-tier, but it was to be the first of just six league goals that season.

In the 2002/03 campaign, as Coventry finished 20th in the old First Division under the management of player-coach Gary McAllister, Bothroyd did finish as the club’s top scorer, with eight in the league and ten across all competitions.

In three seasons at Coventry, Bothroyd had been almost entirely overlooked as they suffered a relegation, and then became the bright spot in a very average second-tier side.

The idea that he was a ‘bright spot’, though, is very generous to Bothroyd, with expectations of a £1 million player in the First Division being a lot higher than what he had provided, despite eventually getting the game time he desired.

Bothroyd’s nomadic and bizarre career

Despite the underwhelming stint at Highfield Road, and the fact Coventry had completely lost out on their £1 million investment as he departed the club on a free transfer at the end of his contract in the summer of 2003, he again returned to a top-flight.

However, rather than that be a return to the Premier League, he instead joined Perugia on a free transfer, joining Serie A just as the bubble was beginning to burst in Italian football, which had been the dominant force in club football for the last decade or so.

After just one underwhelming season in Italy, he did return to the Premier League on loan with a move to Blackburn Rovers before moves to Charlton Athletic and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Despite gaining promotion on loan at Stoke City in 2008, in a stint whereby he failed to score in just four appearances, he then moved to Cardiff City and it is in Wales where he finally found a home with 45 goals in 133 appearances in three years with the Bluebirds.

After initially having been courted by both Jamaica and Guyana, Bothroyd received a shock call-up by Fabio Capello to the England national team, and he earned a cap for the Three Lions whilst at Cardiff in the Championship due to an impressive start to the 2010/11 season.

A final chance back in the top-flight came in 2011 with Queens Park Rangers, but that too didn’t go well and finished with a loan move to Sheffield Wednesday in the following campaign.

He then went on to finish his career in Asia with a stint at Thai Premier League side Muangthong United and then a fairly lengthy time in Japan at both Jubilo Iwata and Hokkaido Consadole Sapporo.

To summarise, Bothroyd experienced several different versions of a career in one – and that would be a good way to display what happened with Coventry; a move that didn’t benefit anyone, bar the selling club.

Arsenal managed to make a reasonable profit on a player that couldn’t aid, and wasn’t even called upon to aid, a relegation battle and then one that could show signs of quality but perhaps only once put it altogether for a full season – and that came over a decade after his time at Coventry, whilst with Cardiff.

It is perhaps too much to describe the move as one that goes down in infamy, but it is one that Coventry will mightily regret; it was a risky deal to make, and those risks came to pass to sting the City hierarchy.