Bristol City won't be rushing for a repeat of St Etienne, Liverpool January transfers | OneFootball

Ryan Kent and Lois Diony arrived on loan at Ashton Gate in January 2018 but failed to live up to expectations

With January edging ever closer, Liam Manning and Bristol City's hierarchy will have started planning for the transfer window as they look to strengthen their squad.

The Robins will know that some good business in January could see them move up the Championship table, and it's a month they can't afford to get wrong if they have ambitions of the top six.

January is a notoriously difficult month to do business in, and Bristol City have found that out the hard way on occasions over the last few years.

However, whatever happens in January, they'll be looking to avoid a repeat of their 2018 January business which saw them add highly-anticipated loan signings from Liverpool and St Etienne, two deals which aren't fondly remembered at Ashton Gate.

Bristol City won't be rushing to repeat Liverpool and St Etienne January deals

The 2017/18 season was an exciting time to be a Bristol City supporter, and when the January transfer window opened, the Robins were fourth in the Championship, just two points off automatic promotion and had reached the EFL Cup semi-final after a win over Manchester United.

Ashton Gate was a good place to be, and Lee Johnson knew that some shrewd business in January could be the difference in getting them over the line and winning promotion to the Premier League for the first time in their history.

It looked as if the Robins had struck gold when they announced the loan signings of Liverpool youngster Ryan Kent, who had played for Freiburg in the Bundesliga during the first half of the season, and French striker Lois Diony from St Etienne.

The signing of Diony came with an option to buy at the end of the season for a reported £4 million, and while he hadn't found the back of the net that season, his goalscoring record prior to that suggested that he was a coup.

However, the pair both struggled to make an impact in BS3, with Kent playing just ten league games, starting six of them and being left out of the matchday squad for the final five games of the season as the Robins endured a more difficult second half of the season and finished 11th, missing out on the play-offs.

Meanwhile, the highly-rated Diony, who was brought in to fire the Robins to promotion, performed even worse, and he made just seven appearances, just one of which was a start and failed to score a single goal.

Just like Kent, he was excluded from the matchday squad towards the end of the season, and the pair completely failed to make any sort of impact as the Ashton Gate faithful saw their Premier League dreams disappear.

Understandably, Johnson wasn't keen to make Diony's stay at Ashton Gate a permanent one, and he headed back to France in the summer.

If Manning is looking to do business this coming January, the example of Kent and Diony's arrival in 2018 is one not to follow, and the current Robins boss will be hoping for far better luck in the transfer market.

Ryan Kent's Bristol City move got even worse for the Robins

Liverpool had sent Kent to Bristol City in the hope that he'd get regular minutes under his belt before returning to Anfield ready to potentially challenge for a regular place in Jürgen Klopp's squad, and they were far from happy with his lack of minutes.

Prior to his move to Ashton Gate, Liverpool had inserted a number of financial clauses to his contract, with one of them meaning that the Robins would have to pay a fine to Liverpool if he didn’t feature in a certain number of games.

This meant that the Robins then had to pay Liverpool a fine of £200,000 for Kent's lack of game time, a frustrating blow which only compounded what was a miserable loan spell.

In the aftermath, Johnson said: "Ryan hasn’t done how we would have hoped in our team for whatever reason.

“He came into a club with big expectations, but for whatever reason, it hasn’t worked as well as we would have hoped.”

Signings that had promised so much fizzled out into poor moves, and Bristol City will be looking to stay well away from a repeat of those deals when the window opens in January.