Southampton FC hit rock bottom with £19m transfer | OneFootball

Guido Carrillo made just 10 appearances at St Mary's Stadium before his contract was terminated in 2020

Guido Carrillo became Southampton's club-record signing when he joined the Saints in January 2018 from Monaco, but he went down as one of the biggest flops in the club's history

Southampton were enduring a tough 2017/18 campaign, battling down near the bottom of the Premier League table, the season after recording a fourth-straight top-eight finish and reaching the EFL Cup final.

To make matters worse, Virgil Van Dijk had departed the club at the start of the month after the Saints had accepted a then-world record fee for a defender of £75 million from Liverpool.

Southampton went to work reinvesting that money into several different positions and parted ways with £19 million to bring Carrillo to the club.

The then-26-year-old had spent the previous two and a half seasons at Monaco, playing an important role off the bench in the French side's Ligue 1 winning campaign in 2016/17, scoring seven in just five starts.

Carrillo had started just twice in the league in the first half of the 2017/18 term, and a fresh start at a club in need of goals looked appetising for the Argentinian.

Unfortunately for both himself and Southampton, it proved to be anything but.

Guido Carrillo's nightmare stint at Southampton

Southampton resided in the bottom three of the Premier League when Carrillo made his debut from the bench against Brighton and Hove Albion, and whilst the Saints were able to survive by the skin of their teeth by the end of the campaign, the Argentinian's contributions barely helped.

Carrillo played just 10 times for Southampton, seven of which came in the Premier League. Following his debut from the bench, he started five straight games, picking up an assist in a 1-1 draw with Burnley.

The club was still struggling under Mauricio Pellegrino, and with eight games left of the season, he was sacked, with Mark Hughes being brought in for the rest of the campaign.

Hughes' first game at the helm was the FA Cup quarter-final win over Wigan Athletic, which Carrillo started, but after then, he played just seven more minutes in his Southampton career as a late sub in a 3-0 defeat against West Ham United.

The Welsh manager didn't include him in many squads between the end of March and the end of the season, appearing as an unused substitute in their cup semi-final defeat to Chelsea and their vital 1-0 win over Swansea City on the penultimate day, which sent the Swans down over the Saints.

If the writing wasn't on the wall already for the Argentinian's Southampton career, two consecutive loan spells at Leganes in La Liga most definitely drove home the idea that his time at St Mary's was over.

And, despite signing a three-and-a-half-year deal with the Saints upon his arrival, Carrillo and Southampton agreed to terminate his contract a year early, and the frontman went on to return to the Spanish top flight with Elche.

Guido Carrillo was a head-scratching signing for Southampton

Despite his contributions to Monaco's successes, the £19 million signing of Carrillo by Southampton will always be looked at as a strange one.

The Argentinian never lit the place up in France, and in the season before Monaco's league-winning campaign, he netted just four times in 31 games. For a club-record deal, he was rather underwhelming, and that was before Southampton fans watched him play at the club.

Nothing about Mauricio Pellegrino's reign at Southampton was very good, and this signing was the cherry on the icing on a rather inedible cake. Whilst it would be another few years until the club went down, the 2017/18 campaign was the start of a few seasons languishing in the bottom half after European runs under Ronald Koeman and Claude Puel.