Burnley FC's £500k Bolton Wanderers gamble failed miserably | OneFootball

Burnley's 2014 move to sign Marvin Sordell was far from a roaring success

Over a 10-year reign at Turf Moor, it was inevitable that Sean Dyche would make the odd poor signing, but his 2014 decision to recruit Marvin Sordell has to be up there as one of the worst.

A shock promotion in 2013/14, despite being among the pre-season favourites to be in a relegation battle, left Burnley in a strange position, knowing that their squad probably wasn't good enough to compete at the top level.

Improving upon that naturally required some hefty funds, but without selling some of their star players who got them there, the task was always likely to be difficult.

That meant their recruitment model before the 2014/15 season largely saw them bringing in experienced pros like Matt Taylor and Steven Reid, while they also opted to try and unearth cheap hidden gems.

With that model comes its own risks though, and getting them wrong happens more often than not with those types of players who don't always go on to prove themselves.

Sordell certainly fell into that category and won't be a signing who lives long in Burnley memories for the right reasons.

Sean Dyche hoped Marvin Sordell could resurrect a troublesome career

At one point in the early stages of his career, Sordell was billed as the next big thing and was a regular in the England U21 squad, while he even represented Team GB at the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Bolton Wanderers paid a rumoured £4m to sign Sordell from Watford in 2012, when he was then just a fresh-faced 20-year-old, and the pressure of carrying such a hefty fee on his shoulders proved a lot for Sordell, who really struggled for form after his move.

Sordell scored just four times across 25 league appearances for Bolton and his career began to go wayward as he struggled for form, with even a loan spell with Charlton struggling to revive his career.

The then-Clarets boss stepped in at that point to offer Sordell a lifeline in the top flight, bringing him to Turf Moor in a £500k deal that represented a bargain fee at the time for a player who could still have hit the heights it was expected he would've done.

He was a man Dyche knew well from his time at Watford, with the then-Burnley boss managing the forward whilst in charge of the Hornets, and he obviously saw something he felt he could get out of him

Marvin Sordell's Burnley spell was unsuccessful

Better players tend to raise better fees in football, and in Sordell, Burnley got exactly what they paid for - a £500k player.

To expect a player in that price category to hit the ground running in the Premier League was always unlikely, and Sordell proved that Dyche's faith wouldn't be rewarded with a string of poor performances in the Premier League.

The former Watford man never scored a goal for the club in the Premier League, with his only Burnley strike coming in the FA Cup, and he departed after just one season when his contract was terminated by mutual consent.

He will undoubtedly go down as one of the poorer signings of the Dyche era at Turf Moor, and although he didn't set the club back by too much financially, Dyche got it so wildly wrong signing him at that level, that most of his other football after leaving Turf Moor saw him bounce around League One and Two.