Football League World
·9 June 2024
Football League World
·9 June 2024
, which provides personal opinions from our FLW Fan Pundits regarding the latest breaking news, teams, players, managers, potential signings and more…
Watford FC are a club who have experienced a range of ups and downs over the last decade, and after earning promotion from the Championship to the Premier League in 2015, the Hornets were subsequently relegated back to the second tier in 2020.
Following a five-year stint in the top-flight, the Vicarage Road outfit won immediate promotion back to the Premier League in 2021 but were subsequently relegated in 2022 and have not made their return since.
The Hornets faithful will always remember their team's run to the 2019 FA Cup final, which included a dramatic 3-2 semi-final win over Wolves in extra time after trailing 2-0 midway through the second half.
Since their promotion to the Premier League in 2015, the Hertfordshire outfit have had a total of 16 different managers, while Quique Sanchez Flores endured two separate spells as permanent manager, and Hayden Mullins was twice appointed on a caretaker basis.
The club has also seen a high player turnover during these years, and FLW's fan pundit, Justin Beattie, has revealed who the worst player he has seen in Watford colours is.
Justin said: "I've seen a lot of bad players at Vicarage Road in my 40 years of attending.
"I think in terms of money spent on wages, and transfer fee, we have to look at Andre Gray as being one of the worst players that I've witnessed in a Watford shirt.
"If you look at the amount we spent on him in total, and then the goals return, the actual figure per goal is horrendous.
"He also had a pretty poor attitude.
"He had a real arrogance about him which didn't endear himself to Watford fans, so although there's probably been technically worse players, for me, he was a massive disappointment and the money that we spent on him could have been invested more wisely.
"So for that, he'll always be probably the worst player I've witnessed in a Watford shirt."
The striker arrived at Vicarage Road in the summer of 2017 for a fee worth in the region of £18m with a big reputation, having scored 23 goals for previous club Burnley during the 2015/16 Championship season, which he followed up by bagging nine goals for the Clarets during the 2016/17 Premier League campaign.
However, the Jamaica international was never able to replicate these figures in a Hornets shirt, while his best campaign in Hertfordshire came in the 2018/19 top-flight season, as he scored seven goals in 29 league appearances.
His worst campaign at Vicarage Road came during the 2019/20 campaign, which saw the club relegated back to the Championship, with Gray scoring just two goals in 23 Premier League outings.
After leaving Watford in the summer of 2021, the forward went on to score 10 goals in 28 Championship appearances for QPR before leaving just a year later to join Greek side Aris Thessaloniki.
The 32-year-old then went on to join Saudi Pro League side Al Riyadh in 2023, where he scored seven goals last campaign.