The biggest white elephants the league has ever seen

Some purchases are ill advised: Stephen Ireland’s car, Posh Spice’s singing lessons, and the wedding ring Sir Paul bought Heather come to mind. But none of these fiscal errors were as monumentally costly as the eleven disasters listed below. Well, maybe McCartney’s one-legged Gaff, but even she would have been more useful than many of the Premiership’s ‘Huge Waste of Money’ XI:

GK: Massimo Taibi
£4.4m (Reggina-Man Utd)
Signed as the heir to Peter Schmeichel, but after conceding 11 in four games, including letting Matt Le Tissier’s tame free-kick squirm through his leg, he was never seen again.

DL: Asier Del Horno
£8m (Athletic Bilbao-Chelsea)
Lasted just a year at Chelsea before being squeezed out to Valencia, where he flopped again. Afetr ensuring the door hit his ass on the way out, manager Quique Sanchez said: “He should try to understand why, in two years, two coaches have pushed him out of clubs.”

DC: Per Kroldrup
£5m (Udinese-Everton)
Everton were raving about their capture in pre-season but he only ever made one league appearance before swiftly being shipped off to Fiorentina in a cut price deal. Rumours circulated that the Toffees intended to sign his central-defensive partner at Udinese, but somehow contrived to buy the wrong guy.

DC: Jean-Alain Boumsong
£8m (Rangers-Newcastle)
Sneaks in ahead of his former partner-in-crime Titus Bramble just because he cost a bit more. His errors will live on forever thanks to Youtube.

DR: Khalid Boulahrouz
£8.5m (Hamburg-Chelsea)
Another big-money Mourinho capture that was gone within a year, and he can’t try to blame this signing on Abramovich. Arrived with the tag ‘Khalid the Cannibal’ because of his supposed ability to ‘eat up the opposition’, but it appears that at Chelsea, he bit off more than he could chew.

ML: Albert Luque
£9.5m (Deportivo-Newcastle)
If you spend big money on a player, the last things you want to happen is for them to either pick up an injury straight away or for them to show no indications that they were worthy of their price tag. Unfortunately for Newcastle, they suffered both when they signed Luque.

MC: Salif Diao
£5m (Sedan-Liverpool)
One of those players who arrived at an over-inflated fee after one or two good games at a World Cup, Gerard Houllier decided to compare him to Patrick Vieira - he now plays for Stoke.

MC: Juan Sebastian Veron
£28.1m, 15m (Lazio-Man Utd-Chelsea)
Sir Alex Ferguson’s decision to splash the cash on Veron is defendable considering he looked world-class in Italy, but Claudio Ranieri’s decision to spend £15 million to bring him to Chelsea after he’d shown an incompatibility to English football at Old Trafford was truly baffling.

MR: Jose Reyes
£10.5m (Sevilla-Arsenal)
Big things were expected of young Jose when he arrived in a deal which could rise to £17 million but he failed to settle off the field and rarely delivered on it. In his last days at the club, Arsene Wenger demonstrated a penchant for dry humour by quipping: “Despite the global warming England is still not warm enough for him.”

FC: Andriy Shevchenko
£30m (Milan-Chelsea)
Few would have disputed that he looked unstoppable when he was at AC Milan but ever since scoring on his debut, he has been the subject of fierce criticism. After scoring eight league goals in two seasons, he’s more worthless than Ashley Cole’s wedding vows.

FC: Dave Nugent
£6m (Preston-Portsmouth)
It may seem like a harsh choice when you consider the number of big-money strikers who have flopped in the top-flight - Rebrov, Marlet, Mutu, Maccarone, Grabbi, Forlan, Akinbiyi, etc - but Nugent broke new barriers of failure when his new manager Harry Redknapp admitted he was willing to sell him just a month after spending £6 million on him!

[The total bill for this shambles would be £138 million. Arsenal and Liverpool’s starting teams from last night combined would cost around £110m.]