100: Kevin Davies, Merlin’s Premier League Kick Off Sticker Collection, 1998

Recent weeks will not have restricted your opportunities to make yourself miserable but, if you want to take things that little bit further, I’m here to inform you that a solitary Freddo will cost you 28p. In other words you are getting one frog-shaped chocolate treat for 2.8x its original value. Could 2020 get any worse? Actually, scratch that last remark, I don’t want to tempt the bugger.

In the innocent summer days of 1998 you may well have emerged from your local cornershop with a Freddo, a few packs of stickers and enough change from your pound coin to…well not do very much because you were 10 and had about 5p left for the week. That being said you could have excitedly prepared for the upcoming football season with Merlin’s superfluous Kick Off Sticker Collection and have familiarised yourself with the new signings set to grace the Premier League from the European glamour clubs like AC Milan, PSV Eindhoven and…Southampton.

Ahead of the 1998/99 season Blackburn Rovers, eager to build upon their sixth place finish and mount a title challenge, splashed out a then staggering £7.25m on Southampton’s young striker Kevin Davies. Davies had scored 12 goals for the Saints in his debut season in the top flight and was seen as the perfect addition to an experienced, but ageing, strike force featuring Chris Sutton, Kevin Gallacher and Martin Dahlin. Rovers were no strangers to spending and their meteoric rise from the old Second Division to the Premier League title in 1994/95 owed a lot to the financial clout of their owner Jack Walker. Nevertheless, in the 1990s, such a large transfer fee came with a huge weight of expectation.

Kevin Davies was a key player in Bolton Wanderers’ impressive tenure in the Premier League during the 2000s and notched up over 400 appearances for the Trotters scoring 85 goals and, collecting over 100 yellow cards through his physical approach to the centre-forward role. He scored for the club in their League Cup final defeat to Middlesbrough in 2004 and earned them a draw away at the mighty Bayern Munich with a late equaliser during the club’s 2007/08 UEFA Cup campaign. This is all impressive in its own right but becomes even more admirable considering the harrowing experiences of Davies’ solitary season at Ewood Park.

Despite being heralded by some pundits as an outside bet for the title, Blackburn endured a miserable Premier League campaign and were relegated with a game to spare. Rovers drew fourteen times and managed an average of only one goal per game , drawing a blank in twelve of their fixtures. Davies’ managed only one goal in the league, against fellow strugglers Charlton Athletic, in 21 appearances and was returned to Southampton in the early stages of the 1999/2000 season in a swap deal for Egil Ostenstad. Following his return to the South Coast he struggled for regular game time as James Beattie, who had joined as part of the deal to send him to Blackburn in the first place, emerged as one of the most prolific strikers in the league and, following a loan spell with Millwall, Davies dropped down a division to join Bolton Wanderers. The rest, as they say, is history.

Transfer fees continue to act as heavy burdens on players’ shoulders and it’s fair to say that the weighty price tag attached to Kevin Davies led to him becoming something of a scapegoat for Blackburn’s poor performances in the league. Using the trusted economic model of the Freddo ratio (patent pending) Davies’ transfer would have been worth around the £20m mark in the current market. By way of comparison, Newcastle’s struggling forward Joelinton (1 goal in 25 league appearances) cost over £40m ahead of the current season, or the equivalent of two Kevin Davies’. This questionable foray into maths probably doesn’t prove anything but, eventually, Davies proved his worth as a Premier League striker and so at least there’s a happy ending. Unless you fancy a Freddo later.