Five Lincoln City Signings Who Looked The Real Deal, But Weren’t

January is a crazy month. It’s a time when players are judged by their Wikipedia page by fans who wish to seem knowledgable when suddenly the opinions of opposition supporters matter and when everyone wants a bit of gossip.

Just how good is the new player your club sign? Is he going to be a world-beater or a huge flop? Will the hope live up to the hype, or will a name that looks great on paper ultimately disappoint.

We’ve already seen it to a degree both with the Imps this season and across League One. when Ben Woodburn signed for Blackpool, it looked a super capture on paper, but ultimately he’s flopped. Robbie Gotts certainly had the promise and potential to be a big player for us, but six months later he’s in League Two having made a small impact, but not the great earthquake some Leeds fans had predicted.

It was a comment by Kate Jackson on our forum which got me thinking about another list for the site. She said Aaron Lewis, who looks like he has played his last game for the club, would always be one of those players that went down in Imps folklore as “Promised Much/Delivered Little”. After that, there was a comment about not giving me ideas for an article. Well, it did.

I think this is always going to be subjective because what a player offers can be judged in a few different ways. If a player arrives as a potential gamechanger, goes on to make 100 appearances but only ever as a fringe player, should they be included? Similarly, would someone like Cameron Stewart, a former Manchester United and Leeds player, rank on the list despite not having been in great form before arriving at the Bank? There’s also the trap of rehashing old names to fall into – we all know about Tommy Tynan, so I want to steer clear of the same old names.

With that in mind, I have put together a list of five players from my time as a fan that I felt promised an awful lot, but ultimately delivered very little.