Real Madrid are the biggest club in the world by Champions League titles, incoming revenue, and social media followers. In order to reach that level, you pretty much have to nail most of your big transfers.
That has definitely been the case for Real Madrid over the last several windows, as they have brought in no-doubt world-class players like Eduardo Camavinga, Aurelien Tchouameni, Antonio Rudiger, David Alaba, Arda Guler, Jude Bellingham, and now Kylian Mbappe for free.
However, before that, Real Madrid had more mixed success in the market, and that came back to bite them with a few poor seasons in the Champions League that were very un-Madrid like, such as early exits in the 2018/19 and 2019/20 seasons.
Real Madrid had a few ghastly transfer errors as a result of desperate moves after losing Cristiano Ronaldo. Let’s take a look at the five worst transfers Madrid have made since 2010, noting that these moves seem to be concentrated right around the period where they were not winning Champions League titles, sandwiched in between two golden eras (including one that is ongoing).
LW Eden Hazard, 120M
Move over Thomas Gravesen and Antonio Cassano, because Eden Hazard is unequivocally the worst signing in Real Madrid history, even though he technically won the Champions League and is a lot better and more likable than either of those two footballers.
Hazard’s time at Real Madrid may have been doomed from the start, and if you ask some fans, it was Hazard’s entire fault for showing up to his first training sessions in the summer overweight because he liked eating too many biscuits.
No, the reason why Hazard flopped was because of injuries. The Belgian legend was every bit as brilliant at Real Madrid as he was at Chelsea…for a period of like three games.
He tore Real Sociedad apart and was doing the same to PSG in November for about an hour before his own countryman, Thomas Meunier, stomped on his ankle when Eden’s back was turned near the touchline.
It was the kind of unnecessary, stupid challenge that Meunier has made his entire career – not because he is malicious but because the guy quite literally doesn’t know how to play defense. (It’s why he’s out of football at this point.)
Ever since that injury, Hazard was done. Yeah, he could make some backheel flicks and score the occasional rocket from outside the box, but he could no longer accelerate past players and lost total confidence in himself.
Even as I call Eden Hazard the absolute worst signing in Real Madrid history because of the initial fee, the cost of his 20 million euro wages, and the fact that he retired without recouping a transfer fee, I can’t talk bad about the guy.
Not only is that because he was a tremendous player and a nice guy, but he was also so incredibly unlucky. Blaming Hazard for what happened at Real Madrid is just looking for a scapegoat to fulfill the just-world fallacy. Sometimes, football just sucks.
ST Luka Jovic, 63M
To be honest, Luka Jovic was the more disappointing signing for Real Madrid, because he was supposed to be a young player on the rise. Furthermore, whereas Eden Hazard can point to injuries, Jovic had no real excuse for being so ineffective.
Jovic actually had a decent enough first season at Real Madrid before the COVID-19 pandemic, but then he started doing stupid stuff during the pandemic that got him in trouble in his country of Serbia.
From then on, Jovic was a joke. If you can find any clips of him playing for Real Madrid in 2020 and 2021, it’s not a pretty sight. The guy was sleepwalking on the football pitch, looking more likely to spontaneously combust into an actual king-sized mattress than score a goal.
Jovic won Real Madrid matches in the 2019/20 season when the won LaLiga. By the time he was jettisoned to Fiorentina, Jovic had flopped miserably on loan in a return to Eintracht Frankfurt and got leapfrogged by Borja Mayoral. And by the way, time has proven that Zinedine Zidane was 100 percent right for wanting the team to keep Mayoral over Jovic instead of loaning Mayoral to Roma.
Now that Jovic has failed in Serie A for both Fiorentina and AC Milan, too, it’s fair to wonder if he was ever that good for Eintracht Frankfurt before joining Real Madrid or if he was a mirage supported by Sebastien Haller, Ante Rebic, and Filip Kostic.
ST Mariano Diaz, 21.5M
Mariano Diaz made more headlines for bench pressing and doing his best to never leave Real Madrid because his wage demands were so outrageously beyond what clubs of his actual level were capable of paying him.
But unlike the rest of these players, Mariano did at least have a marquee moment, scoring the game-sealing goal off the bench in the first Clasico of 2020 to effectively seal Real Madrid’s fate as champions over Barcelona.
It was a brilliant solo goal, but it was an anomaly. Mariano is literally the worst footballer of any of the players on this list and had no business ever stepping foot on the Santiago Bernabeu grass as a Real Madrid player.
You should have seen the way Zinedine Zidane and even his own teammates would react whenever Mariano showed his “first touch”. The man was a human brick, He played football like it was rugby. Mariano would show up to games and spend half the match offside, the other half heading literal heads instead of the ball.
How on earth did he wear the No. 7 jersey for Real Madrid after Cristiano Ronaldo? Better yet, how on earth did he score 18 goals for Lyon? Since then, he’s scored six LaLiga goals and has been just as bad for Sevilla as he was in Madrid.
RB Alvaro Odriozola, 32M
Alvaro Odriozola was yet another mediocre, overpriced player who didn’t materially help Real Madrid, and I did a double-take when I saw that he was still on the Real Madrid books in the 2022/23 season before returning to Real Sociedad in 2023/24.
It’s telling that Odriozola can hardly get a game in for La Real right now. At 28, Odri lost a lot of his best years of development sitting behind Dani Carvajal, but it’s not like Real Madrid didn’t give him opportunities to start; he just wasn’t good enough.
Odriozola is one of those players Real Madrid never should have signed both for their own benefit and for his. He is a smaller, shiftier right back who would have been better off as a wing back in an attacking system, rather than someone forced to, you know, defend.
RB Danilo, 31.5M
Danilo was unfairly labeled as an attacking fullback by the average fan, probably for the simple reason that he is Brazilian and he was stereotyped to be a kind of player that he wasn’t.
Defensively, Danilo was actually excellent for Real Madrid, and he wasn’t as bad as some Madridistas will have you think. If anything, at Real Madrid, we saw glimpses of the stalwart, defensive leader he has become as a converted center back for Juventus. By the way, Andrea Pirlo deserves a lot of credit for renewing Danilo’s career by turning him into a central defender.
As for Real Madrid, Danilo was barely worth even half of what the club paid for him, but out of the five players on this list, Danilo is the only one who is currently playing football at a high level and was the only player who was even remotely useful to the Blancos, starting 10 games in two Champions League-winning campaigns with 41 more starts in LaLiga.
The managing editor of The Trivela Effect, Kevin has 15 years of experience in digital media. He covered Real Madrid from 2019-2022 for The Real Champs as a site manager. You can contact him at the site’s official Twitter handle @TrivelaEffect or via the site’s official email thetrivelaeffect@gmail.com.