5 best bargain defenders of all time

I know a thing or two about bargaining. Whenever I go to shopping with my mother, I get astounded at how amazingly she debates with the shopkeeper to get him to lower the price – and the best part is that she almost always gets her price.

While I have no doubt that my mother, or any South East Asian mom, would make a great transfer director for top European clubs, there are already some great negotiators in the world of football that manage to pull some of the best bargain deals.

In a market so inflated, this is a quality that most clubs would want to have in their transfer director. Indeed, it is this very quality that brings success to a club. They say a good defence wins you titles and we have some of the greatest defenders being bought for relative peanuts. And here are 5 such cases…

#5 Sami Hyypia - £2.5 million, Liverpool

When Jamie Carragher was asked to name the top 10 defenders in the Premier League era, he named Sami Hyypia as the tenth best defender the league ever had. Such is the adulation that Carragher has for him that he credits the former Finland international for Liverpool’s rise in fortunes in the following years.

“He transformed our defensive record and won 10 trophies,” said the former Liverpool captain. Indeed, Hyypia joined Liverpool in 1999 for a paltry £2.5 million and was instrumental in Liverpool’s Champions League winning campaign in 2005.

The former Leverkusen defender was an astute performer of the art of defending and formed one of the strongest centre-half pairing with Stephane Henchoz first and then with Jamie Carragher. When he departed from Anfield in 2009, Ron Yeats, a former scout of Liverpool, said, "one of the best bits of business we've done over the years… a steal – a bargain."

Given that Hyypia won 10 trophies during his time at Anfield – including the miracle of Istanbul – he can definitely be labelled as a shrewd piece of business for £2.5 million.