Wigan Athletic's one-season wonder saw Everton waste £6m | OneFootball

After Roberto Martinez left Wigan for Everton, he came back to take Arouna Kone

Rewind to 2012/13 and the lives of Wigan Athletic fans peaked as they lifted the FA Cup as rank outsiders after beating Manchester City in the final.

Little did Latics fans know at the time though, that was the peak of their success and things were to take a rapid downturn afterwards, with relegation followed up by the departure of Roberto Martinez to Everton, leaving the club in a bit of a pickle.

Martinez had built a great squad at the DW Stadium, but coupling their cup run with their Premier League duties in the end proved to be their undoing and their eight-season stay in the top-flight ended.

The Latics haven't been back since, and their chances of making an immediate return to the Premier League in 2013/14 certainly weren't helped by Martinez raiding his former employers for three of their better players.

Arouna Kone, James McCarthy and Antolin Alcaraz all followed Martinez to Goodison Park in 2013, which left Wigan scrapping around for replacements and a new manager.

One of those departures perhaps wasn't the massive blow it seemed at the time though, as Kone endured a fairly unsuccessful spell on Merseyside.

Arouna Kone was one of Wigan's better 2012/13 performers

Aside from the FA Cup success, 2012/13 wasn't a season that yielded too many positives for Wigan, but Kone was one of a few shining lights in that campaign.

The emergence of Callum McManaman was one of those few positives, but the goals of Kone were arguably a bigger one, as he netted a respectable 11 times in his debut Premier League campaign.

Wigan signed Kone from La Liga outfit Levante in the summer of 2012 for a rumoured £2.7m fee, and after scoring 15 goals in La Liga the season before he moved to the North West, it was evident he had top-flight scoring pedigree.

Kone was an unusual character in the sense he wasn't necessarily blessed with top-flight technical ability, yet he had an uncanny knack to be in the right place at the right time to put the ball in the back of the net, which is ultimately what a striker is there to do.

He was a big player for Wigan in their unsuccessful fight to stave off relegation, netting what proved to be the decisive goal in victory in three of the Latics' last four Premier League wins.

Everton's Arouna Kone experiment failed miserably

The Toffees had high hopes for Kone when he signed for the club, and they felt they'd got a steal when they activated a £6m release clause in his Wigan contract.

Such a small fee for a double-figure Premier League goalscorer would have yielded high-fives all round in the Everton boardroom, but it was ultimately the Wigan chiefs who got the better deal as they doubled their money on a man who flopped at Goodison Park.

Kone scored more goals in his one Premier League season with Wigan than he did across his entire Everton career that spanned over three seasons, although it's worth caveating that one was completely written off by a knee injury.

All told, Kone only netted 10 goals for Everton and was the scapegoat to many an Evertonian, and three of those came in one match against Sunderland back in 2015.

Martinez hailed the Ivorian as "sensational" after that game, and while his debut season with Wigan may have been, his time at Everton couldn't have been further away from that definition.