On this week in transfers: in 2006, Nicolas Anelka signed for Bolton for £8m. In 2011, Emmanuel Adebayor signed for Tottenham on loan. And in 2014, Mario Balotelli signed for Liverpool for £16m.
Three unrelated transfers in different seasons, but three very related players. All three are related by one club, of course, Manchester City, but they are also related by something much less tangible, too. They are all cases of players who could have shaken world football to its core, but whilst the talent was world class, the attitude and application wasn’t a match.
It’s a well-trodden path. Footballer joins big club at a young age, makes more money in a week than he ever dreamed of making in an entire year, and naturally doesn’t know what to do with it. Suddenly the rails seem further away than they ever did before, and on the pitch, the potential never gets fulfilled. Something like that.
It’s a cliche and overly simplistic, of course. There’s no telling why potential isn’t reached, why talent stays unfulfilled. For some players, it is indeed the money, fame and lifestyle they can’t get used to. For others, they’ve ended up at the wrong club, in the wrong system or with a coach who couldn’t get the best out of them. For others still, maybe the potential we all thought we saw just wasn’t actually there to begin with.
Whatever the reasons, they’re unlikely to fit the cliches because footballers aren’t robots but humans with character flaws, personal lives and other complexities.
But for Anelka, Adebayor and Balotelli, the talent was never in doubt. But none of the three made the most of it.
Of the trio, perhaps Anelka had the best career, winning the league in several countries, the Champions League with Real Madrid and playing in another final for Chelsea as well as winning Euro 2000 with France.
Adebayor, by contrast played for Monaco, Arsenal, Manchester City, Real Madrid and Tottenham Hotspur over a period of 11 years – four clubs who each appeared in the Champions League last season – and has only one Copa del Rey winner’s medal to show for it.
Balotelli, somewhere in the middle, was part of Jose Mourinho’s treble-winning Inter Milan squad, helping to make history in Italy before taking part in Manchester City’s historic first Premier League triumph, too.
But careers, especially when it comes to raw talent, shouldn’t be qualified by trophies won, even if they often are. Football is a team game, and although individual awards are usually given out to players whose teams had the most productive seasons, that’s not a measure of singular talent.
It’s striking that these three players moved on the same day. Not because they are so similar, or because they moved to similar clubs – they didn’t. Even looking at the dates, so far apart, shows us very little. But the fact that all three moved on August 25th is to some degree significant. It shows that they weren’t the top tier signings their talent suggested they could have become.
They all moved right at the end of the transfer window, just days before its end, and at a time when most seasons have already started. Deals are done at this time of the year either because they’re lower priority to the transfers sealed at the start of the summer or because clubs are panic-buying. They are usually the dregs of the window, or the deals which are completed only after one deal has created a domino effect of players filling the gaps of departing stars.
But with the talent of Anelka, Adebayor and Balotelli, they aren’t the sorts of players who should have been in that position.They shouldn’t have been moving clubs in the penultimate week of the transfer window, when signings like Alex Buttner to Manchester United and Joey Barton to QPR were finalised. They should have been better than that. And yet, temperament is often just as important as talent.
It was only in one of those areas that all three of these strikers fell down.