Footballers who faded away

Luke Chadwick was a Fergie golden boy for a few months in 2001. Then the "ugly bastard" insults got to him. On Championship Manager 2001/02, he develops into Ronaldo levels of awesome.
 
Michu, maybe only a one season wonder but after injury his career took a downwards spiral.
 
MileStolar said:
Does Thomas Müller qualify? Was almost world class at one point and he fell off when he should've maybe stepped it up another level
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What level comes after world class? :D

I would add Lee Sharpe to the list.
 
Interesting thread. It's crazy how one poor career move or rushing back from an injury too quickly can completely detail a promising player's career.
 
The whole current german generation. Götze, Schürrle, Draxler, etc.
 
I can’t argue with that! Fair play.
HTG said:
I get what you're saying, but I'd assume you can find many reasons like this for other players mentioned here, often without us knowing. So the point still stands, he faded away. But it's good to mention why, it shows that they are just normal people with all issues involved.
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van der star said:
Rosicky, Lucas Barrios, Jackson Martinez.
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Rosicky was pretty much a starter at Arsenal for most of his stint there and Jackson Martinez had a career wrecking injury and it's a miracle he can still play the game (he can barely run due to the damage caused by injury to his scheletul-muscular tissues).

Lucas Barrios is a good fit: he seemed to be a full package striker.
 
Ecstatic said:
The wording of the suggested debate is very loose. A player not mentioned I guess.
Named as part of Pele’s FIFA 100 in 2004 (a list of the 125 greatest living footballers) Javier Saviola being just 22 at the time was the youngest on the list, he was destined for big things. At the time “El conejo” had scored 60 goals in 144 appearances for Barcelona, an impressive return when considering he was part of a struggling Barcelona side as a second striker, and behind a club legend in Patrick Kluivert. Move on ten years and things didn’t really go to plan, but it wasn’t the sudden decline we see with many talented footballers, it was altogether a more sad affair with a player who never fully achieved what perhaps he could have. Instead Saviola was a player who showed his outstanding talent for the biggest clubs on the planet yet never quite got the chances he should.
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Good player in the wrong decade. His career was actually quite good tbh. He was used pretty much as a power sub at Madrid with some effect, and made an important part of Benfica to break Porto's dominance in the league.

The problem is that Saviola is a poacher type of striker, and poacher's usage in top clubs declined in the 2000's because those players suddenly became a liability when facing opposition with good zonal defense organization.
 
Kaka, Pato, Robinho, Adriano, Götze, Deisler, Bojan, Owen, Kirchhoff, Hojbjerg ...
 
SoCross said:
Arshavin. Wonderful player to watch when on song.
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He should’ve moved to a better league earlier. His peak wasn’t that short, but very few noticed his performances when he was playing in Russia.

Ultimately, he just wasn’t that motivated when he came to Arsenal, which is a shame. With his talent he should’ve done more.
 
Fridge chutney said:
Xavi
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Ehm... He had won the treble before basically retiring. After playing literally more games than any other outfield player in history (only Shilton and Ceni has played more official games). How is that fading?
 
Huntelaar is still playing, and even scoring at a good rate for Ajax. But I still somehow have a feeling that he retired around 2010-2012.
 
Ooge_ said:
Kaka, Pato, Robinho, Adriano, Götze, Deisler, Bojan, Owen, Kirchhoff, Hojbjerg ...
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Isn’t that bit early and harsh, he’s 23 and a decent PL player. He could move to a bigger club and also he was never considered as anywhere the same level of talent as the first names on that list.
 
I seem to remember Gourcuff tearing it up in France one year. Seemed to completely vanish after that. Some of the best ones had external factors, such as Owen with injuries and Adriano with mental health. Adriano especially was completely unplayable at the age of 21 and should have gone on to be one of the games greats.
 
Georgi Kinkladze. He was marvellous for one or two seasons, and completely collapsed after that.

And what about Wesley Sneijder? Potentially the world’s best in 2009-2010 at Inter, faded rapidly after that.
 
James Beattie

Scored a couple of worldies for Southampton, got an England call up and then faded away into complete mediocrity.
 
Offside said:
Stephen Ireland was absolutely brilliant one year for City, had a number of big clubs looking at him. Then suddenly he couldn't get into Aston Villa's team. Can't remember if he had an injury or what.
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A mixture of mental health issues, major injuries, and managerial changes all combining to create a perfect storm, sadly.

He played 50 games in the 2008-09 season and contributed to 26 goals. He really was the only player in our side that season who Robinho knew how to work with. He started a lot of games under Mark Hughes during the next season but he couldn't maintain the same level. Then he picked up an injury during Mancini's first month and never regained his place in the team. Hughes really liked using him behind the midfield next to Barry, but Mancini started playing De Jong instead to prioritise defensive protection and so Ireland never got a look in after that.

Then he just couldn't stay fit. He moved to Villa but Houiller didn't like him, so he was loaned out to Newcastle where he got injured basically straight away, was seen around a fair few nightclubs, got injured again, and so he never really played there either. He made two appearances and was on the field for them for precisely 49 minutes. He went back to Villa and turned his career around briefly - his "Honours" section on Wikipedia says he won their Player of the Season award for 2011-12. But then he got injured again, this time he broke his wrist, and never really got his place back.

By the time he was sold to Stoke he was past his peak and his career was basically dead. Even Hughes didn't play him much. Then he broke his leg in training, missed the entirety of the 16-17 season and most of the 17-18 season as well. He was last seen at Bolton, who released him after two months, during which he never played a minute.
 
Wumminator said:
Michael Johnson.

Owns a pub near me now.
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Bless him. A player whose career was lost to a growth spurt his body couldn't adjust to, a little like Rodwell but even more extreme. It's easy to look back at players who never made it with rose-tinted glasses but Johnson really was excellent - a proper Rolls Royce midfielder in the making, he was a hero of mine during that Sven season. Sadly, though, as we all know, he just couldn't stay fit and wound up very depressed as a result. He was arrested and charged with drink driving three times in four months in 2012. We eventually released him and he retired to set up an estate agents. Glad to see he's running something and keeping busy.
 
Harry Kewell- thought he was going to be something special at one point. Spent 2 of his last 5 years in Turkey and 3 in the Australian League
Ariel Ortega-spent the last 12 years of bhisccareer in Turkey and South America.Pity.
 
Actually, speaking of Michael Johnson, here's a Reddit comment from 2013 written by someone who knew him:
I knew Michael growing up. He grew up in Urmston and we shared mutual friends. His dad is an excellent youth coach who took a local team all the way to playing guys like Ajax in youth tournaments, and Michael was his jewel in the crown. There's a lot of silly people talking a lot of silliness in this thread in what went on with him and what happened, usually spouting worn out cliches about overpaying and over-partying. To be honest, they're pretty way off base.

Growing up, I'd never seen anyone who worked harder than Johnson on his game. There was no regular N64 party with his mates - by the time he was about ready to leave primary school he was already off to Netherlands to play in a youth system over there. His entire life from being a toddler was built around football, the idea that he somehow lost desire is ridiculous and insulting. He sacrificed most of his childhood to become a footballer.

On this overpaid thing, people don't seem to understand how contracts are structured, especially for a youth player at a club like City then. You don't just get your full whack every week - by the time MJ was 20, before any of the later drinking, he was having to borrow money to pay bills. Like every other footballer he thought he was invincible and bought a bunch of nice stuff when he broke in. Then he got injured, his wages dropped, and he could barely make ends meet.

It's hard to describe the type of toll that working your entire life towards a goal and being let down by your body in the cusp of achieving it takes on you. This guy wasn't injured once, he was injured four or five times on the bounce. Initially it was a growth based injury, he was seen as the next big thing, then was told that he had to go home and sit on his couch for a year because, despite having immense talent, his body had failed him and there was no cure but to wait. And watch his peers surpass him in development.

He finally got back into training from this, and wanting to make up for lost time he pushed too hard too soon and buggered his knee. Another few months for him to wait and watch. At this point his behaviour was fine. What the City physios were doing allowing him to work so hard escapes me. I imagine he wasn't best pleased either.

Same thing later happened again. Got his shit together, came back, immediately injured. At this point he sunk into a depression, understandable as he felt his hopes and dreams that he had worked so hard for to be slipping away due to little fault on his part. It didn't help at this point that he had problems in an infuriatingly stupid and hostile dressing room. Ireland, Johnson, Samaras, etc. all have frankly embarrassing stories about this period. It also didn't help that the club at this point were in mass disarray and couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, thus provided him with no support at all.

When it happened again injury wise, he completely fell apart. He decided that sitting in a couch rehabbing was doing nothing and so he started going into clubs and casinos more often. Here the cliches apply more. He snapped out of this behaviour too late. Perhaps this coinciding with the extra support players were given is a coincidence but it probably isn't.

Whilst Johnson contributed to the fecking of his career, I place a major proportion of the blame on the club and the frankly scandalous lack of support young players were given. Almost every graduate of our academy during that period has had major mental problems, from Ireland's bizarre behaviour to Richards' lack of assertion that Vieira sorted out, to Johnson and Ched Evans and Stephen Jordan etc.

For everybody's screaming about bringing through kids, City early in the 00s are a perfect example of why fans need to calm down with this. We thought that we could save our money by bringing through players and it would just all work out in the end, without thinking of the long term. Long term we have wrecked the careers of several promising players because we concentrated on their footy skills and not their emotional development. We saved ourselves millions of pound in the short term to the cost of tens of millions in the long term.

We have learnt from these mistakes of the past but when I see clubs like Villa and Sunderland getting plaudits for throwing bunches of kids into the mix, it makes me concerned about whether we in England are throwing another generation away due to this obsession with playing homegrown kids.
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harms said:
Huntelaar is still playing, and even scoring at a good rate for Ajax. But I still somehow have a feeling that he retired around 2010-2012.
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Sure, he couldn't back up the hype from his first Ajax spell and turned out not good enough for Madrid, but he remained a decent striker for Schalke with a really good goal scoring record and seems to be experiencing a second spring at Ajax now. If anything he's probably the opposite of a faded player.
 
Alan Smith. I digged him a ton as a midfielder for us I must admit. Those tackles, heroism and must-win-whatever-it-takes mentality. No doubt he wasn't a very gifted footballer though.
 
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