Manchester United’s wasted talent Anderson liked clubs more than training centre

Year after year, the football public is presented with a brand new list of promising young players whose potential reaches the highest levels. They are predicted to have a bright future and have huge expectations placed on their shoulders while they are growing up. There are those who will cope with this pressure and make it big, but there is a much larger group of less successful ones who, for various reasons, will not turn their potential into a stellar career and their name will not become synonymous with quality. One of the latter group is the Brazilian midfielder Anderson.

Anderson learned football in Gremia, from where he moved to Porto in Portugal at the age of 17 to prove his talent in European competition. But the steep rise of his career continued and after just two years, he was plucked from the Dragons by Sir Alex Ferguson himself to the illustrious Manchester United.

Many football commentators and pundits in England wondered and often even questioned the legendary coach’s decision to bring in a fairly unknown teenager for a then very solid €31 million, but Ferguson stood his ground and continued to work with Anderson as a future replacement for Paul Scholes.

And indeed, the moment the seasoned Scholes was injured for three months in the autumn of 2007, the chance came just for the young Graeme alumnus. First against Arsenal and specifically Cesc Fabergas, he showed how tenacious, strong and, in the best sense of the word, annoying a counter-attacker he can be.

The same a month later when the Red Devils travelled to take on Liverpool, where the Brazilian had an even bigger challenge in Steven Gerrard. But even the experienced captain of The Reds looked increasingly fed up and bothered by the opposition’s back eight as time went on.

For Sir Alex Ferguson, Anderson’s three-month loan spell in place of the ageing Scholes was a godsend, not least when he also played like a partisan in key games against Arsenal and Liverpool. The first season was a dream one for the Red Devils’ new hope and even the fans at Old Trafford fell in love with the young footballer.

However, nothing lasts forever and the coach’s recently nameless youngster was beginning to cause problems. It wasn’t so much about injuries, which sooner or later must cross every footballer’s career, but rather his less than perfect approach to the lifestyle of a top athlete. The latter, of course, did not help proper recovery after an injury; on the contrary, it often led to additional health problems.

As time went on, it became more and more apparent that Anderson not only loved football, but more importantly, being a footballer. He got a contract extension and for quite a long time the club’s directive and Ferguson himself believed that they could correct the youngster’s misaligned mind. But this was not to be and more and more rumours of his frequenting nightclubs and enjoying the nightlife leaked out.

Eventually, after eight years at Old Trafford and a return from a loan spell at Fiorentina, United were happy to let him go free to his native Brazil, where he donned the Internacional jersey. From Brazil, at the very end of his two years without a club, he made another run to Turkey before ending his active playing career in September 2019.

He was supposed to be a superstar, he was supposed to be the workhorse of Manchester United and the Canaries national team, but he successfully ate and drank his potential, so to speak. SAF pulled a promising diamond out of his sleeve, but his cut went awry and grossly underperformed, unfortunately for Red Devils fans.

Sources