Robbie Keane has made the big-money move to the US, where he joins David Beckham at LA Galaxy. But here are five players whose careers ground to a halt in the MLS.
By Shane Breslin & William Nestor
Shaka Hislop
A better-than-decent Premier League keeper during spells at Newcastle and West Ham United, Hislop also impressed at the World Cup with Trinidad & Tobago in 2006, after which he made the move to the US with FC Dallas.
He was just 37 at the time – Brad Freidel, Edwin van der Sar and David James have been excellent in the top division at 40, and Shay Given has just signed a five-year deal at 35 – but for whatever reason Hislop was unable to get a game at his new club.
He made just ten starts in a year in Dallas, playing second fiddle to an uncapped Argentine veteran by the name of Dario Sala, and eventually retired following the ignominy of dropping to third choice behind a teenage American.
Thierry Henry
Okay, so he’s the top scorer in the MLS with 12 goals this season, but Irish people don’t need many excuses to have a cut at “The Thief of St Denis” (© George Hamilton, RTE) and you don’t have to look too closely at his impact for New York Red Bulls this year to discover the negativity.
Red Bulls have been described as the most expensively assembled squad in MLS history, with their playing roster including stars (or otherwise) such as Rafa Marquez, Teemu Tainio and the least talented of the Rooney household, John.
Despite the investment, however, they have won just six of their 24 games this season – only two of those in the past four months – to lie in eighth place and on the brink of an ignominious exit before the play-offs.
Their captain’s influence has prompted one unnamed scribe to say “Thierry Henry has spent more time running his mouth than the field,” while an ESPN report this week included the following lines:
“Henry has spent the year vacillating between moping, glowering at vocal fans in the stands, throwing his hands up in disgust at failed plays (including his own) and excoriating teammates … and his increasingly antagonistic attitude toward the press can’t be doing team chemistry any favors.”
Nice.
Gilles Grimandi
Grimandi won two League and Cup Doubles in five years at Arsenal when he partially filled the role of dark-arts enforcer that Arsene Wenger has sorely lacked since the departure of players like Grimandi, Martin Keown, Steve Bould, Manu Petit and Patrick Vieira.
He was just 32 when he decided to pluck the carrot of some US dollars, after a Double-winning season in which he’d played 40 times.
It’s fair to say things didn’t quite work out as planned for the Frenchman. He signed in January 2003, played one pre-season match in March and called it quits – or had his contract terminated, depending on which version of events you read – without playing a competitive game. He promptly retired.
Lothar Matthäus
The curtain call on a fine career for club and country couldn’t have flopped any greater than it did for one of Germany’s all-time heroes in 2000.
Matthäus had seen his dream of a Champions League winners’ medal evaporate the previous year, when he left the field with ten minutes to go against Man Utd and his side winning 1-0. That was effectively the end of his career with Bayern, and he decided to grab the golden parachute offered by the New York/New Jersey MetroStars.
He spent just seven months at the club, making 16 appearances and scoring no goals. And, Lothar being Lothar, he was tearing his hair out at the inadequacies of his teammates. “This is a very difficult situation with me,” he said. “I have played for the last 16 years for clubs that were very good teams. This is a new situation for me.”
Denilson
The one-time most expensive player in the world (he moved from São Paulo to Real Betis for £21.5 million), Denílson had a brief encounter with the MLS in the midst of doing a whistle-stop tour of the world to pick up some fat pay chegues.
The Brazilian managed one goal and no assists in seven games for FC Dallas in 2007 before he was axed from the squad for the club’s appearance in the US Open Cup final.
They eventually managed to get shut of him by forcing his wages down the following season and with that, Denilson was back on the road once again.
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