It is very easy whenever a player fails when moving from one league to another to just say the usual, overused cliche reasons. Difference of style, the intensity difference, and all the other easy reasons a local media uses to brag about how their league is "tougher" than the others. While those are legitimate factors, they don't tell the full story.
Change is hard in general
This has nothing special to do with specific countries. Life in England isn't particularly harder than life in Spain for example, it is just different and some players have a hard time adapting to the change. You know like normal humans.
Even small things like the type of roads and available brands of food affect everyone changing where they live. It can be difficult going from one city to another, let alone countries or continents in some cases. Those seem like simple and obvious truths. The issue is they are simple and obvious to everyone except football fans.
To football fans, you have a lot of money and therefore you don't have any real problems. So, any performance issues have to do with your mentality. It can't be about anything else. And to the media, it is just a chance to write another column about how great and difficult their league is. In this post, I will explore the little things that lead to a transfer singing failing to adapt and how much they are more crucial than thought.
Homesickness
Khadija Bahadur and Ricard Pruna, Barcelona's ex-medical staff that Xavi is currently trying to bring back, talked about this extensively in their research. It is not just emotional, it is also a type of mental and physical pressure. It causes sleep disturbance, anxiety, and even makes your muscles tenser. Those are factors of injuries.
Players can't bring along their family and friends as those people can't just leave their lives behind, especially with the players having the possibility to move. Some players and managers can't even bring in their immediate family (Partners and offspring) as they would have built a life elsewhere.
Those players' solutions to these problems are the same ones we have, we call, text, or videocall the ones we miss. Add to that the logistics of the time difference and even that is difficult as people are busy during different times. Some players' families can't even watch their matches.
The changes in media and culture. How much they are focused on, what kind of restaurants available. Some players in the study mentioned above couldn't even cook the food they wanted as some ingredients weren't available or just available in a different kind.
Also, the weather and the mental pressure, all of that leads to a tendency of getting sick more and delaying duties. One transfer changes a player's life entirely.
Sadio Mane
Sadio Mane opened to Liverpoolfc.com about his journey. He moved from a village in Bambali, Sédhiou to Dakar (400 km away), to France (Metz), to Austria (Red Bull Salzburg), all within three years. All of that started happening around the team he was 16. By the time he was in Austria, he was 19.
All of that happened while the player couldn't even tell his mother about the troubles he was facing because she was an emotional person. He was all alone.
Khadija Bahadur and Ricard Pruna said in their report, that in order for a person to adjust to life in a new country, they'd need at 12 months. That is reasonable when you are required to be familiar with the roads, food, culture, language, forming a social network among other things. Mane had to do all of that as a teenager.
I am one of the people who had a serious issue with Mane's personality at times, when I read his story, I am surprised he is not even worse. Whether Mane was poor or a billionaire, his life still consists of complicated parts, because surprise, he is human life all of us.
Yet, we treat these players like they are machines, constantly comparing their numbers and giving them premature judgments like "flops", or "disappearing during big games". Forgetting that they're only humans trying to do their job.
This by the way comes with setting aside all the variables of problems someone has at home, like a relative's death, family dispute, and all other domestic issues.
Expectations
The nail in the coffin. Transfer fees are something players can't control, places and sites like transfermarkt can value players all they want with all different kinds of metrics, but in the end, there's no actual way to value players' prices.
With players brought in for a large transfer fee, or players brought in after a star left, we have a new set of problems to deal with. Players have to deal with all previously mentioned and the added media attention and fans' pressure. Imaginary numbers and expectations are set for players to meet. Forgetting that a player can only control so much.
Maybe some players lose motivation and start getting lazy intentionally, but even that can be caused by different factors. Most players don't start their careers with hopes of making a lot of money in early years then do nothing. There are reasons behind every action, and sometimes there is more than meets the eye.
I am not saying we shouldn't expect anything from signings, I am just saying that our expectations should come with the other factors in mind.