French youth international Isaac Lihadji has departed Sunderland for Qatari side Al Duhail after just over six months on Wearside, and I can’t help but think it’s such a colossal waste for the lad.
This news isn’t too much of a surprise, he missed Hartlepool in pre-season, according to Tony Mowbray, because the deal was getting closer. But before that there were the initial rumours, and those rumours (I think it’s fair to say) were largely dismissed by our support. After all there was no way a young player (21 years old) who was almost certain to get more game time than last season would choose to pack it in now and depart for a much less competitive and largely unknown league in Qatar. Here we are though, he’s gone and I don’t think too many people will think it’s going to derail our season or cause a revolt in the dressing room.
Put simply he’s chosen money over ambition, and at the end of the day if that’s his priority at such an early point in his career then fair enough but that means he isn’t a player we want around anyway. He only played six times for us and let’s be honest, never set the world alight. What Lihadji has done however is a colossal waste.
There were talks of him potentially being the Amad Diallo replacement, whether or not he was ever going to be good enough for that is a matter of debate but he could certainly have played more and gotten a lot better than he was in his first few appearances. There were always flashes of what he could do, an odd run forward or pass that made you think there was a good attacking player there. We weren’t that far off the Premier League last season and the expectation is that we will once again be there or there abouts in the upcoming campaign. So Lihadji leaving is not only a major step back in his career but a potential missed opportunity to play Premier League football, something that shouldn’t be taken lightly as that is considered by most young players in the EFL as the goal of their careers.
If he’s chosen guaranteed stacks of cash over this then he’s being short sighted in my view. If he made it to the Premier League, be that with Sunderland or someone else at some point after impressing here, then that money would have came anyway. If he’s chosen to play in a poor quality league rather than play in a competitive league with competition for him to play in the starting XI then Lihadji has clearly set out his priorities. He’s not chosen developing as a player but rather making as much money as possible. I think we’ve had enough of those types of players haven’t we over the years?
And just a quick caveat: I fully understand that footballers have short careers and don’t really have that much time to get a high earning contract, but I believe Lihadji had the potential to be playing in the Championship at the very least at a high level. Championship footballers still make quite a bit, especially at the top end of the division. So it wasn’t like he was going to end up on pennies if he didn’t leave for Qatar.
To just end this article, I want to make a few comments on Speakman and the wider transfer methodology of the club. Basically this isn’t really Speakman’s fault and isn’t a sign the model isn’t working. We always knew at some point one of the young players we have would have their head turned by a higher paying club somewhere. Granted most expected that to be a Premier League club, but so far we’ve done well to ward of interest from them. Lihadji is very much the exception to the rule that we are good at keeping our players, we’ve only sold Dajaku (Wright left due to ‘mutual consent’) other than Lihadji and he left because we wanted him out (that isn’t a dig at Dajaku to be clear, he always tried in a Sunderland shirt and that’s good enough for me). We can’t control what players want all of the time and despite this being a bit of a disappointment, don’t go shouting at Speakman because he certainly doesn’t have control over the emerging threat of Middle Eastern leagues tempting players away for large sums of money. You could argue we should pay our players more but in Lihadji’s case he’s only been here for six months so why would we have him on a large salary?
