Can you tell if a player will adapt to the Premiership?

Following on from Ent's SAF thread about spending in the summer the topic of how quickly a player can adapt to the premiership came up. As we have seen numerous times players who are brought in from outside the premiership vary in how long they take to adapt to the pace/power/playstyle of the premiership. After some debate I wondered if it is possible to predict how well a player will adapt.


Which leads to the question is it possible to predict who will be a success
straight away, who will take time to adapt but will then be a big
success and who will never quite adapt?

Looking at previous signings a trend is somewhat apparent of players from Ligue 1 and the Bundesliga settling in quite quickly, examples of this include Papiss Cisse and Michael Essien amongst many many more examples. On the other hand players from La Liga and Serie A often take a little while, examples including David Silva and David de Gea amongst many others. Another possibility is the type of player as bigger players (tanks if you will) often adapt very quickly, such as Essien and Yaya Toure but Vidic bucks that trend as it took him quite a while to adapt.

So the point of this discussion will be first to assess if it is possible to identify players who will adapt quickly and others who won't, and then secondly to look at each of this years summer signings from abroad to the premiership and try to predict how quickly they will adapt.

I think it is very hard to guage as each league recruited from has it's successes and failures.

For example you list Ligue 1 as successful but we have the likes of Djemba Djemba, Gervinho, Chamak etc who weren't (and many more).

Good players will adapt, if they've played in a competitive league, CL football and some international football and are used properly by their new club (very important) they are likely to be successful.

I also think you are harsh on Vidic as he hadn't played in 2-3 months when he joined in January and made a handful of appearances (10 IIRC), mostly in cups and was then immense the following season.

I think personally it's impossible to tell and it's something that irks me when instantly I mention a player from say the Dutch league as being potentially a quality player to have the old ' oh he'll just be the next Alfonso Alves' etc as obviously every player to have ever played in the Eredivisie will obviously be a flop if attempted to move to the Premier League.

Sometimes clubs just have to take a punt ala Ronaldo, 25 games for Sporting Lisbon, no call up to the national team but Utd splashed out over £12m to beat Arsenal and Liverpool to him.

I was using Vidic as an example of someone who took a few games to pick up the pace, regardless of the fact that he was injured before hand.

Hero, I know what you mean but I was hoping that we could give it a go as a community. Then by Christmas we can see how well we do. Bearing in mind that we'll probably be completely wrong!

Hero wrote:I think personally it's impossible to tell and it's something that irks me when instantly I mention a player from say the Dutch league as being potentially a quality player to have the old ' oh he'll just be the next Alfonso Alves' etc as obviously every player to have ever played in the Eredivisie will obviously be a flop if attempted to move to the Premier League.

Sometimes clubs just have to take a punt ala Ronaldo, 25 games for Sporting Lisbon, no call up to the national team but Utd splashed out over £12m to beat Arsenal and Liverpool to him.

I think there is a bit of a difference with young players and Ronaldo whilst showing great ability did take 2 seasons to really develop and settle as a player.

Gregers - Vidic didn't take that long, he was signed during the Russian post season and was up to it 6 months later.

I think we need to define adapting; if it is hitting the ground running, or showing yourself to be a good player within a year or so.

Interestingly Veron was quite brilliant for us in his first 2 months, won POTM for August but by general concensus he failed to adapt to the league.

Lets say over both the initial period and then mid season, is that fair?

Some players adapt better than others. It can be based around team-mates or systems formations.

Cantona, Yorke, Bergkamp, Zola, Henry just some big name examples of players that found their feet in the Premier League. It is difficult to judge when they haven't kicked a ball in the league.

During the off season I'll do a topic of the players that have signed to PL clubs. I can't wait to see Podolski. There's some doubt over him just now but he's class for Germany.

Should be fun.

I semi agree with Hero. We shouldn't all label Dutch league players as "the next Alfonso Alves" but a lot of them do struggle. Bas Dost to Villa

Pod and Marin are the two big ones so far.

Stefan Savic

Kompany hit the ground running though.

I'd say this will be interesting as e.g. Henry failed to score in his first 8 games for Arsenal so you could have some amusing comments arising.

Exactly Ent, also will be interesting seeing combining different opinions. Hopefully we can get to an overall opinion on each player as well