For Spanish Players, the Premier League Dream Can Often Become a Nightmare

Football may well be an international language. Unfortunately, for many players, it is a language all too frequently lost in translation.

For many young players, making it as a professional footballer somewhere—anywhere—in the world is the stuff that dreams are made of. The harsh reality is, for many of them, all too often that dream becomes a nightmare.

The success stories of some of the elite players who have managed to win the hearts and minds of a demanding culture alien to everything they know are well documented.

The Fabregases, De Geas and Matas of this world are one side of the story, but there is always another tale to be told.

No names, no pack drill, but imagine this scenario. You come to the United Kingdom from a town in Spain where you are recognised wherever you go.

You arrive at a place that is about 200 miles from the hub that is swinging London, but which is so different from it that it could be on another planet. No one knows you, you have no friends, you speak not a word of the language and you find it hard to decide whether what you hate most is the food or the weather—or both in equal measure.

You arrive at the training ground with the "burden" of being a product of the school that brought tiki-taka to the world and immediately expected to run at 100 miles an hour while simultaneously slotting into a system of play that is totally alien to everything you have ever been taught.

Your new team-mates probably don’t know you from Adam, although what they do know is that as the great panacea, the miracle worker and solution to all problems that you are supposed to be, you’re more than likely on a contract that earns you more in a week than some of them will earn in a month.

In the claustrophobic, clique driven, sink-or-swim hierarchy that is football, the contempt of many of them will know no bounds.

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You don’t speak English, your coach and new colleagues speak no Spanish and, even if they did, don’t really want to talk to you anyway. Even worse than that, perhaps you don’t speak the same language in footballing terms either.

After training, you go back to your luxury hotel, or rented "home" and wonder just how you are going to fill the rest of your day. You miss your family, your friends, your country—in fact just about everything.

Having been attracted to the club by a coach you have always respected, you arrive to find him gone—history, another victim of the game’s ruthlessness—and find yourself being shouted at by a man who you feel knows as much about football as you’ve contrived to forget, and forced to play a style alien to you, in a foreign country with a completely different culture.

When you find yourself struggling with it you are branded lazy, "typically continental," unprepared to "die for the shirt," kiss the badge, unprofessional: hero to zero.

So by way of "punishment," very often what is proposed is a loan move somewhere. In the event that such a suggestion doesn’t meet with your approval, a short, sharp shock is the order of the day. Train with the youth team and the reserves for a few weeks; see if that will concentrate your mind.

By way of consolation, you earn a lot of money, yet somehow it counts for nothing because the one thing that can make life bearable when you are a long way from home, both physically and emotionally, is playing the game you love—and now even that’s been taken away from you.

All of this has happened to a half-dozen Spanish players in the last 12 months.

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There is a world of difference between playing your football in London and playing in the United Kingdom. The bustling, energetic, cosmopolitan feel of the nation's capital is a million miles away from that experienced by many players who move to the provinces.

Yet, even in London, life is not without its problems. Santi Cazorla has openly admitted that when he first came to Arsenal, had it not been for the wonderful Mikel Arteta taking him under his wing and showing him around, he might well not have settled in England.

Perhaps we shouldn’t feel too sorry for these players. They are very well-paid young men, earning their corn by living the dream. But they are also human beings, not machines, and money isn’t everything. It’s never as simple as some would have you believe.