Ranking the Biggest Current Stars Who Flopped in La Liga
La Liga has long been seen as one of the top European leagues, not just for fans and casual viewers but also for players—a league to aspire to join, to play in and shine in.
And when a player performs well in La Liga, the biggest clubs tend to come calling: Barcelona or Real Madrid might be the pinnacle, but clubs all over Europe are always scouring Spain's secondary sides to find a new talent, an emerging face or simply a proven name who is showing he is ready to step up further.
But it doesn't always work out quite as intended. Some players don't adapt or simply can't fit in—less so in Spain than in the Premier League, it must be noted—or fail to show their best form before moving on.
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That isn't always the end of it, though, and plenty have gone on to have tremendous careers, even reaching the top of the game after flopping in La Liga.
Here we look at the biggest names in football who failed to produce in Spain, from the disappointing to the abject. The players are ranked in order of their standing right now.
20. Raul Jimenez
Mexican striker Raul Jimenez was seen as a lethal penalty-box option who could add another layer of threat to Atletico Madrid's front line.
It didn't quite go to plan, as he scored just once all season and was immediately offloaded to Benfica, where he remains three seasons later. This season, he's a largely frustrated sub.
19. Maxi Lopez
Having starred for River Plate as a youngster, Maxi Lopez made the move to Barcelona in 2005 and scored on his UEFA Champions League debut—but that was as good as it got.
He spent a season on loan at Mallorca, where he also failed to regularly find the net, before embarking on a meandering career mostly spent in Italy, where he has latterly rediscovered form and relevance with Torino and Udinese.
18. Eduardo Salvio
Another Benfica player, Eduardo Salvio trod a similar path to Jimenez, though he came from Lanus to Atletico before joining the Portuguese side.
Salvio had a year and a half at Atleti but never convinced as a starter and only notched five league goals for the club. He's now in his sixth season at Benfica after leaving Atletico permanently in 2012.
17. Guillermo Ochoa
Guillermo Ochoa managed a much longer stay in La Liga than those mentioned above, but it wasn't a particularly pleasant three-year stint.
He spent two years on the bench at Malaga—despite largely remaining Mexico's first-choice goalkeeper—as back-up to Carlos Kameni and then spent 2016/17 on loan at Granada, where his form was as erratic as the defence in front of him and the team was relegated. He switched to Standard Liege in the summer and remains Mexico's stopper of choice as they head to the FIFA World Cup.
16. Jozy Altidore
Staying in the CONCACAF region, Jozy Altidore is the USMNT's No. 9, a starter and scorer whether they play with one up top or two. He also plunders plenty for MLS side Toronto FC—13 this season and counting.
Back in 2008, though, he stumbled around up front for Villarreal, making a handful of appearances and scoring once before heading out on loan to Xerez. There, he played a grand total of zero matches because of a toe issue, and his grand tour of Spain was over.
15. Cristian Zapata
Villarreal have a great record of signing and developing centre-backs whom other clubs go on to procure after they have shown great form for the Yellow Submarine—Diego Godin, Eric Bailly and Mateo Musacchio all included.
Cristian Zapata was somewhat less impressive in his single season at the club, making plenty of errors as a young defender and seeing his team relegated. Despite that, AC Milan saw promise; they swooped to sign him, and there he remains, now in his sixth season at the club.
14. Edu Vargas
Chilean forward Edu Vargas seems to have been around forever, but his only stint in La Liga was a brief and unsuccessful part-campaign on loan at Valencia in 2013/14. He was often sub or subbed off in league play, while having a more regular role in Los Che's UEFA Europa League campaign. He managed just five goals all told and wasn't signed at the end of the season.
He's now at Tigres in Mexico and is one of his national team's all-time leading goalscorers.
13. Alex Grimaldo
Alex Grimaldo is somewhat different to most above in that he never made the breakthrough to play top-level football before leaving Spain.
A Barcelona youth prospect, he was a regular in the B team, but despite calls from fans for his promotion, the left-back never managed to make an appearance for the Camp Nou senior side. He departed for Benfica in late 2015 and has quickly become one of the most sought-after full-backs in Europe despite a long-term injury last year.
12. Nani
It won't come as a surprise to many who have followed Nani's career path to learn that his single season at Valencia can best be summed up as "inconsistent and frustrating." That may be putting it kindly.
In the summer of 2016, he signed a three-year deal with Los Che; he missed long stretches of the campaign through injury, rarely helped lift the performance of the team when they weren't playing well and has this term been shipped off to Lazio on loan.
11. Yevhen Konoplyanka
It's difficult to tell quite why it didn't work out for Yevhen Konoplyanka at Sevilla; he started well, scoring on both his debut and Champions League debut, and he often looked one of the most dangerous players in the team. But his manager clearly didn't fancy him as a starter and he was phased out.
A single season in La Liga was incredibly unsatisfying for such a spectacular player with great potential, and he moved on to Schalke, first on loan and then permanently.
10. Oriol Romeu
Into the top 10, and Oriol Romeu gets us started—though not for his stint as a promising youngster at Barcelona, with whom he debuted, unlike Grimaldo.
Romeu moved on before a proper assessment of his ability to influence games in La Liga could be made, but chances were hard to come by at Chelsea, and a loan to Valencia should have provided the opportunity to see where his development was.
Unfortunately, he rarely got the chance to showcase his ability; Los Che were a mess, he didn't have a set role in the team and he suffered more than one injury, which meant his appearances were sporadic.
He has since gone on to establish himself as one of the Premier League's best holding midfielders with Southampton.
9. Ricardo Quaresma
Portuguese winger Ricardo Quaresma has had quite the career, taking in spells with clubs that are among the biggest in their respective nations, such as Sporting CP, Porto, Inter Milan, Besiktas, Chelsea and Ah-Ahli.
His success levels have varied greatly from season to season, never mind club to club, but one early campaign in his career will always be regarded as a failure: 2003/04 with Barcelona.
Quaresma didn't find consistency or work rate easy to come by, scoring only once—and falling out with manager Frank Rijkaard in the process.
That was always unlikely to lead to happy times, and he was duly offloaded as part of the deal that saw Barca bring Deco to the club. From then on, Quaresma rebuilt his career, most recently winning back-to-back Super Lig titles in Turkey and also forming part of the Portugal team that won the 2016 UEFA European Championship.
8. Ciro Immobile
The top scorer in Serie A is Paulo Dybala, one of the highest-rated players in Italy and someone seen by many as the heir to Lionel Messi.
Second-top scorer in Serie A is Ciro Immobile, with nine goals in just seven games and a confidence about his play at Lazio that was never seen during his time with Sevilla.
Perhaps he's just the type of player who needs to be in his home nation; the Italian was a regular scorer with Torino before he departed for Borussia Dortmund in 2014. He also flopped in Germany, and a loan to La Liga in 2015 didn't make things better.
Back in Serie A, he scored 23 last term, a best-ever top-flight haul for Immobile, and he's well on the way to bettering that already this term—while also becoming a regular part of the Italy national team setup over the past couple of years.
He has scored more goals this season already than the number of league appearances he made for Sevilla during his yearlong stay.
7. Luis Alberto
If Immobile is producing the goods up front, he has attacking midfield schemer Luis Alberto to thank for creating plenty of chances.
Alberto played for Barcelona B and briefly for Sevilla's first team as a youngster, not shining particularly for either after making his name with Sevilla's youth sides and B team. His move to Liverpool didn't yield much more success, including a loan back to Malaga in 2014/15, when he was sparingly used and inconsistent.
The one season when Alberto did show his worth was 2015/16 with Deportivo La Coruna, again on loan, and it prompted Lazio to make the move for him—which has paid off handsomely.
6. Antonio Valencia
A regular captain of Manchester United and the winner of almost a century of caps for Ecuador, Antonio Valencia has made a top-level career for himself—though he took a long while to reach that top.
Initially seen as a rampaging winger, his stay in Spain saw fleeting matches with Villarreal and Recreativo before Wigan Athletic brought him to the Premier League.
Neither Spanish side saw the best of him, a young wide man who was fleet of foot but lacking in end product. Nowadays he's one of the most consistent, hard-to-beat full-backs in the English top flight, tactically aware and a role model at his club.
Aged 32, Valencia has come a long way from being loaned down to the second tier in Spain.
5. Nuri Sahin
Under Jurgen Klopp, Nuri Sahin became one of the most important components of Borussia Dortmund's swashbuckling, title-winning midfield. His ability to find space and pass from deep made him a sought-after commodity. Real Madrid won the race for his signature, but he never came close to settling in the Spanish capital.
Infrequent appearances, several injuries and an inability to displace any of the first-team players led to Sahin calling time on his stay in Spain just one year into a six-year contract.
He moved to Liverpool on loan in 2012, failed to win a spot there either and headed back to Dortmund.
It didn't seem as though his return would pan out as planned; Sahin was continually sidelined by injury and missed large chunks of both 2015/16 and 2016/17, playing under 500 minutes all told last season—but there has been a happy turnaround of late.
Under Peter Bosz, he's once again fit and a regular part of the team, anchoring the midfield and playing a key role both in the Bundesliga and the Champions League. Sahin, on top form, remains one of the picks of playmaking midfielders around Europe.
4. Suso
Liverpool signed Suso as a youth prospect, well before he had a chance to play any senior football in Spain, but he did head back to La Liga for a loan spell at Almeria in 2013/14.
It didn't go tremendously well, as he fell foul of team rules more than once. He meandered in and out of the side as his form fluctuated—as would be expected of a young attacking midfielder, in fairness. It was hardly the defining season he hoped for before returning to Liverpool, and he duly spent the following campaign largely unused.
A move to AC Milan followed, midway through the campaign as his contract neared expiry.
Though it took Suso some time to work his way into the Milan lineup on a regular basis, 2016/17 saw him take a huge upward curve in both reliability and productivity, and he has become one of the team's most important attackers.
Even this term, after heavy summer investment, he's a regular starter and tops the squad for assists in Serie A.
3. Zlatan Ibrahimovic
Zlatan Ibrahimovic's time at Barcelona splits opinion, and none more so than when asking him or his then-manager, Pep Guardiola, how he fared.
Ibrahimovic was a huge-money signing, costing Barcelona Samuel Eto'o plus £40 million, but he lasted only about half a season as a regular starter. During that half-campaign, he was excellent—yet he was quickly ushered out of the team to make space for Lionel Messi, who moved from the right to the middle of the forward line.
Zlatan was left out thereafter, either because he was suspended or on the bench. Ultimately, he was not even sold—instead, he was loaned to AC Milan with an option to buy. Barcelona simply didn't want him.
He was good for Barca initially but not overall. The Swedish forward has been a massive success everywhere, though, and that makes this move to Spain a failure, perhaps the only one of his career.
Since then? He's won five league titles, the Europa League, a whole host of individual awards, a position in the Champions League team of the season, earned a place in the AC Milan hall of fame and become Paris Saint-Germain's all-time leading goalscorer.
The only reason Zlatan isn't No. 1 is because this ranking is based on current ability, and it's tough to say how effective he will be in the second half of 2017/18 at 36 after a long-term knee injury.
2. Fabinho
Fabinho had a brief, almost irrelevant spell in Spain—but one in which he didn't make enough impact to be signed by Real Madrid.
The Brazilian midfielder moved from his home nation to Rio Ave in Portugal and then straight to Real Madrid Castilla on a loan deal. During his year in Spain, he did make his Real Madrid senior debut, late on in the season as a sub, but Los Blancos neither renewed the loan nor sought a permanent deal.
Instead, he headed to AS Monaco, where he has since grown into a monster of a performer, both at right-back and in central midfield.
A full international and a Ligue 1 title-winner last season, Fabinho has been linked with the likes of Manchester United and Atletico Madrid and is rated at more than £40 million.
Perhaps Real Madrid weren't paying enough attention or perhaps Fabinho simply didn't have what it took at that age to spark serious interest—but he certainly does now.
1. Toby Alderweireld
Top of the pile is Tottenham Hotspur centre-back Toby Alderweireld, heralded by many as the most complete defender in the Premier League.
He's composed on the ball, reads the game well and has good pace to cover when needed. He's also part of perhaps the finest-structured side in the league. All this is after more than two seasons at Spurs—and he had already impressed hugely at Southampton on loan before that, which was when clubs started to take notice of him.
But Saints only snared his services because he failed to break into the side at Atletico Madrid.
Alderweireld spent just one year at the Vicente Calderon, failing to command regular game time—though that's hardly a slight against him given Atleti won the title and reached the Champions League final that season.
Miranda and Diego Godin formed an impenetrable barrier to the first team for the Belgian, and his frustrating season on the sidelines formed the start of his journey to England and proving himself as one of the best defenders around.
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