Those who watched Adrien Silva’s 2017 move from Sporting to Leicester City will undoubtedly recall how spectacular it was.
Due to the transfer not being completed in time for the deadline, the midfield player was forced to wait six months to make his new team’s debut.
Since Silva was interviewed for the 1 Para 1 podcast and Record provided the quotations, this story has now been revisited in the Portuguese media.
He provided numerous information about what transpired and made it apparent that some negative emotions are still present.
It has to have been the lowest point of my career, in my opinion. I doubt I ever disclosed it to anyone in public. When I was on the national team, I didn’t think it would happen. Then, with only one day remaining, I received a call telling me to get over to England as quickly as possible. And I needed to get authorization from Fernando Santos. I followed through on my promise to the management to train the following morning. I trained as promised even though I had to go through the night without stopping to sleep. Then, though, the worst occurred. discovering that errors had been made ten days later. And that’s when the most difficult part started.
The spell without playing wasn’t his only problem, with a managerial change making things even worse.
“I didn’t play for six months. Meanwhile, there was also a change of manager in those six months, who wasn’t the one who had signed me [Craig Shakespeare]. I thought it was going to be positive, but it turned out to be really negative. He didn’t count on me [Claude Puel]. He did everything to try and destabilise me. It’s easy to catch a coach who favours other qualities. But then when it comes to other things, it ends up being a bit more unpleasant and it was a very difficult four months to endure psychologically, because I wanted to carry on playing for the national team and I always had that in the back of my mind. I wanted to carry on because it was the year of the World Cup in Russia.”
Silva joined Leicester City for €20.5 million in 2017, however he only played 21 games for the team. Silva was a member of Sporting.
He was loaned out by the Foxes to AS Monaco in January 2019. He remained there until Leicester City finally allowed him to go permanently in the summer of 2020, this time to Sampdoria.
Silva continued to play for Al-Wahda in the United Arab Emirates, and he missed six months of action last year due to contract expiration. He didn’t sign a contract with Rio Ave in Portugal until January 2024; this summer, he will once more become a free agent there since his contract is set to expire.
