Brazilian young soccer players are very much appreciated all over the world, but not in England. For a long time, few Latin American players wanted to go play in the Premier League. And there are not many clubs that would like to see in their roster a technical, but physically weak Brazilian. However, in recent years, this trend has begun to change. Clubs of the English Premier League began to pay attention to Argentines and Brazilians, Chileans, Colombians and Uruguayans.
Carier start
Lucas Leiva has long been considered a young and promising player who could become a real world-class star. In 2007, he moved to English Liverpool. It would seem that a suitable club, a team in which you can prove yourself well. After winning the Champions League in 2005, Liverpool stopped showing something interesting, the team could not win almost any trophies.
Reliability in the central zone of “Liverpool” was to add just Lucas Leiva. The biography of the player at the time of the transition to the Merseysiders was not rich. He played 38 official matches for the main Gremio team. For Brazilians, he spoke from 2005 to 2007. In 2006, he and his team were able to win the Brazilian Championship. And in 2007, he played his first match as part of the national team.
"Liverpool"
The transition to Liverpool was not unexpected. In his first season at Anfield, the Brazilian played 18 matches. Perhaps Leiva would not have played so many matches if not for the departure of Sissoko. With every season Leiva progressed. In the 2010-2011 season, he was able to become the best player on the team. But then the recession began in his football career. Injuries, unsuccessful performances of the team, the management of the club is incomprehensible - this is how you can characterize everything that happened around Lucas the next years. In 2015, Lucas Leiva was able to recover from an injury.
Leiva has played over two hundred matches for Liverpool, but he is not a star and team leader. The return after a serious injury in 2015 remained invisible, however, like the entire career of the Brazilian. In the foreground were Rogers' strange rearrangements, Balotelli's strange behavior.
Competition for a place
Nevertheless, the player must be given credit. When he joined the team, there were many players in his position. Despite the sale of Momo Sissoko, Lucas had enough competitors. But Lucas Leiva is a football player who was not afraid of difficulties.
Arriving at the English Grand, Leiva was a 20-year-old ball picker. He did not have physical data, skill, but he was still genius in his own way. Even despite the almost complete lack of speed and impact, he was a key player in the central zone for a long time, an unsung hero like that. In this regard, it can be compared with the former Nigerian defensive midfielder of London's Chelsea, whose name is John Obi Mickel.
The first competitors of Lucas in Liverpool were Mascherano and Alonso. After they left for Barcelona and Real Madrid, new competitors appeared: Henderson and Allen. However, none of the listed players believed that their competitor is Lucas Leiva. Liverpool is a team in which rotation takes place all the time, which is not always clear and necessary, but it exists. It so happened that, being a player “on the hook”, Leiva spent more time on the field than the players of the main squad.
