Forgotten ex-Liverpool man now regrets leaving Anfield too soon; one teammate was a ‘phenomenon’
One former Liverpool player has admitted that he may have left the club with indecent haste in an honest reflection on his time at Anfield.
Luis Alberto was officially on the Reds’ books for three years but only spent one season on Merseyside (2013/14) as he was loaned out twice before a permanent move to Lazio in 2016.
Now playing with Al-Duhail in Qatar, the 31-year-old spoke at length to Cronache di Spogliatoio about his career, reflecting on his time with LFC, for whom he made just a dozen appearances but was eternally grateful to one particulary illustrious teammate.
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Alberto said: “Even in Liverpool the dressing room was beautiful. I could have done more, I could have stayed there, but I was young and I wanted to play, so I went.
“[Luis] Suarez was like a father to me there. He is a beautiful person, a phenomenon. I was always with him. We were always at each other’s homes. It was impossible to go outside the house without him.
“I didn’t play much but I learned. I saw that the Premier League is fantastic in everything. They have an organisation which is the best.”
Alberto was only 20 when he came to Liverpool in the summer of 2013, and it can be easy to forget just how daunting it can be for someone so young to leave their homeland for a foreign country where their native language isn’t spoken widely.
While he had fellow Spanish speakers such as Suarez to ease the transition, the midfielder never managed to establish himself at Anfield, being handed just 258 minutes on the pitch by Brendan Rodgers before his loan spells at Malaga and Deportivo La Coruna.
That sparsity of game-time made it understandable that he’d seek to leave Merseyside after a year, but while he wasn’t to know it at the time, he wasn’t quite indispensable for either of the two clubs back in Spain either. However, he later went on to become a Lazio legend of more than 300 appearances.
Hindsight is 20/20 vision, of course, but perhaps Alberto retrospectively feels that, if he stayed put, he’d have had a chance of featuring more frequently for Liverpool in those couple of years after his solitary season with the Reds.
It was a pity that it never worked out for him at Anfield, but it’s good to see that he went on to enjoy a stable career in a major European league elsewhere.
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