There are very few highlight players in the world better than Xherdan Shaqiri. In a seven-minute supercut, he looks like the most complete attacking midfielder in the world.
Xherdan Shaqiri’s biggest problem was already solved by Stoke City
Mark Hughes has snagged a gem, and he did it by sucking up.
Marco Luzzani/Getty Images
The most impressive thing about this video isn’t the top plays, but the variety of plays that he makes. Long-range goals and tidy close-range finishes; through ball assists, crossing assists and diagonal assists; dummies, stepovers, flicks and turns; runs where he beats defenders for pace and runs where he bulldozes them. He is everything you could ever want in a footballer.
And now he plays for Stoke City.
Mark Hughes has done some incredible work in turning around Stoke's reputation for being the Premier League's resident anti-football bullies, but they're hardly Bayern Munich or Inter Milan, Shaqiri's last two teams. Those are treble-winning clubs from world renown cities. Stoke City and Stoke-on-Trent don't quite fit that description.
It's hard not to feel like the football scouting community knows something we don't. Again, this isn't to to disparage Stoke City, who have a very passionate fanbase and did very well last season. But they're not as big of a club as some of the other teams that were linked to Shaqiri, like Liverpool and Schalke. If those teams really wanted him, they probably could have beat Stoke to him. They ultimately chose not to.
Shaqiri, for all his qualities, had a disastrous 2014-15 season. He came off an excellent World Cup performance hoping for more opportunities at Bayern, but found them scarce. He scored twice in 15 appearances in the first half of the season -- most of them as a substitute -- and asked to be sold to Inter. It should have been a perfect move for him, and it looked like a sign that Inter, one of the sport's saddest and most mismanaged clubs, were finally turning a corner. Shaqiri could go to a second-tier club and be guaranteed to start every match. Inter had a young centerpiece to build a team around. It only cost Inter €14 million. It looked like a coup.
It didn't work out, at all. He wasn't always first choice, and when he was, he struggled to fit in. "Why did Roberto Mancini sign Shaqiri, then, when he showed just a bit of inconsistency, bench him for the rest of the season?", wondered Brett Callan of Inter Milan Offside when I spoke to him about what went wrong for Shaqiri at Inter. "He's the one that brought Shaqiri to Inter. It seems like he just gave up on him." Given Inter's willingness to ship off Shaqiri for the same price they paid for him, that seems to be a fair assessment.
“I’d be willing to say that, given more opportunity, Shaqiri really could have done well at Inter,” said Callan. “He was never given a chance, and it was clear that Mancini was willing to get rid of him fast to help balance the books.”
Inter and Bayern legend Lothar Matthäus agrees. “Mancini has never had confidence in Shaqiri and has never helped him to adapt,” he told Swiss newspaper Blick. “If you buy a player [like Shaqiri] then you have to play him! With his qualities, he should never be out of the starting lineup ... if I were Inter’s investor, I would be asking for an explanation from my coach. What is happening at Inter is shameful and it is why they risk not winning anything for a long time.”
Maybe Shaqiri’s failure at Inter wasn’t his fault.
good luck in England, @XS_11official. sorry for wasting six months of your career
— Inter Offside (@inter_offside) August 11, 2015 Back to something Matthäus said -- “Mancini has never had confidence in Shaqiri” -- what if his only glaring flaw is that he needs to be coddled and told he’s amazing? Ultimately, managers are willing to do this for someone like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, who are clearly their team’s best players, but not for a very good player who merely has the potential to be one of the top players in their squad. But for a club like Stoke, Shaqiri can be their Messi, so Hughes is perfectly willing to oblige.
“It is very important for me to have the coach behind me showing great belief in me, and Mark Hughes has done that,” said Shaqiri about his move to Stoke. “He’s a great guy, a great coach and somebody that I’m excited to work for. We have had many conversations, spoke about lots of different things and in the end, this was the move that I really wanted to make.”
So what if Shaqiri’s a bit immature and needy? If that’s the biggest problem with him, Hughes has already solved it, and he might become Stoke’s greatest player ever.
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