Five Premier League flops Ruben Amorim salvaged at Sporting includes Liverpool outcast

Ruben Amorim built his Sporting revolution on the back of players who flopped in the Premier League – and frequently embarrassed Wolves in the process.

Amorim takes charge of his 231st and final Sporting game on Sunday, a matter of hours after Manchester United face Leicester. These English top-flight washouts have underpinned his success in Portugal.

Viktor Gyokeres
The form of Europe’s top goalscorer and one of the best assist providers this calendar year is an incredible and timely reminder that even when Brighton get recruitment wrong, the odds are they have still fundamentally nailed it somewhere along the line.

In January 2018, midway through their first Premier League season and under the stewardship of Chris Hughton, Brighton obviously used their new-found status and market influence to raid the Swedish second tier. From champions IF Brommapojkarna they plucked Gyokeres, who had finished third in the Golden Boot stakes to Richard Yarsuvat and Salif Camara Jonsson.

A revisionist view would suggest Gyokeres should have been thrown straight into a relegation battle but that is fanciful: a teenaged forward with no prior top-flight experience in any country was not made for a battle over minutes with Glenn Murray.

The focus will inevitably fall on what Brighton could have done differently but really there can be no blame. Hughton was never going to prioritise his development over Premier League security, Graham Potter made what was at the time an entirely understandable call to favour the potential of Aaron Connolly instead, and none of the three loans Gyokeres was sent on – all at second-tier clubs – signalled this current talent explosion was imminent.

Even an initial spell with Coventry was underwhelming, but it did eventually unlock a burgeoning career once the move was made permanent for £1m. Sporting came along with about 20 times that a couple of years later and neither side can have any regrets.

Brighton might but even then he scored one goal in eight appearances, was deployed as often on the left as in the centre and never featured outside the domestic cups. A player’s progress is never linear and Gyokeres needed to take a step down to move forward.

It was after one of those games that Potter said “he is one of those we will keep assessing where he is at and make the right decision for him in terms of his development”. Brighton certainly stuck to their word; they just aren’t the ones benefiting from it.

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Pedro Goncalves
A quick heads up: this list will not reflect kindly on Wolves.

They nearly signed Gyokeres in summer 2023 but negotiations stalled because chairman Jeff Shi was on holiday and could not release the requisite funds.

The sale of Goncalves was similarly damning. A pick-up from the Valencia academy where he and Nuno Espirito Santo first met, it seemed as though Wolves had expanded their collection of gifted Portuguese technicians. But he made a solitary senior appearance in two years before leaving.

There were suggestions that Goncalves had grown homesick in England – and a move to Familicao in his native Portugal hardly refuted them – but a lack of opportunities cannot have helped. Even that one game for Wolves was a substitute cameo in a League Cup second-round game against Sheffield Wednesday, replacing Elliott Watt.

Nuno could find no room for Goncalves in what was then a different Molineux landscape. Former technical director Scott Sellars explained that Wolves still managed to “protect” themselves by inserting a sell-on clause which was activated when Sporting signed him within a year of his Primeira Liga debut, so “if they’re not quite good enough for Wolves or what Nuno wants, that’s not a negative”.

Goncalves is in a different stratosphere to Wolves now – and could have been supplying the Swede’s bullets in the Midlands rather than Lisbon.

Trincao
The rise of Trincao does far less to shame Wolves. In 30 appearances on loan during the 2021/22 season the forward only scored three goals and provided one assist. It would have been ludicrous to trigger a buy option on the basis of those numbers and so he was returned with well wishes for the future to Barcelona.

Sporting were the ultimate beneficiaries again but Trincao even started slowly there before finding his feet and place in the team. He ranks ninth for appearances made during Amorim’s entire managerial career, and fifth for both assists and goals scored.

In Premier League terms, Trincao’s stay was fleeting and forgettable, save for his bullying of Harry Maguire and Luke Shaw.

Marcus Edwards
Mauricio Pochettino later admitted his mistake. A day after comparing Edwards’ style to that of Lionel Messi he gave the Spurs academy product his professional debut in a League Cup win over Gillingham as a substitute for Vincent Janssen. Those are some mightily mixed messages.

Perhaps that pressure contributed to the level of untapped potential Edwards accrued in north London. Some have put his struggles to break into the first team down to issues with attitude; the player himself later said he had “grown up in a lot of ways” from those teenaged years and that “it clicked straight away” in Portugal.

The only league appearance Edwards has made in England remains the six Championship minutes Norwich afforded him on a doomed loan in 2017/18.

A spell with Excelsior ignited an appetite for first-team minutes which took the playmaker to Vitoria de Guimaraes and then Sporting, for whom he has played more than 100 games since.

In a slightly more reserved take than previous, Pochettino later said: ‘Our challenge is to get him to accept the pathway we’ve laid out for him.’ Edwards has not suffered for taking a more circuitous route.

Sebastian Coates
With 44 points from his 38 Premier League appearances, Coates has a personal career record to match his Stoke-based surname. The Uruguayan certainly never established himself at Liverpool and struggled further down the food chain with Sunderland, albeit leaving in the summer of their eventual relegation.

A two-year loan with Sporting developed into a move which spanned nine seasons, eight trophies and a Primeira Liga Player of the Year award; no one player has been more integral to Amorim’s rise than the centre-half he inherited and kept close for all but his final few months in the Sporting dugout.

Not bad for someone who couldn’t get a look in at Dalglish-era Liverpool and was deemed surplus to the requirements of Sam Allardyce’s Sunderland. There is hope yet for Maguire.

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