Luis Alberto: One of Liverpool’s strangest signings

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Signed from Sevilla three years ago, Liverpool barely saw the Spaniard play even in his first season and not at all in the following two.

The summer of 2013 was a pretty unspectacular transfer window for Liverpool as Kolo Toure, Simon Mignolet, Iago Aspas, Aly Cissokho, Mamadou Sakho, Tiago Ilori, Victor Moses and Luis Alberto would all join the club.

Only Toure, Mignolet and Sakho would be regulars for the season ahead, although Cissokho got some game time during his loan spell form Valencia but was not really well fancied.

But there were one or two signings in there that were pretty strange, with Luis Alberto the strangest of all.

A £6.8 million signing from Sevilla, he only made at total of 12 appearances that season before two loan spells back in Spain.

Unlike the other players, there was nothing to define him. No horrendous corner in a defining game like with Aspas, technical mishaps that Cissokho had or indeed the stinker of a performance that curtailed any chance Victor Moses had of having a prolonged run in the side beyond December of that year.

Now the Liverpool Echo are reporting that he could be in line for a move to the Championship with three clubs interested after a return to Sevilla fell through.

One of the noticeable things about Alberto was the almost casual but not very quick way he would move across the pitch. He did have one assist to his name as he came off the bench to set up Luis Suarez’s second goal in a 5-0 win over Tottenham Hotspur in December of that season.

But he was always seen as a bit too slow, possibly lightweight – as if the mind was made up behind the scenes that he was not going to be cut out for the English game – and put down as a one of the infamous transfer committee signings from the Brendan Rodgers era.

Some will wonder why he did not get more of a chance, but overall it was a baffling signing. You have to brand him as a flop because he did not work out, but no one really knows if he had the talent, going from nearly joining the Europa League winners to only attracting interest from the Championship does not really make that picture clearer. Either way, it seems one of the strangest signings Liverpool have made in recent years.