Why do so many Spaniards fail to adapt to the Premier League?

Let’s not beat around the bush here. The three main things that attract Spanish footballers to the Premier League are, namely, and in no particular order, money, money and money. Well, and the possibility of playing in one of the top leagues in the world. Perhaps too the dream of being involved with some of the top clubs in the world.

But generally… Ignore the hype, the badge kissing, the talks of joining clubs with great histories, long traditions; discard the rhetoric of wanting to prove yourself in a different culture, semantics about testing yourself in an alternative footballing style.

Most players and agents leave for the UK with £ signs in front of their eyes and little thought as to whether or not it is a good move from a footballing point of view.

They are not bothered because they know that if they return – and the majority do – they will almost always go back on a higher salary than when they originally left. Many do not adapt because many do not want to and know (or suspect) that bigger clubs that the ones they left in Spain will come for them as the Premier League experience adds to their CV. In reality, only those who approach with the right attitude do, and there are examples of it – Cesc, Arteta, de Gea, Adrian, Monreal, Azpilicueta, Obiang and more.

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Former Spurs defender, the Frenchman, Benoît Assou-Ekotto, was never everyone’s cup of tea but there was always a refreshing honesty about him, and as far back as 2010 in a revealing interview with the Guardian’s, David Hytner, he summed up what everyone knew but no one actually dared say.

“If I play football with my friends back in France, I can love football,” he says. “But if I come to England, where I knew nobody and I didn’t speak English… why did I come here? For a job. A career is only 10, 15 years. It’s only a job. Yes, it’s a good, good job and I don’t say that I hate football but it’s not my passion.

“I don’t understand why everybody lies. The president of my former club Lens, Gervais Martel, said I left because I got more money in England, that I didn’t care about the shirt. I said: ‘Is there one player in the world who signs for a club and says, Oh, I love your shirt?’ Your shirt is red. I love it. He doesn’t care. The first thing that you speak about is the money.”

“Martel said I go to England for the money but why do players come to his club? Because they look nice? All people, everyone, when they go to a job, it’s for the money. So I don’t understand why, when I said I play for the money, people were shocked. Oh, he’s a mercenary. Every player is like that.”

For every Juan Mata, Xabi Alonso and Santi Cazorla there are many Spanish players whose temporary sojourns into world of Premier League football have merely been a stopover along the way before they return from whence they came.

In this last window Sandro and Roque Mesa have both returned to Spain on loan to Sevilla following a hugely underwhelming, limited time spent in the UK. They are in good company.

They will team up there with Jesus Navas or Nolito who had earlier returned to his both physical and spiritual home. The Spanish – as they so often do – have a phrase for it. “La tierra nos tira”, they say, “Our roots pull us back.” Never was it more appropriate than in the cases of Navas.

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Except perhaps for Iago Aspas a man who scored for fun for Celta Vigo both before and after an abjectly miserable spell at Liverpool where he played just 15 games and scored just one cup goal before being loaned to Sevilla for a season. Now back at his beloved Celta, a club that were he not playing for them, he would be supporting from the terraces, he is unrecognisable as the sullen flop that he will always be perceived as at Liverpool.

Footballers uproot and set off to explore new cultures with the best of intentions and the greatest of financial incentives. That it should go awry on so many occasions tells us what we need to know not just about the players themselves but also the environments they frequently find themselves floundering in.

It is a complicated, multi-layered scenario; no one is totally guilty yet everyone is to blame.

It you wanted the perfect definition of a square peg trying to fit into a round hole then the story of Jose Antonio Reyes when he joined Arsenal from Sevilla could have been written as a masterclass on how not to try to build a new life for yourself in a foreign country.

Reyes didn’t struggle to learn English for the simple reason that he made a decision not to bother to even try. He moved into a home with his parents and, 24/7, kept the property at a constant 30 degrees so it would remind him of his native Sevilla. In the early stages of his stay in England if he needed bread and milk, instead of someone nipping down to the supermarket, the problem was resolved by ringing David Dein and asking him if he could organise it for him.

Reyes was obviously an extreme example, although to a greater or lesser extent this unwillingness, or inability, or both, to attempt to integrate has been at the root of all friction between club and foreign players, not just Spanish.

The search for that scarcity that is footballing genius will require a great deal of tolerance and guarantee the enduring of moments of acute suffering by clubs eager to pander to the every whim of their new trump card, the goose that will lay the golden eggs.

Unfortunately when said ‘goose’ becomes to be seen as more of a ‘turkey’, more Joker than Ace, unwilling to adapt to his new surroundings, not prepared to integrate, then coaches, directors, fans, media etc will swiftly isolate them. The Premier League lacks many things not least sentiment and frequently compassion. What it does not lack is money and if something, someone doesn’t work, doesn’t come up to expectations you ditch it and get another one.

It might of course be preferable in the long term to ask why it hadn’t worked, what went wrong? Was it the language barrier, the weather, the different food, the inability of the player’s partner, wife, children, parents, siblings to fit into a different culture, to adjust to another environment?

Was it caused by misconceptions about character traits, petty jealousies (inevitably about money or status) or misplaced negative banter, frequently misunderstood or just plain lost in translation?

As a club you should want to know these things because what you most certainly do know is that living in that testosterone-fuelled pressure cooker that is a Premier League football club, life is difficult enough when everyone sings from the same song sheet and in the same language. It isn’t difficult to imagine the explosive potential of, perhaps, seven different nationalities, four languages and six different cultures attempting to co-exist, never mind thrive and prosper.

But the good ones do succeed and, interestingly, those that survive the best are invariably those that, literally, speak the language of the country where they are practising their art.

The likes of those mention already plus Pepe Reina or Fernando Torres, all enjoyed, and in some cases, are still enjoying, successful careers in the Premier League because they adapted, fitted in; and perhaps most interestingly all of them speak very good English indeed.

For those that arrive with the notion of returning as soon as possible find everything a chore. The cold, the training, the refs, the slurs, the snubs – real or imaginary. Most of the players arrive with the necessary prerequisites to adapt to Premier League except for one – the mindset. Without the language, the preparation, they hide away until such time as they return home.

And in the end no one cares, no one asks why?