Roque Santa Cruz: one great season, then the loan circuit

The season

Santa Cruz arrived in England in 2007 after eight years at Bayern Munich, where injuries and the presence of Giovane Élber, Roy Makaay and Claudio Pizarro had kept him on the fringes despite a European Cup winner's medal. At Blackburn Rovers he finally got a run as a first-choice striker, and in the 2007-08 Premier League season he scored 19 league goals. He was named Premier League Player of the Month for December 2007 and, at the end of the campaign, Blackburn's Player of the Season. It was, by a distance, the best individual season of his career in English football and the form that persuaded a Premier League rival with new Abu Dhabi money to come looking for him.

What came next

Manchester City, newly taken over by the Abu Dhabi United Group, made Blackburn a series of offers that were rejected - £12 million, then £16 million, then a reported £25 million asking price that City wouldn't meet in February 2009. The deal eventually went through that June anyway, for £17.5 million on a four-year contract. It did not work out as either side hoped.

Santa Cruz never established himself at City. Between September 2010 and January 2011 he made just one league appearance for the club. Rather than fight for a place, he turned down a loan offer from Lazio because he wanted a permanent exit, then went back out on loan anyway - first to Blackburn in January 2011, where he managed nine appearances as the club finished 15th, then to Real Betis in Spain, where he scored seven goals in 33 La Liga games and asked to stay on permanently, and then to Málaga for the 2012-13 season, where he was reunited with his old Bayern teammate Martín Demichelis and made a scattering of appearances including a return to Champions League football off the bench against Zenit St Petersburg.

Through all of this he was repeatedly described in transfer reports as surplus to requirements at City, and interest arrived and evaporated from Queens Park Rangers, Newell's Old Boys and Werder Bremen without a permanent move materialising. The City contract simply ran down while he played his football elsewhere on loan.

Paraguay, and the long tail

Internationally, Santa Cruz remained central to Paraguay well past his peak club years, captaining the side to a fourth-place finish at the 2015 Copa América and becoming the national team's all-time leading scorer in 2013. He eventually returned home, playing for Libertad and later Nacional, and became the first Paraguayan footballer to make over 1,050 competitive appearances in a career that has now produced goals in four different decades.

The Blackburn season stands as the one obvious outlier: a single year of genuine Premier League form, flanked on one side by years of injury and squad competition at Bayern, and on the other by a big-money move to Manchester City that never found the same rhythm again, dissolving instead into a sequence of loans back to the clubs and leagues where he'd once looked, briefly, undroppable.