David Trezeguet's forgotten spell in the UAE

A striker between homes

By the summer of 2011, Trezeguet had left Juventus and spent a season at Hércules in Spain, where relegation and his own goal tally couldn't save the club. He was 33, still looking for regular football, when he agreed a one-year deal with Baniyas, a club in the UAE Pro-League, on 30 August 2011.

It was a modest move for a player who had scored the winning goal in a European Championship final and finished as Serie A's top scorer, but it fit a pattern common to strikers in the twilight of their careers: a league outside Europe's traditional powers, offering a fresh dressing room and, presumably, a fresh start.

A spell that barely began

That fresh start never really arrived. Trezeguet's time at Baniyas amounted to almost nothing in football terms. He appeared in the club's opening league match of the season and featured once in the Etisalat Emirates Cup. That was the entirety of his competitive output in Abu Dhabi colours.

An injury, picked up early on, kept him out for most of the campaign that followed. There was no recovery spell, no late burst of appearances once he'd shaken off whatever had kept him sidelined. Instead, on 21 November 2011, less than three months after he'd signed, his contract was mutually terminated.

It is as close to a non-event as a transfer involving a World Cup winner can be. No goals are recorded from his time there, and the two fixtures he did play amount to barely more than a pre-season's worth of action stretched across a season that was supposed to be his.

Why it's forgotten

Part of the reason the Baniyas spell has vanished from most retellings of Trezeguet's career is simple: there is so little to retell. A striker who scored 138 goals in Serie A, missed a penalty in a Champions League final shootout and another in a World Cup final shootout, offers plenty of dramatic material elsewhere. Three months in the UAE Pro-League, ended early by injury before he'd had the chance to make any real impression, doesn't compete for space in that story.

Within a month of the termination, Trezeguet had already found his next move, a return to Argentina and a childhood dream, signing for River Plate just after the club's historic relegation. That switch, and the goals that helped fire River back to the top flight, dominate the next chapter of his career. The Baniyas interlude, by contrast, sits quietly between two more memorable moves, a spell defined less by what happened on the pitch than by how little did.