Falcao’s challenge of adapting to life at Utd

Such is the predictable correlation between the amount of money a football player costs or earns and public expectation levels, it’s safe to assume Radamel Falcao — whose well publicised salary is around £265 000 per week — is not going to get much leeway when he first appears in a Manchester United shirt.
It seems to be a simple equation: incomprehensibly high wages, or a snappily quotable transfer fee, are supposed to come with the guarantee of instant quality.

But should they really?
The human element seldom scratches the surface of the public conscience when analysing the impact of a new player.
During the international break Falcao was parachuted into Manchester, not a part of the world he knows well, for a matter of hours as his sensational loan deal from Monaco was secured.

While the international language of football might be clear when he gets out onto the training pitches at Carrington, attempting to integrate into a new culture and not having a clue about how to get around unaided throws up all sorts of challenges — even more so when a player has the happiness and security of a young family to consider.

Falcao is married to an Argentine singer — Lorelei Taron — and they have a baby daughter who was born in Monaco. She recently celebrated her first birthday. An enormous salary is obviously a help when learning to live in a new country, but has limited worth if your family is homesick and feeling isolated by a language barrier.

Hotel living, sometimes for months until you get settled, can drive everyone up the walls. The key for United is to help Falcao and his family feel at home as quickly as possible.

This is the sixth different country he has played in — but the first that is not Latin or Mediterranean.
In theory, the business of settling in should be exponentially easier for Falcao than was the case when English football began casting the net for talent with global abandon.

“It’s great that world-class players like Radamel Falcao are coming to the Premier League.
“We lost Luis Suarez, we lost Gareth Bale and you just thought that maybe the pull of La Liga or the Bundesliga was greater than the Premier League.

“But I think we’ve proven now that this probably still is the greatest league in the world and it’s great that the best players are coming to England,” said former Manchester United star, Phill Neville.

On the opening day of the maiden Premier League season in 1992-93, the number of players from overseas who started for all the clubs combined was 11. Falcao’s recent arrival took the number of different nationalities at Old Trafford alone to 11.

Last week, at QPR’s training ground as he was gearing up for the final few days of the transfer window, Harry Redknapp was extolling the virtues of his new Chilean signings, Eduardo Vargas and Mauricio Isla.

He was amazed to secure two internationals who excelled at the World Cup on loan from Napoli and Juventus respectively.
His expression changed when someone reminded him of a previous venture with players from that part of the world.

Not that Javier Margas, a Chilean defender who joined Redknapp’s West Ham in 1998, was a worse prospect.
But the experience felt like it came from a different universe. The player was more or less left to his own devices. It was disastrous.

“We put him in a house out in the middle of Essex, gave him a car, but he didn’t speak a word of English,” recalls Redknapp.
“On the first day he got in the car and we expect him to find the training ground, but he ended up at Stansted Airport.

“Then, coming up a country lane, he gets a puncture.
“His wife’s family own two or three of the biggest hotels in Santiago, she had three or four sisters and they were the closest family you have ever seen.

“She’s in the house all day, doesn’t speak English, can’t watch television. That’s how it was those days.
“There was no-one looking after them. Poor old Margas, that was how it was, and his wife was crying all day. I think I’d have run home.”
In actual fact Margas did bolt — he went missing for several weeks and was eventually tracked down back in Chile.

He returned to London, and stayed with West Ham for three seasons but never really transferred from the periphery to the heart of it all. — BBC.