Former Liverpool youngster Bobby Duncan has once again departed England after leaving Derby County.
Duncan, aged 21, played just one senior game for the Rams in almost two years at the club. Now, he has left the club and has signed for Spanish third division side Real Balompédica Linense.
Duncan, the cousin of Liverpool legend and Aston Villa manager Steven Gerrard, has signed a three-year contract with the Spanish outfit. His deal at Derby had been due to run for another season. It represents a second sojourn abroad for Duncan, after a year in Italy with Fiorentina. He joined Liverpool in 2018 after spells at Wigan and Manchester City's academies and he was tipped for a bright future.
A prolific spell for Liverpool's under-18s side saw him win a place in the senior squad for a pre-season tour in 2019. But then relations soured when his agent Saif Rubie posted an extraordinary rant on Twitter claiming his client was being held against his will after loan bids from abroad were rejected.
Rubie wrote: "Today is the final straw of the behaviour and dealing of Liverpool sporting director Michael Edwards.
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"For a player with zero first team experience, no clubs were prepared to pay an outright reasonable fee for a player they got for £200,000 last summer. With that in mind, we have been able to find clubs that were ready to take Bobby on a season-long loan, invest time and effort developing Bobby with an option to buy for amounts of £1.5million upwards, which is a great return for the club on a player who will never play for the Liverpool first team and who doesn't want to be there.
"The club and Michael Edwards specifically made it clear that that kind of deal wouldn't work. Putting all of that aside, Bobby has suffered some deep mental health issues with all the stress the club has put him under. Stress of being told he can leave but then going out of their way to force him to stay against his will. Bobby has not left his room for four days because of this and will never go back to Liverpool again and my only concern now is his mental health and well being."
Unsurprisingly he was shipped off by the Reds after that episode, joining Italian club Fiorentina. But less than a year later, after the move failed to work out, he returned to England to join Derby.
Remarkably, he has played just one senior game in English football - an FA Cup defeat whilst at Derby against Chorley, as part of an inexperienced team owing to Covid infections in the first team. Now after plenty of off-the-field talk without any tangible return on it, Duncan will be hoping another fresh start allows him to finally show what he can do.
The Spanish club confirmed his arrival, saying: "The new and talented attacker is a footballer with great projection, with good individual technical quality, offensive combination capacity and final pass, precision with his left foot and a goalscorer."
