Superstars footballers who played in unusual places - from a Liverpool legend to an Arsenal villain

We’re coming to the end of the strange post-transfer window ‘mopping up’ phase which sees clubs from countries outside the traditional European powerhouses taking advantage of their later deadline days to hoover up a few stray players who are unwanted by their clubs – and that’s leading to an increasing number of players making rather unusual moves. Take former Newcastle United and Norwich City full-back Jamal Lewis, who probably didn’t expect his career to take him to Brazilian powerhouse São Paulo.

Indeed, the international football map is opening up somewhat, especially with good money to be made in countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United States and India, and there is now a long list of potential pre-retirement gigs for big-name players that simply didn’t exist before – so as the borders of football expand and players add more and more exotic stamps to their passports, we wanted to celebrate some of the trailblazers who made unexpected moves to countries which aren’t usually seen as footballing powerhouses.

From Premier League staples finishing their careers in the frozen Atlantic north to Brazil legends pitching up in South East Asia, here are eight players who went where few of their colleagues would even contemplate venturing and played in unusual and unexpected countries.

David James – Iceland

Football wasn’t always particularly kind to James, who racked up 53 caps for England despite a slightly exaggerated reputation for moments of calamity at the top level – but that didn’t seem to prevent James from extending his career as long as possible, even once it became clear that playing in the Premier League was beyond him.

After playing down in the EFL for Bristol City and Bournemouth, England’s first Black goalkeeper expanded his horizons by signing a short-term contract with Icelandic outfit ÍBV, encouraged by their manager and James’ former Portsmouth team-mate Hermann Hreiðarsson. He made 23 appearances and drew some pretty impressive crowds to their stadium, if you can call it that – the 3,000 capacity venue has one traditional stand and opposite that some breathtaking rock spires exploding out of the island nation’s volcanic landscape. Already 43 when he signed, James announced his retirement at the end of the season, only to return for one last job with Kerala Blasters in India the following year.

James, incidentally, wasn’t the only England international to play in Iceland – former Manchester United midfielder Lee Sharpe had a very short stint with Grindavík at the end of his career as well, two whole years before he went on Celebrity Love Island. James never did that, but he did have a crack at Strictly Come Dancing. The less said about that the better...

Denílson – Vietnam

Considered something of a wasted talent after failing to live up to the enormous amount of hype he generated in his early years in Brazil, Denílson nevertheless went on to earn 63 caps for the Seleção and play nearly 200 games in La Liga for Real Betis, even if he didn’t quite prove to be the world-beating talent most pundits believed him to be.

With his career faltering at the age of just 28 after an undistinguished spell with Bordeaux, the winger decided to take his show on the road, playing for Al-Nassr in Saudi Arabia before it was trendy and spending time in the United States and back home in Brazil. But his most unusual stop came in 2009 when he turned up at Vietnamese side Hải Phòng, scored two minutes into his debut and promptly never played for them again – injury was blamed. That one game and one goal would prove to be his last in the professional game. He was only 31.

Rivaldo – Uzbekistan & Angola

Denílson was reportedly paid $17,000 (£12,900) for his one game in Vietnam, so you could hardly say he did it for the money – but his contemporary and undoubted Brazil legend Rivaldo probably had his bank balance on his mind when he left AEK Athens at the age of 36 and signed a two-year contract with Uzbek side Bunyodkor.

One of the greatest players in the world around the turn of the new millennium was reportedly paid a rollicking €10.2m (£8.6m) to play in the central Asian petrostate and played for the full two years there, he scored 42 goals in 76 games in the Uzbek League and became comfortably the most high-profile player ever to play in it. A brief return to Brazil followed before he made another unusual move, spending 2012 in Angola with Kabuscorp in the capital city of Luanda. 11 goals in 21 games at the age of 40 followed before he returned to his homeland once more and retired.

Robbie Fowler – Thailand

One of Liverpool’s greatest goalscorers and still the eighth highest scorer in Premier League history, Spice Boy Fowler had a storied career in the English top flight but was starting to struggle by the time he headed off to Australia at the age of 34 – spells at North Queensland Fury and Perth Glory produced a few goals, at least, but he was clearly quite a long way past his prime. That didn’t stop him giving the game one last go in Thailand.

In 2011, a 36-year-old Fowler joined Muangthong United on a deal worth a reported £500,000 and was greeted at Bangkok Airport by a crowd of fans and media. A reported ten thousand Fowler shirts were sold. It was a brief honeymoon period – despite being appointed player-manager before even scoring his first goal, he was criticised for an apparently indifferent attitude and sub-par performances which were below the club’s standards. He later told English media that he “loved it” in Thailand, much to the disbelief of the local fans given that he was frequently absent and scored just two goals in 13 league games as his side finished well off the pace of a league title they had expected to win. He was gone after one season and never played again.

Michael Essien – Indonesia & Azerbaijan

A Champions League and Premier League champions, Ghanaian midfielder Essien was one of the best in the world during his long and storied run at Chelsea, so it was a little surprising to see him leave Europe at the age of 34 in order to take up a contract offer from Indonesia.

Claiming that he wanted to blaze a trail for other footballers to follow, he spent a season at Persib Bandung – but it was not a road that many would go down, and he contract was rather bizarrely terminated a year later by the club because they had too many overseas players for what would have been his second season. Quite why Essien, miles better than anyone else on the books, was the player sacrificed remains unclear, and the player has always spoken positively about his time there. A short spell in another relative footballing backwater, Azerbaijan, followed, and Essien played 15 games for Sabail while acting as a youth coach before he finally hung up his surprisingly well-travelled boots.

Jlloyd Samuel – Iran

Iran is very much a footballing country, but for obvious cultural reasons it’s rare to see Western players playing in the Pro League – but former Bolton Wanderers and Aston Villa full-back Samuel did just that when he joined Esteghlal in 2011 after injuries had scuppered his career in the Premier League.

Unlike many players featured in this article, he stuck it out as well, even after he was greeted in Tehran with the sacrifice of a sheep, something which might have been a bit of a culture shock moment. The Trinidad & Tobago international ended up spending four seasons with Esteghlal and Paykan and won both the league and domestic cup before retiring from the professional game. Sadly, Samuel was killed in a car crash after drink-driving in Cheshire in 2018. He was 37 years old.

Pablo Aimar – Malaysia

You remember Aimar – Valencia legend, wizardly little attacking midfielder and one of many, many heirs apparent to Diego Maradona’s throne before Lionel Messi came along and put them all in the shade. What you may not know was that after a highly impressive career in Argentina, Spain and Portugal, he became the highest-paid player in Malaysian history.

The strongly-named Johor Darul Ta'zim were the team that took him on, handing him a lucrative two-year contract when he was 34 years old. They didn’t get great value for money, however – thanks to a string of injuries, he only managed eight appearances for his new side, scoring twice. He was released from his contract just nine months after signing it, but was given a league winners’ medal when his team became champions, something he didn’t have much of a hand in at all.

Emmanuel Adebayor – Paraguay

After he grew too old to continue antagonising Arsenal fans, the greatest Togolese player of all time spent a bit of time in Turkey but decided that he wasn’t quite done with the game when his contract at Kayserispor came to an end in 2019 – so he became a rare player to head off and play in Paraguay, signing a deal with Olimpia, the side that gave the world Roque Santa Cruz.

It was not an especially successful move. He only managed four matches and didn’t score once, with his number of games reduced partly because of the emergence of coronavirus and partly because of a straight red card he got for a flying kick to an opponent’s face in what proved to be his last game for the club. 36 at the time, he never played again.

Alex Song – Djibouti

The former Arsenal and Barcelona midfielder’s career nosedived curiously quickly around the age of 30, and he found himself going from West Ham United to Russia for an ill-starred stint with Rubin Kazan, for whom he played for a little over a year before a almighty falling out saw him leave the club, who promptly demanded that he pay €40m (£33.7m) for breach of contract.

With that bridge thoroughly burned, Song moved to FC Sion in Switzerand, only for him to be one of nine players sacked for refusing to take a paycut during the covid pandemic. Seven months later, Song found one last opportunity to extend his faltering career – in the poor and routinely overlooked East African nation of Djibouti with Arta/Solar7. He gave it a good go, too, becoming club captain winning two league titles in three seasons with them and briefly playing alongside former Chelsea forward Salomon Kalou before eventually retiring in 2023.