Football is made up of sliding doors moments. Such as, for instance, Jesse Lingard’s decision to leave West Ham after that stellar loan spell in an attempt to kick-start his career at Premier League powerhouses Manchester United instead.
Four years on, Jesse Lingard’s career has taken on a very different shape. A career in, well, Korea.
Representing FC Seoul at the age of 32, the former England international is destined to spend his prime years away from the spotlight of the European stage.
What might have been, had Ole Gunnar Solskjaer not fought to bring Lingard back to Manchester United only to reward his stellar progress at the London Stadium with a familiar spot back on the Old Trafford bench.
As then-West Ham United boss David Moyes would explain, Solskjaer initially had big plans for Lingard. Only a few months later, the Man United legend got the boot, Ralf Rangnick took his place, and Lingard would eventually join Nottingham Forest as a free-agent having made only two Premier League starts in a miserable final year at his beloved Red Devils.
The dazzling form which made him such a hit in claret and blue – nine goals and four assists in 16 league appearances – would never again rear its head.
Marcus Rashford sent Jesse Lingard post-West Ham United warning
Darren Bent, the former England striker, cannot help but see similarities between Lingard’s post-West Ham malaise and the situation Marcus Rashford currently finds himself in at Manchester United.
While the extent of his Aston Villa revival has clearly been overblown – there have been flashes of brilliance but only flashes – Bent feels that Rashford could do a lot worse than to look at the career trajectory of his old friend when making up his mind this summer.
“I am not sure going back to Manchester United is the right thing for [Rashford],” Bent, scorer of 106 Premier League goals for the likes of Aston Villa, Sunderland and Tottenham Hotspur, argues on talkSPORT [16 May, 5pm].
“I know it’s a different scenario but I remember Jesse Lingard going down to West Ham, and he was absolutely different level. Remember how good he was? That goal against Wolves.”
Darren Bent suggests Lingard needed to stay with West Ham
Lingard earned West Ham’s ‘Best Individual Performance’ award after his thrilling dismantling of Wolverhampton Wanderers in January 2021. A display capped by a slaloming solo goal which would not look out of place in a Lionel Messi-themed compilation.
“He made the decision not to go back to West Ham,” Bent adds. “He went back to Man United [instead] and he just faded away again. Then he went to Forest and Forest didn’t work out.”
That is one hell of an understatement. Lingard averaged better than a goal every other game in a West Ham shirt. Many of them pretty spectacular too.
In a Nottingham Forest shirt, however, he would not even get off the mark in the Premier League, eventually spending nearly a year out of the game before FC Seoul offered him the opportunity to fall back in love with a sport which appeared to have turned it’s back on Jesse Lingard.
A word of warning, then, for Marcus Rashford; A £40 million purchase clause in his Aston Villa contract.
No matter how successfully a brief loan spell may go, football is fickle enough to render it all pretty meaningless in the blinking of an eye.
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