Hey guys!
I'm a Werder Bremen supporter and decided to register in your forums in order to leave my or "our" opinion about Eljero Elia here. First of all, maybe some general information about Werder, as most of you won't know that much about this club. Well, we've been quite successfull for several years with coach Thomas Schaaf, playing in the Champions League in every year from 2004 to 2010, with the exception of 2009, when we won the German Cup and got the UEFA Cup final. Since then, things went quite badly and after all our great players (Mertesacker, Pizarro, Özil etc.) had left, the players the money was reinvested in were not able to fill those gaps (Ekici, Arnautovic, Wesley etc.).
One of those players is Eljero Elia. When he joined us, we - like for every player - had great hopes which he failed to answer sadly. He had some bright moments, when you could clearly see what he is capable of. When he finally scored his first goal in September 2013 and even made it a brace, we thought he has finally become the messiah we expected him to be. But those moments were quite rare. He is a dribbler, but then again tries to nutmeg half of the opponents' team. This basically always ended in a loss of possession or a goal tick for the other side. Additionally, his finishing is horrible. While some players tend to think about how they shoot the ball, Elia just tries to get to the ball with his speed and then simply kick it and hope for the best. He has talent, but his understanding of the game seems not very convincing at all.
I don't really want to judge things related to his private life, but yeah, he does not seem like a philosopher. Instagram die-hard user, posting and deleting things and facebook every 5 minutes and stuff like that. For German tabloid BILD he was easy prey with his lifestyle, like for example when he bought a TV for 35,000 €. On Facebook, he recently answered like this to a fan who (obviously insolently) asked him to care about himself instead of his injured colleague.
We would have been happy to let him go for about 2 million € or even less, as he was not needed anymore and was (one of) the highest paid players in the team. When rumours came up about a permanent deal for something around 5 million €, we were going nuts as we could not believe that somebody might pay this much! Now, that it has become a loan deal, we are not so satisfied anymore because we simply can't see him doing well for the Saints. But we are certainly wishing him all the best! You know, we need that money and 5,5 million € are a huge sume for a club like ours. Premier League prices are ridiculous, so at least give us a piece of the cake! It would be ridiculous to get the money we spend on this player back!
All the best, Eljero! All the best, Saints! Feel free to leave your thoughts in the Worum!