Nomads! The 5 soccer players with the most team changes

Leaving a soccer club is a delicate and difficult decision for a player to make. This implies moving to a new city or country, dealing with different cultures and even other languages, getting to know a place again, its addresses, norms, and even customs. For this reason, athletes, in general, prefer the stability of staying in a team and in some cases deciding on nearby clubs, but this is not the mentality of these five players, who are not afraid of change to the point of going through more than 20 different teams.

Julio de Leon

Something that defines most of these "nomadic" soccer players is that they continue to play at a professional level at an older age than usual and De León does not escape this classification. 41-year-old Honduran, Julio Cesar is an attacking midfielder with a long career in Italian and domestic soccer. In 1996 he made his debut with the club that formed him, the Club Deportivo Platense, his numbers were good so he emigrated to Mexico with Atlético Celaya of the first division. However, the big step was taken in 2000 when he went to Serie B in Italy with Reggina, a team with which he would ascend to Serie A, from there he would go through several Italian clubs such as Genoa, Fiorentina, Parma among others.

In 2020, he declared in a Facebook Live that this would be his last year as he plans to dedicate himself to technical direction, he also added that he will seek to climb levels because "I am like turtles, slow but I reach the goal." However, De León continues as a CD Broncos player, although the current club only has four players on the roster. Julio de León went through 21 clubs distributed in Honduras, Uruguay, Mexico, Italy, El Salvador, Guatemala, China, and the United States.

Steve Claridge

This former English soccer player met a total of 22 clubs as a player. However, never leaving his native country since he began his career in 1986 with Bournemouth as a center forward, Claridge went through teams such as Leicester where he was champion of the English first division in 1996 and the League Cup in 1997. Also, he played in other small teams such as Brighton, Birmingham among others, according to the BBC, a newspaper for which he is now a sports correspondent and commentator.

Lutz Pfannenstiel

This time it is a goalkeeper, Lutz is a former German soccer player who currently serves as Sporting Director for St. Louis City in the United States. His debut in professional football took place in 1991 with FC Vilshofen, in 1993 he was not going through a good run but in the same way, Bayern Munich made him a good offer. However, the goalkeeper rejected it to go to a club in Malaysia, in 2014 he told the BBC that he made this decision because his idea was to start, while at Bayern he would have been on the bench.

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Lutz went through 24 different teams in countries including Germany, Malaysia, England, South Africa, Singapore, Armenia, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Canada, the United States, Albania, Brazil, and Namibia, where he would retire in 2011.

John Burridge

Another goalkeeper on the list, Burridge is a former English soccer player and lover of this sport, to the point that he did not mind changing teams in order to play, this mentality made him a goalkeeper for 29 different clubs since his inception in 1971 with the Workington of England, Burridge would comprise in its majority of English equipment. Burridge spent with some well-known teams such as Aston Villa, Newcastle Utd, Southampton among others, little by little he was lowering the category to be able to keep playing.

Sebastian Abreu

The well-known Uruguayan soccer player is known as “El loco” Abreu, currently 44 years old but still continues in his career as a center forward at Athletic Club de Brasil after signing in February 2021. This means that Abreu reaches his 30th soccer team but this is not the end, since according to Fútbol UY the Uruguayan has a verbal contract with Atlética Sud América of his country to arrive this same 2021. The "madness" This forward is such that in 2019 he was in charge of Boston River as a player but also as Technical Director, according to El Tiempo. Abreu has passed through 11 different countries to play in the 30 teams where he was, including recognized ones such as San Lorenzo, Deportivo la Coruña, América, River Plate among others.