Do Not Sell My Personal Information
One of my favourite football lists of all-time, is the one where I recall ridiculous and random footballers that Arsène Wenger signed. Le Professuer must have seen some potential in them but, for various reasons, they didn’t amount to anything during their time in north London.
The list includes the likes of Rami Shaaban, Stefan Malz, Tomas Danilevicius, Guillaume Warmuz, Kaba Diawara and, the man I want to talk to you about today, Alberto Mendez.
Mendez was signed by Le Professeur in 1997 after he impressed the gaffer in the one game he saw him play against ESC Rangierbahnhof Nurnberg. Nothing strange about that – well, apart from the name of the opposition. However, this is where things get a bit weird.
At the time Mendez was 22-years-old, a business administration student and playing in the FIFTH tier of German football for SC Feucht. Weird, right? Well it doesn’t end there because Mendez admitted he was surprised to get the call from Arsenal the day after the one game Wenger saw:
“We’d long been guaranteed promotion, so we hadn’t trained for a month…Instead we had already plenty of unofficial promotion parties…The next morning our coach rang to say Arsène wanted to sign me and I told him that he, too, must still be under the influence. When I went to London for talks I told Arsène three times: You’ve watched me just the once, I played badly and you still want to sign me? I just don’t understand it.”
Alberto joined for £250,000 – hardly a transfer to break the bank when you consider that Marc Overmars was joining the same summer for £7 million – and scored on his debut in the 4-1 win over Birmingham City in the League Cup.
The German made a few appearances in the Double-winning season and even scored in a Champions League game versus Panathinaikos – Arsenal had already been knocked out and Arsène fielded a weakened team.
It was quite clear that Mendez was never going to make it at Arsenal and he was loaned out to AEK Athens, then SpVgg Unterhaching in the Bundesliga and finally to Spanish side Racing Ferrol before being released.
After departing north London, Mendez joined the Spanish side he had spent his final season at Arsenal on loan to. Despite making 29 starts for the side in the second tier of Spanish football, they were relegated and Mendez moved to another Segunda side, Terrassa.
Yet again, Mendez suffered relegated from the Segunda, this time with Terrassa and this was regular occurrence for the midfielder.
Mendez eventually returned to the fourth-tier of German football with the very club Arsène Wenger had first signed him from, SC Feucht. From here on in, the midfielder basically stayed in this league but was regularly switching teams due to the instability of the clubs.
Mendez eventually retired from the game at the age of 36 due to injury but this journeyman lived out every average footballers dream and, for that, he can be happy.
