Jurgen Locadia: An update from MLS on the Brighton striker
The 2020-21 MLS season came to an end last weekend – which makes this a good time to check in on how Brighton & Hove Albion striker Jurgen Locadia has done on-loan at FC Cincinnati.
Locadia. You remember him. He was the Dutch centre forward the Albion paid £14 million for in January 2018 and who gave an interview three months later saying he couldn’t head a ball.
Eight months after that he said he wanted to move to Germany or Spain for first team football. 10 months on and Graham Potter granted Locadia that wish, only for Hoffenheim to decide he wasn’t any good and subsequently cut short his season long loan in Germany after just four months.
The premature termination of Locadia’s Bundesliga spell is what sent him to Cincinnati in January 2020. Whilst nobody was expecting great things from him in the United States, we were expecting at least something. Anything. If Bradley Wright-Phillips can look like a world beater in MLS, then any half decent striker should be able to make an impression.
Locadia has made an impression all right, but not for the right reasons. His two headline-making moments came from two absolutely astonishing misses, which in their own strange way have actually made us over here at WAB Towers grow to like Locadia.
Miss of the year by Jürgen Locadia.
Unbelievable miss on an absolute sitter. And this is a player on loan from a Premier League club, who paid £15 million to sign him just a couple years ago.#PORvCIN #MLS #MLSisBack pic.twitter.com/fspOKOr72n
— Joga Bonito (@Jasoninho10) July 29, 2020
He has now veered from being a player who we were genuinely angry that the Albion had broken their transfer record to sign into Colin Hawkins levels of ineptness – and any player who provides a comedy service on a par with that of The Hawk is a friend of ours.
To think, Locadia got off to the perfect start in MLS too. He scored on his debut as Cincinatti lost 3-2 away at New York Red Bulls. Covid-19 soon brought the season to a halt but when it resumed with the wonderfully named MLS Is Back Tournament held at at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney World Resort, Florida, he was on target again in the second round against eventual champions Portland Timbers.
Things were looking up for Locadia. Unfortunately, that was as good as it got and his form was Donald Ducked once Cincinnati were sent home from Disney after losing on penalties against the Timbers. Locadia missed the third Orange and Blue spot kick as his new team were eliminated 4-2 from 12 yards.
Locadia failed to score in 14 appearances once the regular MLS season resumed in August. Given that his arrival in Cincinnati had been greeted with euphoria (people turned up at the airport to bang pots and pans together as he went up an escalator and everything), two goals all year was not the return that club or supporters would have been expecting.
When things were not working out for Jurgen Locadia at Brighton prior to his move to MLS, his response was to tell newspapers he wanted to leave and spend his spare time releasing rubbish music rather than knuckling down on the training ground.
He does at least appear to have taken some responsibility for his lack of goals for Cincinnati. Writing on Instagram, Locadia said: “I want to say that I’m disappointed in myself.”
“Disappointed in this season. I think FC, the fans and more important the people working for FC deserved more from us players this season.”
“And I know during a professional career you got highs and lows. And in a lot of game we were unlucky as well. But I know we can do better. Next season must be better and we will.”
Ah yes, next season. One of the few good things to come out of the Covid-19 pandemic is that Cincinnati negotiated an extension to Locadia’s stay in MLS beyond June 2020 to ensure that they got more than just two games out of the striker.
This extended deal keeps Locadia in the US until June 2021. There is also a clause which means that a permanent transfer is automatically triggered once Locadia has made a certain number of appearances for Cincinatti.
The permanent transfer fee in the original loan deal was set at $10 million (around £7.5 million at the current exchange rate). Cincinnati general manager Gerard Nijkamp confirmed that the extended loan lowered that figure.
At a guess, we would say the Albion can expect to receive no more than £5 million from the Orange and Blue, representing a massive loss on the then-club record amount paid to PSV Eindhoven for his services nearly three years ago.
And there are no guarantees that Cincinnati will end up triggering the clause either. As a fledgling franchise, they have never spent more than £1.3 million on a single player. To pay triple their previous transfer record for a striker who has scored one MLS goal in 16 appearances would be mad.
If Cincinnati do not play Jurgen Locadia in the opening months of the 2021 MLS campaign to avoid having to keep him, then he could find himself returning to Brighton ahead of the 2021-22 season, where he would still have another year left on his contract.
You might have forgotten about Locadia. Or you might have thought you would never see Locadia in a Brighton shirt again. Unless he starts banging them in for Cincinnati next season, then there is every chance he will be sent back to the Amex in the summer of 2021.
We cannot wait. Watch this space.
