Manchester United flop Bebe wants to join Portuguese giants Sporting Lisbon. The 22-year old has made a total of 7 appearances for the club since joining from Vitoria Guimaraes for £7.4 million and his future at Old Trafford looks bleak.

Bebe spent the second half of last season at Rio Ave in Portugal’s top-flight where he played 17 games and clearly wants to stay in his homeland for good:

 “I would love to play for Sporting,” he told Correio da Manha.

 “The club would suit me and it is an ambition of mine to play for Sporting.”

Whether or not Sporting would want Bebe or whether the player in his heart really wants to go there is anyone’s guess. But a return to Portugal at any club in all honesty is exactly what the young forward needs and something an online betting man would put good money on occuring.

Realistically with his limited-experience he was never going to really make it at United. That’s not to say that the club didn’t help him.

As recently as April Bebe said in an interview with maisfutebol.iol.pt:

“I never took Manchester United seriously and never understood a word about what Alex Ferguson was saying.

‘I thought,”I’m here, I’m doing well and I don’t have to try hard every day. It was my fault. I was messing around too much.”

That there says it all. How can a player not take a move to Manchester United seriously? That proves that sometimes there’s only so much a club can help a player, especially when that player is not really ready to be at that club.

Some fans may read between the lines and think that by ‘messing round’ Bebe perhaps was a trouble-maker. Of course he wasn’t. He was a kid plucked from obscurity and right into the limelight. It was just too soon for him in his football-career and naively perhaps he thought that he had made the ‘big-time’ and that within a couple of years he would become a star.

At least he knows now where he has gone wrong and if he does ever go to a club who can challenge for trophies that he can use this time in his career to make sure that he doesn’t make the same mistakes again.

In another time and place could Bebe have by now developed into a fine young player? Possibly but the odds were against him from the start. Ideally he probably needed to spend a season or two at Guimaraes before moving. That would have been a challenging-enough period for him in terms of stepping a division but if he was good enough, his talents would have been nurtured and he would have been in a far better position afterwards to deal with a switch to Europe.

Were United wrong to spend the best part of £7million? Yes they were, but they weren’t wrong to buy a player who they believed they could in-time develop into an outstanding talent. After all Sir Alex Ferguson claimed that both Real Madrid and Benfica were looking at Bebe so who can blame them for taking a punt on an unknown who had the potential to become a star

We won’t know how Bebe would have developed at both of those clubs but the lifestyle would have suited him better and he wouldn’t have had to cope with learning a new language. Hope

Will Bebe go down as one of the Premier League’s greatest flops? Probably but try to name a football club that hasn’t made a cock-up in the transfer market, try naming a club who hasn’t spent millions on a player only to see they’ve literally just sent the money down the drain. Try naming a club who hasn’t signed a youngster from abroad who for a number of reasons gets released and leaves the club to disappear back into the doldrums.

That’s just part and parcel of the game. Just like how every now and again a club will spot a gem, they will undoubtedly get ripped-off and buy a dud.

By Adam Dennehey @ADennehey87