URUGUAYAN international Diego Arismendi shook his Staffordshire neighbourhood but left football followers somewhat unmoved.
Noisy late-night parties hosted by the defensive midfielder at his Newcastle-under-Lyme home hit the headlines for the wrong reasons but on the pitch he made little impact, in spite of high expectations. He ended his first season in England on loan at Brighton – and got sent off in his last game for the Seagulls.
Stoke City, then in the Premier League, paid £2.6m for the 20-year-old after he had already won medals at one of his home country’s top teams – Nacional – and two caps for his country.
He made his first appearance for Stoke on his first day at the club, setting up the only goal of the game in a reserve team win over Wolves.
Peter Reid, assistant manager at the time, said: “Diego was excellent. He broke up the play and the beauty with him is, for a defensive midfielder, he can pass, which he did extremely well.
“It will take him a little bit of time to get used to the pace but first impressions on him, I’m very pleased. He has had a smile on his face since being with us and he really enjoys his football. He has the attributes to be a very good player for us.”
Arismendi made his first team debut in a League Cup match against Blackpool but was forced off with an injury on 47 minutes of the 4-3 win.
Having struggled with the language barrier and not being able to force his way into Tony Pulis’s starting line-up, he was loaned to third tier Albion…where there was a Uruguayan in charge.
Gus Poyet was excited by signing his fellow countryman and saw it as quite a sign of the Albion’s intentions under Tony Bloom. He told The Argus: “We are showing where we want to go as a club, starting from the chairman and going through the whole of the staff.
“We are trying to achieve things that are not very easy but, because of the knowledge of the game and the contacts we’ve got, sometimes they work.
“When you know people and people know you personally and they are happy to let you have a player like Diego, you have to take advantage of that.
“I know him and his agent very well from before he came to England. He was a player growing up in one of the two biggest teams in Uruguay (Nacional) and playing for them regularly.
“I was surprised when he came because, I don’t know why, but Uruguayans have got a little bit of fear about England. I suppose it’s because of the language and the weather. They prefer Italy or Spain.
“I was very pleased by his decision to come and join Stoke. Of course, I have been following him a bit to see if he was making the first team.
“Unfortunately, Stoke are doing very well and there is no place for him right now there. He wants to play football, so he is very welcome.”
One place he wasn’t so welcome was Newcastle-under-Lyme. The month before he joined Brighton he had upset his neighbours by holding a number of noisy, late night parties, playing loud music and apparently having indoor kickabouts with his friends.
One neighbour at the prestigious No 1 London Road apartment complex, plastic surgeon Dr Muhammad Khan, told the Daily Mail: “I can’t sleep and I can’t concentrate doing my work. I am at my wits’ end. My flat vibrates from the volume of the music and it is like elephants stomping across the floor.
“Sometimes it sounds like he is playing football in the flat. It makes my lights flicker. It is every single night and then gets worse at weekends. I have spoken to Mr Arismendi twice, but all he said was that it was his friend’s birthday.”
In Sussex, Poyet hoped Arismendi would find the surroundings more to his liking. “I think he will love the city, a young boy with his girlfriend. He is going to adapt to Brighton very nicely. He wants to enjoy playing football so, slowly, I think he is going to get into the team.”
Poyet thought Arismendi would adjust to life in League One and the English game in general, but things didn’t work out that way and he only made three starts and three appearances off the bench for the Seagulls.
To make matters worse, in his final game he saw red (above) after scuffling with MK Dons’ Alex Rae. It was the same match that saw Lewis Dunk make his debut.
Poyet considered bringing Arismendi back to the Albion the following season on a season-long loan but they couldn’t afford to buy him and instead he ended up joining Barnsley, newly promoted to the Championship, on a similar arrangement.
He scored once (against Yorkshire rivals Leeds United in a 5-2 win) and featured in 32 games for Mark Robins’ Tykes, together with fellow loanees Kieran Trippier (from Man City), Chris Wood (from West Brom) and Paul McShane (from Hull) before returning to Stoke at the end of the season.
Because previous season’s FA Cup winners Man City had qualified for the Champions League in third place, cup runners up Stoke got to play in the Europa League (their first venture into Europe since 1975) and Arismendi started two matches and was sub in another two.
As an aside, in August 2011 I was on holiday in Split, Croatia, when City and their fans arrived to play local side Hadjuk (the visitors won 1-0). Our swimming pool sunbeds were taken over by red and white striped towels!!
Back in England, Arismendi remained firmly rooted to the bench as an unused sub for league matches and in March 2012 he was sent out on loan again, this time to Huddersfield Town until the end of the season.
Newly appointed manager Simon Grayson gave him seven starts and two appearances off the bench but he was not involved as the fourth-placed Terriers won promotion via an 8-7 penalty shoot-out win over Sheffield United at Wembley.
When Stoke excluded him from their 25-man squad at the start of the 2012-13 season, the writing was on the wall and his unhappy three-year spell in England came to an end when his contract was terminated in November 2012. He rejoined Nacional back in Uruguay.
Born in Montevideo on 25 January 1988, Arismendi said: “I had a tough upbringing. Everybody in Uruguay has a hard life, that is just the way it is there. But I come from a working class family and my childhood was not really any harder than anyone else.
“The aim, though, for me was always to play football and I have managed to realise that dream.”
He was only 20 when he won his first international cap in a friendly match against Norway in May 2008 and his second came in a World Cup qualifier against Bolivia. Both games finished 2–2.
After he returned to Montevideo and helped Nacional continue their domestic dominance by winning the Torneo Apertura (round robin South American tournament) and Uruguayan championship, he won two more caps in 2014.
He spent the 2015-16 season in Saudi Arabia playing for Al-Shabab but returned to Nacional for a third spell between 2016 and 2018. He then moved to Argentina, and at Rosario Central he once again didn’t leave a lasting impression.
In a rather scathing assessment elciudadano.com reported: “Arismendi had the confidence of the coach when he signed earlier this year but did not meet expectations at all.
“(Coach) Paton Bauza thought he would fit in quickly but that was very far from reality. He never adapted to the team. When he had chances to show himself, he wasted them; he suffered injuries and he always showed more errors than virtues when he got on the pitch.”
Arismendi once again returned to the Uruguayan capital, this time to play for Racing Montevideo, where he spent one season, before switching to one of the city’s other clubs, Montevideo City Torque.
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