8 World Class Footballers (Who Were Useless By 30)

Spanish striker Torres was supposed to be the final piece of the Chelsea jigsaw when Roman Abramovich... wait a minute, this is all beginning to sound familiar.

To be fair, the former Liverpool attacker has managed to reinvent himself in recent years as a diligent workhorse in Diego Simeone's Atletico machine, and - even at his very lowest point in Chelsea colours - he still helped the West London side claim their first ever Champions League win in Munich.

The bar that Torres had set himself, though - particularly during his time at Anfield under Rafa Benitez, where he nearly helped end Merseyside's quarter-century wait for a league title - was much, much higher than that. And it's still not really clear why he suddenly stopped doing the business during his mid-20s.

The revisonist interpretation of El Nino's career is that he was simply playing way beyond his natural level during those brilliant couple of seasons on Merseyside, and that the sharp decline to his numbers thereafter was simply a straight-forward regression to the mean.