There was some low level amusement this week when Wes Brown, asked to name the stupidest footballer he’d ever played with, picked out his former team-mate Anderson. This was on the grounds that even though Anderson has been in Manchester since 2007 he still doesn’t really speak English. Or at least, he doesn’t speak it when Brown’s around. Or, more likely, on these occasions he simply gives in to the easier option of communicating in the fluent conversational Portuguese Brown has presumably cultivated by now after many years of interacting with overseas team-mates.

Either way the news capped a big week for Anderson-related issues generally after some separate talk that his time at United – the closest a spectacularly trophy-laden seven years is ever likely to get to a nice cup of tea and a lie down – could soon be over, with a move back to Grêmio already being punted about.

Farewell, then, Anderson. It feels as though you never really got started. And at the same time as though you’ve been pretty much hanging around the place since the beginning of recorded footballing time. There he is, Anderson – dear old Anderson – chairing Bobby Charlton around Wembley in ’68, buddying up with Norman Whiteside, larking with Cantona. Indeed the ballad of Anderson is not so much a matter of plain old opportunity passed up as a remarkable – and perhaps even unrepeatable – tale of stasis, drift and a simple refusal to go away.

It feels like an interesting point of contrast that prior to winning the Wes Brown Stupidest Footballer 2014 gong, the last individual award to come Anderson’s way was the Golden Boy in 2008 as Europe’s most promising under-21 player. Before that it was the Golden Ball as the player of the under-17s World Cup. Around that time Anderson was also being described, variously, as the New Pelé, the New Ronaldinho, the new Kaká, the new Scholes. Yet 10 years on, after half a sporting lifetime in the Premier League, he looks like something else entirely – perhaps even a decent candidate as the worst value footballer of all time.

It is a hotly contested field but there are some decent numbers to back this up. Anderson has earned at least £20m in his time at United. In return he has scored nine league goals and made just eight assists in among 70 starts in the Premier League. Yet he has become over time an oddly immovable background presence, the footballing equivalent of gallstones or gout, a symptom of expensively furred arteries, a system bunged with gilded crud. Eight seasons on the Age of Anderson is now all but over. Brown is right – something pretty stupid has been going on here. But what exactly?

Oh, Anderson. You were supposed to be a thing of beauty. Instead, at 26, his career resembles a kind of confidence trick, a Dapper Laughs Ronaldinho; perhaps even a highly successful one-man monetising of various irresistible football archetypes. The enduring mythology of Brazilian talent. United’s own cult of youth. The skills, the pedigree, the hair. Bung it all together, and like an overly aggressive predictive text programme English football will simply fill in the rest. Anderson: midfield genius. We want to believe.

Yet for all the obvious disappointment of an attacking midfielder who took three years to score his first goal at Old Trafford, you’ve got to hand it to him – he knows when to turn up. Anderson won four league titles! He scored a penalty in a victorious Champions League final shootout! Best of all, between 2006 and 2013 he picked up 14 major honours at United and Porto, playing on average just 14 matches per trophy and thereby making him – by a pure statistical measure – a decent shout as the most successful outfield player of all time.

What happened? The general view is a simple case of over-promotion, a player with everything except the basic will to explore the outer limits of his talent. “If I want to I can be a great player,” he said in 2011. But it turns out, he didn’t want to. Careers have always fizzled out or imploded but this feels like a new way of doing things, a high grade congealment within the machine, a simple lack of old style desperation.

Similar charges are often levelled at English football’s own teenage princelings, subjects of a continuing industrial experiment into the irradiating effects of fame, wealth and unchecked aspiration. Anderson is, in this respect, our own chubby-cheeked frontiersman, embodiment of the basic weirdness of the boom years and a player who has become, in a sense, his own Wag: pampered, entitled, parasitic of his own talent, rolling his eyes, fiddling with his sunglasses, asking vaguely what the score was while saying yeah, Anderson, bless him, he’s been good to me.

Although to be fair to English football there were some slightly ominous soundings even when he was winning that Golden Ball in 2005. “He was clearly the best player,” Tostão said, “but there were times when he just stood around.” Indeed. Seven years on Anderson – immovable, endearing, just standing around – would seem to be almost done even with that.