Back in the winter of 2014, after a 3-0 thumping at Old Trafford, Brendan Rodgers sat up long into the night, drinking tea, eating toast and devising a new tactical plan. It was an evening well spent. The following game Liverpool switched to a three-man defence, went on a three-month unbeaten streak and Emre Can, reinvented as a kind of free-roaming centre-half, looked by far and away the best young player in the country.

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Liverpool's Emre Can celebrates Image credit: Reuters

Plenty has changed in the two years since: Liverpool’s manager is no longer a toast-chomping Ulsterman but a German who stays strictly clear of carbohydrates; the team has reverted from a back three to a back four; and Can’s career, formerly burgeoning, has stalled alarmingly.

The first thing to note is that there’s nothing especially remarkable here. Footballers’ development tends not to be straightforwardly linear – map a line graph of your typical player’s career and it will likely zigzag wildly before settling into some sort of plateau as they hit their mid-20s. Emre Can, only just 23, has some way to go before hands are wrung in earnest. Freddy Adu he ain’t.

Can’s performance on Sunday against Burnley was not only timely (arriving during a simmering contract standoff between him and the club) but also rather summed up his Liverpool career to date: a flash of real technical excellence amid a fluctuating and generally incoherent overall display. At his best he can dominate and dazzle, a heady combination of power and finesse. At his worst he is gallingly short of both, a muddled player who – in style if not looks – brings to mind Sylvester Stallone’s description of himself as “a Mister Potato Head with all the pieces in the wrong place”.

The point, though, is that the pieces are there. The problem is that no one, not least Can himself, seems to have decided where they all go. Having done most of his work for Bayern Leverkusen as a screening midfielder, the high-point of his Liverpool career remains that early stint as an ersatz-libero, while since then he has impressed sporadically in a fairly ill-defined box-to-box midfield role, most notably when Borussia Dortmund were vanquished so dramatically at Anfield a year ago.

Liverpool v Borussia Dortmund, Europa League 2016: Jurgen Klopp celebrates with his players Image credit: Reuters

Can’s biggest hindrance, literally speaking, is himself. His hulking frame bestows on him a palpable lack of mobility. Or to put it bluntly, there’s slow, and then there’s Emre Can. It’s an issue compounded by his side’s tactics: there are few coaches whose game-plan hinges on tempo and sinewy athleticism to the extent Jurgen Klopp’s does.

Can’s habit of taking one or two more touches than his teammates doesn’t help his cause here, especially as he mans the part of the pitch where punchy distribution can make all the difference. This Liverpool side are at their best when springing forward at pace, a scenario which hinges on runners being released via early, ideally first-time passes. In this sense, a bad game from Can is not just inconvenient but actively disruptive. (And the arrival of Gini Wijnaldum, a midfielder who specialises in exactly this, has rather shown up the German’s tendency towards the ponderous.)

Again, a young player who holds onto the ball a bit long is hardly lost-cause material. This is, after all, the same sport in which Cristiano Ronaldo, whose relentless and dead-eyed efficiency made him an all-time great, was lambasted as a youngster for his decadent wastefulness: proof if it were needed that every young player should be granted their fair degree of patience and indulgence.

Can is no Ronaldo, of course, but that’s not to say he won’t experience the sort of breakneck improvement that marks out the elite players. Players in his position, too, tend to be comparative late bloomers in this regard: young attackers can get by on pace and technical wizardry to begin with and pick up the rest as they go, whereas for a midfield string-pulling player like Can, ‘the rest’ is just as fundamental a part of the skill-set to begin with.

Nor is development limited to the tactical and technical. As Can said on Sunday, his Herculean physique has presented its fair share of problems:

I've had calf problems for many years and it has been very difficult for me – 10 minutes into the game I've not been able to feel my feet in a few games – but I didn't like to go to the press and say I am injured.

Jürgen Klopp and Emre Can Image credit: Eurosport

But perhaps the central problem with Can is the same one encountered by any talented youngster at a high-profile club: the incompatibility of patience required with success demanded. With the exception of the freakishly stratospheric talents of the Rooney or Messi variety, every young player’s development is longwinded, packed with hitches, and with no guarantee of a world-class footballer emerging at the other end. Sometimes the persistence is rewarded (Spurs ended up with Gareth Bale) sometimes it doesn’t (Manchester United still have Phil Jones), but either way it’s a slow process that’s incongruous with the fast-food logic of the modern fan, let alone the modern owner.

Which adds fuel to the argument that any perception of Can’s career having stalled is exactly that – a perception – far more than it is a reality.

Can, like most 23-year-old footballers, is far from perfect, but for now the suspicion remains that any decision by Liverpool to sell up would be rash and possibly regrettable. Such patience might not always pay off but when it does, you end up not only with a fine player, but a fine player of your own making. And in today’s transfer-obsessed game, which can feel more like a Wall Street trading floor than a spectator sport, the possibility of that kind of pricelessness surely makes such risks worth taking.

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