5 of the strangest loan deals of the last decade (2010-2019)

#2 Conor Thomas – Coventry City to Liverpool (2010-11)

Conor Thomas made a strange loan move from Coventry to Liverpool - and made no appearances for them

By anyone’s standards, midfielder Conor Thomas’s loan move to Liverpool from EFL Championship side Coventry City in the January 2011 transfer window was a bizarre one. At the time, Thomas was just 17 at the time and had only just emerged from the Sky Blues’ academy after signing with them at as a youngster.

January 2011 saw him make his professional debut for Coventry in an FA Cup win over Crystal Palace, and he followed that by starting in their following FA Cup match against Birmingham City some three weeks later. Somehow, five days after that match – with just 2 professional games to his name – he found himself making a loan move to Premier League giants Liverpool.

Quite why the Reds – who had just appointed a new boss in Kenny Dalglish and also signed strikers Luis Suarez and Andy Carroll during the same window – wanted the young midfielder was a total mystery to basically everyone. Thomas clearly had raw talent, but the move appeared to have come far too early for him.

The story doing the rounds in Coventry at the time was that the club were struggling financially – and so had given Liverpool first refusal on the youngster in exchange for a loan fee.

At any rate, the move didn’t pay off, as Thomas never played for the Reds’ first team – only training with them on a handful of occasions – before returning to the Ricoh Arena at the end of the season, where he went onto make 100 appearances. He now plays for League Two side Cheltenham Town.