Stoke City youngster Luís Silva seems to be having a pretty good adaptation to England. The defender, who left Portugal at the age of sixteen, spoke to Notícias ao Minuto this week and talked about the life at the club.
The player left Portuguese giants Benfica to join the Potters in 2015, a move which was a little difficult for the Eagles’ fans to understand. He’s now part of Stoke’s U18 squad, despite also spending some time with the club’s U23s.
“It has been a positive experience,” the player told Notícias ao Minuto. “The first year is always made of adaptation, complicated, but after this phase, we begin to feel a little bit of home in that other place. We get used to it, we are there to work and, so far, it has been going very well.”
Asked if he feels a big difference between Stoke City and Benfica, the youngster said: “We have to be honest, of course it’s a big difference to go from Benfica, which has one of the best training centres in the world, to England, where it’s a little bit different.
“There, all the centres are similar, whereas here there are three big ones with enormous infrastructures… There, everything is smaller and more concentrated. The focus is not on the infrastructure, but on the work that is developed there.”
On his relationship with the senior players, the 17-year-old revealed he’s treated very well by them. Especially by those who can speak Portuguese or Spanish: “Of course, I regularly speak to players like Imbula, with whom I joke a lot. I also talk to Bruno Martins Indi, who is a super cool guy who talks to me and asks me how I am every day. He speaks Portuguese, he’s a very interested guy in what goes on here. He will come back one day… or not, that in football you never know [laughs].
“I also talk to Muniesa and Bojan. Before I got there, there were more Spaniards than Portuguese and I started turning my Portuguese into Spanish so I could communicate with them and evolve accordingly. Arnautovic speaks Spanish, Affelay too. We are communicating and joking, even when we meet in the corridors or the canteen. There is no distance between the main team and the academy, also because of the centre’s own infrastructure, which doesn’t distinguish the ranks.”
Silva certainly sounds happy with his life at Stoke City, and with how the club, and first team, have welcomed him to England.
