By: NYT & Reuters

The time between Christmas and New Year can make soccer careers appear as transitory as the life of butterflies. Neil Warnock became the first manager to be fired in England’s Premier League this season when struggling Crystal Palace dismissed him on Saturday.

Fernando Torres, the Spanish striker, has finally been released from Chelsea, where his once prolific career had stalled and sputtered ever since he moved there in the transfer window of January 2011. He cost Chelsea a then-British record fee of 50 million pounds, or about $78 million, and he leaves for nothing.

Warnock, 66, is a veteran of the hire-and-fire game of team management. Torres, 30, is on a tortuous journey that ended back where he started, at his first love in soccer, Atlético Madrid.

The Warnock situation has a simple arithmetic explanation. He was hired by Palace two days before this season began to fill the shoes of Tony Pulis, a coach who had turned around the south London team at this time a year ago.

The club was in peril of being dropped from the Premier League when Pulis, well known for his pragmatic ability to get the best out of limited playing resources, took on the task of saving the team. He made it solid on defense, quick on the break, and he gave players a belief in themselves.

Palace finished last season in the middle of the standings in the richest league in the world. The Eagles, as the team is known, had soared. And then, Pulis and the board fell out over the way forward — and Warnock was plucked from retirement to fill the void.

The bottom line is that Pulis has never been relegated with any team. Warnock has taken two clubs down, and sometimes battled back. Their roles had reversed. Last summer, Warnock sat in a TV studio, giving his comments on where other coaches were failing; now Pulis is broadcasting while he awaits the right job to re-enter the hire-and-fire game.

The time is ripe. January is the designated midseason window when clubs can transfer players in or out — and so a club that has no faith in the manager or head coach will dismiss him first rather than allow him to recruit players his successor may not approve. While the media (and the eager stock of unemployed coaches sitting in front of the microphones) speculate, Crystal Palace should already know whom it wants in place of Warnock.

Time is of the essence for Palace. Its team has won only three times all season long, and only once in the last dozen games. The numbers do not tell us everything about form, and if they did then Fernando Torres might already have found his game is up.

Torres has been in limbo for some considerable time. His move from Madrid to Liverpool in 2007 was an instant success as he, with magnificent physical prowess and an instinct for goals, scored 33 times in 46 games. The second season, too, was flowing until the first of several injuries, and then a change of team ownership and coach, began to impinge upon him.

By the time Chelsea took him — more on owner Roman Abramovich’s whim than on the team management’s considered choice — Torres was already a diminished athlete.

A risky gamble

January moves are often a gamble. The new player joins a group that is either already established in its shape and style, or a team that is desperate and disparate in its low form. When Torres arrived at Chelsea he was searching for something he had lost, the twin peaks of confidence and physical prime that made him once the best striker on earth.

But Abramovich was restless in trusting his coaches, still hiring them and discarding them while he waited for the return of the man he fired in 2007, José Mourinho.

In that environment, Torres floundered. He scored just 20 league goals in 110 appearances some of those as a substitute, between 2011 and 2014. The best years of his career in terms of age and experience were being lost in uncertainty.

And when Mourinho did arrive back, he said, often, that the problem with Chelsea was the lack of striking options. Last summer, Mourinho fixed that. He persuaded Abramovich to buy Diego Costa, the brooding, menacing, aggressive goal scorer who had led Atlético Madrid to finish above Real Madrid and Barcelona to win the Spanish league title.

Chelsea then loaned out Torres for two years to AC Milan. After one goal in 10 games, this could hardly be written up as rekindling the Torres flame.

But, rather than the cold of Europe, Torres was out in Dubai when the news broke this weekend. Milan is taking a midwinter training break in the same place as Real Madrid, and the two will play an exhibition game on Tuesday.

Milan, like Torres, is searching for old glories. Has it found a permanent leader in attack? Maybe not.

Atletico Madrid confirmed on Monday that Torres has agreed to return to the club on loan from AC Milan until the end of the 2015-16 season. Chelsea and Milan agreed on Saturday to make the switch permanent, paving the way for Torres to be loaned to Atletico, where he will hope to resurrect his stuttering career under inspirational coach Diego Simeone.

It appears that Atletico could not afford, indeed is not allowed by Spanish financial controls, to pay a transfer fee for another new player. But it can trade for exchange players and loan players, and the Madrid team has someone — the Italian winger Alessio Cerci — whom Milan would be happy to repatriate to its lineup.

All of this explains the statement that Germán Burgos, Atlético’s assistant coach, gave in the Spanish media before Christmas. Torres, he said, was on the verge of returning. “We are waiting for things to firm up,” Burgos said, “We will get the best out of him, the same as everyone. He knows what he is coming to.” A lost talent finding his way home, perhaps.