Former Liverpool and Rangers ace is now 28 and looking for a new club on LinkedIn

Ovie Ejaria has never been short of admirers when he has been fit, focused, and playing regularly, but the story of his career since leaving Anfield has been one of unfulfilled promise, repeated fresh starts, and now an unusual attempt to reboot things via professional networking site LinkedIn rather than the conventional transfer grapevine. The 28-year-old midfielder, who spent a loan spell at Ibrox during the 2018-19 season under Steven Gerrard, is currently a free agent after his release from Spanish second-tier outfit Real Oviedo, and rather than wait for his agent’s phone to ring, he has decided to take matters into his own hands by posting directly to prospective employers on a platform more associated with corporate job-hunting than professional football.

Ejaria’s post, which quickly did the rounds on social media and was picked up by outlets across England and Scotland, laid out his situation in blunt, practical terms. He described himself as 28 years old and London-based, with previous spells at Liverpool, Sunderland, Rangers, Reading, and Real Oviedo. Keeping the details deliberately brief, he explained that he was open to hearing from any club in need of a central midfielder capable of playing as a six, an eight, or a ten, or alternatively someone who could operate as a left winger, inviting anyone with knowledge of a suitable opportunity to send him a direct message. It’s a refreshingly direct approach from a player who, at various points in his career, looked destined for the kind of steady top-flight progression that would have made a LinkedIn plea entirely unnecessary.

For Rangers supporters of a certain vintage, the name Ovie Ejaria will conjure memories of a specific and strange period in the club’s recent history: the beginning of the Steven Gerrard era at Ibrox. When Gerrard arrived in the summer of 2018 to take his first steps in senior management, one of the first things he did was lean on his contacts back at Liverpool, where he had captained the club to Champions League glory and spent almost his entire playing career. Gerrard identified a trio of Liverpool players he wanted to bring north of the border to help him get Rangers competitive again after a period in which Celtic had established total dominance domestically. Dominic Solanke was one target, Ryan Kent was another, and the third was Ejaria, a versatile young midfielder who had represented England at Under-21 level and was seen as one of the brighter prospects to emerge from Liverpool’s academy pathway in recent years.

At the time, Ejaria was still only 20 years old and had already tasted first-team football with Liverpool, making appearances under Jurgen Klopp in the Premier League and FA Cup, even if senior opportunities were always going to be limited given the calibre of midfielders Klopp had at his disposal during that period. He had previously spent the second half of a season on loan at Sunderland, where the Black Cats were relegated from the Championship to League One despite his efforts, managing a handful of appearances and a goal in a difficult team. Rangers represented a step up in profile if not necessarily in the guarantee of regular football, and Gerrard’s personal relationship with the player, forged during their shared time at Anfield, was seen as a significant factor in getting the move over the line.

Ejaria’s time at Ibrox produced moments that suggested Rangers and Gerrard had unearthed something special. Deployed in various midfield and wide positions across his loan spell, he racked up 28 appearances for the club, contributing two goals and an assist as Gerrard began the long process of rebuilding a squad capable of challenging Celtic once again. The high point of his Ibrox career, and arguably one of the defining moments people still associate with his time in Scotland, came in a Europa League qualifying tie against Russian opposition Ufa, when Ejaria produced what was widely regarded as his best performance in a Rangers shirt. Gerrard was fulsome in his praise afterwards, telling reporters that he considered it the player’s strongest ninety minutes for the club up to that point, going as far as to call the display magnificent and noting that after a series of promising cameos and half-performances, this was the first time Ejaria had delivered an excellent showing from start to finish against a good team.

It’s a quote that has aged in an interesting way, because it captures both the genuine talent that convinced Gerrard to sanction the move in the first place, and the sense of a player who was forever teetering on the edge of a breakthrough that never fully arrived. Despite the promise shown against Ufa and in patches elsewhere, Ejaria’s loan spell at Rangers was ultimately cut short. He returned to Liverpool only months into what was supposed to be a full season-long arrangement, and while the specific circumstances behind the early termination have been debated by supporters and pundits over the years, the broader pattern of his career since then has been one of a player who has struggled to convert flashes of quality into sustained, first-team certainty at any club.

After his time at Ibrox came to its premature end, Ejaria’s path took him back to Liverpool before a subsequent loan move to Reading, and it was at the Championship club where he eventually found something closer to consistency, if not outright stardom. Liverpool made his move to Reading permanent in 2020 following two separate loan spells there, and Ejaria went on to enjoy the longest and most productive stint of his senior career at the Madejski Stadium, now known as the Select Car Leasing Stadium. Across his three separate spells with the Royals, he made 127 appearances in total, scoring nine goals and registering 13 assists, numbers that reflect a genuinely useful Championship-level midfielder even if they never quite matched the hype that had surrounded him as a teenager coming through the ranks at Arsenal before his move to Liverpool.

Ejaria eventually left Reading in 2024 as a free agent, at which point he made the decision to test himself abroad, signing for Real Oviedo in Spain’s second tier. His solitary season with the Asturian club yielded a promotion to La Liga, but Ejaria’s own personal experience of top-flight Spanish football was curtailed by fitness problems. He made just eight appearances in La Liga last season, with a December injury keeping him sidelined for around two months and disrupting any chance he had of establishing himself as a regular starter in Oviedo’s midfield. Oviedo themselves endured a difficult return to Spain’s top division, suffering relegation back to the second tier at the end of the campaign, and with his contract having expired, Ejaria found himself once again searching for a new home, this time without a club at all rather than moving between loan spells with Liverpool still technically his employer.

It’s that combination of circumstances, a difficult injury-hit season, relegation, and the expiry of his contract, that has led to the unusual scenes of a professional footballer with Premier League, Championship, and La Liga experience turning to LinkedIn to drum up interest. In football terms it is a slightly humbling moment for a player who once trained alongside some of the best midfielders in Europe at Liverpool and was personally sought out by a Liverpool and England legend to help spearhead a rebuild at Ibrox, but Ejaria’s post has been notable for its lack of self-pity. He has framed his situation in straightforward, professional terms, essentially treating his job search exactly as any other professional might when between roles, listing his relevant experience and being specific and realistic about the positions he can fill.

That specificity is worth dwelling on, because it also tells us something about how Ejaria views himself as a player at this stage of his career. Rather than presenting himself purely as an attacking playmaker or a traditional number ten, which is how he was often talked about as a teenage prospect, he has emphasised his versatility across the base, box-to-box, and advanced midfield roles, while also flagging his ability to play as a left winger. That kind of positional flexibility can be an asset for clubs assembling a squad on a shoestring budget outside the confines of the traditional transfer window, since a free agent with several strings to his bow theoretically offers more tactical value per signing than a specialist who can only do one job.

The timing of his search is also significant. With the traditional summer transfer window now closed across most of Europe’s major leagues, clubs are increasingly turning to the pool of available free agents to strengthen their squads on the cheap, particularly if they have suffered untimely injuries or if their recruitment during the window fell short in specific areas. Being outside the constraints of the window is actually one of the few advantages a free agent like Ejaria holds, since he is able to sign with a new employer at almost any point in the season rather than waiting for the next designated trading period. Speculation has understandably followed as to where he might land next. Given that he remains based in London, sources close to the situation and reporting since his post went public have pointed to a possible return to English football, potentially in the Championship or League One, divisions in which he has already shown he can perform to a reasonable standard during his years at Reading and Sunderland. Others have floated the idea that a return to continental football, whether in Spain’s second tier or elsewhere, cannot be ruled out either, given he has already shown willingness to relocate abroad once in search of regular football.

There is also the matter of his international eligibility, which continues to be mentioned whenever his name comes up. Despite representing England at Under-21 level earlier in his career, Ejaria remains eligible to play for Nigeria at senior level through family heritage, and that dual eligibility has occasionally been floated as a subplot to watch depending on where his club career heads next. A move to a higher-profile league, or simply a run of consistent form and fitness at any level, could reignite that conversation, though for now the priority for Ejaria and those advising him is clearly just finding a club willing to offer him regular game time and a platform to rebuild his reputation after a stop-start few years.

From a Rangers perspective, the story is a reminder of just how eventful and, in hindsight, formative that first summer of the Gerrard era was for the club. Bringing in Solanke, Kent, and Ejaria from Liverpool in one window was a statement of intent from a rookie manager determined to use every relationship he had built over a storied playing career to get his rebuild off the ground quickly. Kent, of course, went on to become one of the most celebrated players in the club’s recent history, a key figure in Rangers’ run to the 2021 Scottish Premiership title that ended Celtic’s domestic dominance and eventually the Europa League final under Giovanni van Bronckhorst. Solanke’s stay was brief and low-key before he returned to Liverpool and later carved out a productive career in the Premier League with Bournemouth and now Tottenham. Ejaria’s story sits somewhere in between those two outcomes: a player who showed enough during his time at Ibrox, particularly in that Ufa performance that so impressed Gerrard, to suggest he had the tools to succeed at a higher level, but who has never quite managed to put together the run of form, fitness, and stability required to fulfil that early promise.

Rangers supporters who followed his loan spell closely will likely view the LinkedIn story with a mixture of nostalgia and sympathy. Few would have predicted, watching him produce that man-of-the-match display against Ufa in August 2018, that eight years on he would be advertising his services on a professional networking site rather than commanding a starting spot in a major European league. But football, and particularly the middle tier of the professional game below the very elite, is littered with players whose careers take unpredictable turns, shaped as much by circumstance, injuries, and the timing of contract expirations as by pure ability. Ejaria’s decision to be proactive and public about his situation, rather than simply waiting quietly for his representatives to find something suitable, has at the very least ensured his name is back in the football conversation, and it would be no surprise at all if the attention generated by his post plays some part in helping him secure his next move.

Whatever happens next, the episode offers a useful snapshot of the realities facing so many players who emerge with huge reputations from academy systems at the biggest clubs in the country. Ejaria was talked about as a genuine talent coming through at Arsenal before his switch to Liverpool, he trained under Jurgen Klopp, he was personally recruited to Ibrox by Steven Gerrard, and he earned praise that most young footballers would treasure for the rest of their careers. Yet by 28, an age at which many players are entering the peak years of their career rather than searching for a foothold, he finds himself out of contract and out of a club, relying on the same tools that a marketing executive or software engineer might use to find their next role. It is a humbling situation, but based on the tone of his own message, it is one Ejaria appears to be approaching with a clear head and a pragmatic sense of what he needs to do next. For Rangers fans who remember his brief but occasionally brilliant contribution to the early days of the Gerrard project, there will be plenty of goodwill behind him as he tries to find his way back into regular first-team football, wherever that opportunity ends up presenting itself.