Hatters hope Viana impact can be more Valois that Besta

The Hatters have a mixed history of success with overseas signings with various players enjoying wildly different fortunes.

Imports such as Lars Elstrup, Johnny Vistrup, Boncho Genchev, Pavel Besta, Zdenek Kroca, Claude Gnakpa, Roy Wegerle, Ratz Fetz, Juergen Sommer, Markus Heikkinen and Ian Feuer have amazed and entertained or failed and vanished in equal measure.

But it was Viana’s ambition to play in England and his faith in his own ability that convinced Still to sign him.

He said: “The sport world now, people come from so many different countries and continents.

“If people are available to you as a football club only a fool would ignore those avenues.

“At all levels now we have European players. Maybe not necessarily have travelled over from Europe to play, but have had European upbringings and have come to England for a variety of reasons to play.

“And this is a boy who is a footballer that wanted to come to England, we didn’t have to chase him to come to England.

“I was alerted to that fact and he’s come in here and that’s the way the world is.

“Not getting into the rights and the wrongs of the amount of foreign players that play in England, that’s neither here nor there.

“Here is player able to come to England to play football, wants to play in England, we’ve had a look at him, we like him and we’ve signed him.

“He came over and to be fair you could see it straight away that he could play. We’ve spent three-four weeks assessing him and within that time we felt that he would be OK to compete at this level and that’s what we think.”

The 21-year-old French-born player has played for Strasbourg and Atletico Madrid B and C in Europe and left Major League Soccer side Real Salt Lake in the summer.

Still’s scouting network helped to identify the youngster and he came straight to Luton off of his own bat without going anywhere else.

“Someone that does some bits for us reminded us of him and we thought we’d have a look, the pedigree was good,” Still continued.

“He’s come from abroad to here, he hasn’t gone anywhere else.

“I looked at where he’d been and what he’d done. He was happy to come over himself at no cost to show us what he could do so he was very confident of what he could do.”

And Still believes he will be able to fill a wide range of attacking roles for the Hatters, especially the longer Luton get to work with him.

He added: “He can play wide, but he can play off the main striker, he can just drop in that the hole, so I think that’s there’s two or three.

“Do I play him wide on the left, wide on the right, or drop off of the main striker.

“And I think that as we develop him, I think he can play central midfield, certainly in a three maybe even in a two, but I need to see a bit more of that to see what we need give him to give him a few more strings to his bow.”