https://scoutedftbl.com/alejandro-garnacho-makes-good-attack-great/
While Alejandro Garnacho provided great promise at Manchester United, things turned sour in the months following Ruben Amorim’s appointment. The 21-year-old’s perceived personality issues – or at least those of his brother – didn’t make for the best PR, and Garnacho was eventually frozen out and put up for sale. Issues with dribbling and consistency didn’t help him either, and the collective optimism around him has faded.
But how much of what ails Garnacho at United comes down to his skillset? And to what extent would his predicament change at a better-performing side?
I’d argue Garnacho’s toolbox is likely to thrive at greener pastures - he’s the kind of player who can turn good attacks into great attacks.
Let’s break it down.
United's stagnant attack and player skillsets
It’s no secret that Manchester United’s attack has severe issues, even with the change in managers. Since Amorim took charge, United have scored just 37 goals in the Premier League, the sixth-lowest total when excluding teams promoted for the 2025-26 season. Two particular issues impacted Garnacho’s individual performances.
First, ball progression is United’s primary challenge. As we discussed last week, United are effectively a mid-table side when it comes to moving the ball into the final third.
Plus, when United do get into the final third, the player with the ball encounters an underpopulated penalty area. In Amorim’s version of the 3-4-3, United don’t commit many players to the box by elite-club standards…
…unless they’re down a goal or two.
What did this mean for Garnacho? Firstly, he had to carry a larger ball progression load than he would in a better side. Secondly, having fewer passing options in advanced areas limited his creativity. Thirdly, floating around in an undermanned box without the ball became less effective because the opposition defence had fewer bodies to deal with.
As a result, United’s individual attackers - including Garnacho - weren’t placed to make a good attack great, but asked to lift a stagnant attack to merely passable. In other words, rather than raising United’s ceiling, the priority is raising United’s floor.
This brings us back to the concept of ‘scalability’, a topic we’ve discussed at length before. Different skills help sides to different extents based on the quality of the team, as established in NBA analytics. A ball-to-feet dribbler who can move the ball up the pitch and unsettle defences may help a middling attack while offering diminishing returns to a great attack, while a great off-ball mover can offer increasing returns at an elite side.
A couple of United’s recent moves make sense when you consider scalability, even if they don’t represent the best use of the club’s wallet. Both Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha had impressive spells at mid-table Premier League clubs, raising Brentford’s and Wolves’ floors respectively by consistently dragging the ball up the pitch and contributing to a bunch of shots, making things happen out of nowhere. Similarly, while the level of his goalscoring potential is up for debate, Benjamin Šeško dropped deeper to stimulate ball progression in Leipzig’s struggling attack last season and created space for his teammates with his physical engagement without the ball. While all three moves are cases of overspending on players unsustainably overperforming their underlying numbers, they stylistically make sense for United because they raise the floor.
Back to Garnacho. With United’s attacking deficiencies and scalability in mind, let’s take a look at what exactly his performances meant within the context of his team.
How Alejandro Garnacho raises United’s floor
As we’ve established, different skills have different effects based on team context. Let’s take a look at how Garnacho presents value to a team of United’s level.
For starters, an easy-to-spot way in which Garnacho helped raise United’s floor is by moving the ball into dangerous areas. After receiving in the attacking third, Garnacho regularly surged into the box with the ball at his feet, creating threatening situations. Last season, Garnacho carried the ball into the box 2.74 times p90, in the 90th percentile for Premier League forwards. Despite lower progressive passing numbers, Garnacho even moved the ball into the attacking third from deeper areas often, too, with 2.95 carries into the final third p90 (94th percentile).
However, this may be an example of statistical quantity not necessarily representing a player’s skill as much as it reflects their role within a team. Garnacho’s progressive carrying numbers aren’t because of his dribbling but despite it. The 21-year-old possesses clear shortcomings in beating defenders one-on-one and holding onto the ball under pressure, with an inconsistent touch and a shallow bag of dribbling moves. His other dribbling stats attest to this, too. Last season, Garnacho only completed 29.2% of his take-ons – in the 9th percentile – and mis-controlled the ball 2.62 times p90.
Instead, as we discussed earlier, United’s poor ball progression placed a larger ball-carrying load on the Argentine. Even if Garnacho managed to push the ball up the pitch consistently, carrying through large spaces well, heavy ball-carrying duties aren’t his cup of tea, and his ball progression numbers represented United’s attacking struggles rather than Garnacho’s strengths.
Plus, his off-ball movement created passing options for United when their setup otherwise rarely allows for players in and around the box. As discussed earlier, while movement may be a skill that ‘scales up’ well, it also presents immense value to a side that doesn’t have much happening front of the ball.
Garnacho’s sheer pace and dynamism, constantly providing an option in behind, is an obvious upside, but he’s developed guile in and around the box, too. He has a wide range of off-ball moves for a variety of situations.
His constant repositioning in response to circumstances changing around him are yet another sign of a box crashing superstar-in-waiting. All this leads to underlying numbers especially promising for a player in a struggling attack. Garnacho posted an xG p90 of 0.3 last season, in the 79th percentile, but the fact he racked up tons of involvements in the box, with 7.2 touches in the box p90 (94th percentile), is especially intriguing. He continued to find ways to get his foot on the ball in the box, despite playing for a side allergic to moving the ball up the pitch. In other words,
That being said, a look at his shot map brings some of Garnacho’s attacking flaws into the picture. As you can see, in addition to a fair number of shots in the central areas of the box, Garnacho took a bunch of them from deep, wide areas, which are unlikely to go in. Plus, all the purple dots represent blocked shots, which reflect issues in where and when he chose to shoot.
A clear-cut flaw of Garnacho’s decision-making this captures is his tendency to go for the shot over the pass very often. The Argentine has received a fair amount of criticism for this from United’s fanbase, and some of his shots may carry opportunity costs for United’s attack. Secondly, Garnacho’s wide and deep shots reflect ****his poor one-on-one skill, which prevents him from creating space for himself in the central parts of the box on the dribble, forcing him to take shots from wider and more crowded areas. This resulted in 34.5% of his shots being blocked.
At the same time, some of Garnacho’s shooting tendencies also reflect United’s mediocre attack. When an attack doesn’t seem likely to generate a good chance at the end of a passing move – as is usually the case with United, because of their lack of ball progression and box occupation – many attackers end up settling for low-quality shots in an attempt to create something out of nothing. Rather than choosing between a long shot and a pass to set up a goal, Garnacho usually chooses between a long shot and a turnover.
All in all, in an attack that had little going right, Garnacho relentlessly made things happen. It lead to all sorts of results, from failed dribbles to skied shots, but his skillset posed obvious value to United. It may offer more to someone else.
Alejandro Garnacho’s ceiling-raising potential
Let’s get back to one of my other pet scouting concepts. In Max Odenheimer’s categorisation, ‘shot-makers’ independently create shots for themselves with their on-ball skillset, while ‘shot-takers’ use their off-ball guile to get on the end of shots closer to goal. In United’s setup, Garnacho is often forced to be a shot-maker, but this isn’t the best fit for his skillset. When Garnacho attempts to create shots by himself on the dribble, it usually results in failed dribbles and blocks. But as we know from his off-ball skillset, Garnacho is destined to be a prolific shot-taker.
While independent shot creation may be especially beneficial to weaker attacks, carving out shots with off-ball movement fits better attacks with more creative quality. It’s tempting to think of movement-based attackers as ‘dependent’ on creative service, but chance creation is also a skill dependent on passing options around the ball-carrier. When a skilled off-ball attacker joins forces with better creators with the ball, it usually results in a mutual benefit, with creative quality being matched with incisive runners who don’t need the ball at their feet to score goals. In other words, off-ball movement is a ceiling-raising skill, and ‘scales up’ well on better attacking sides. This bodes well for Garnacho’s future.
What’s more, Garnacho’s overshooting tendencies are also likely to subside when he plays in a better side more likely to generate high-quality chances consistently. For an example of the relationship between team quality and shot locations, look how Pedro, the patron saint of ceiling-raising, movement-based wingers, settled for shots from increasingly farther away as the attacks he played for got worse and worse.
On the other end of the scale, look how Luis Suarez’s gung-ho shooting approach mellowed down with more quality around him. Garnacho’s trajectory is likely to be similar.
Source: Max Odenheimer’s piece at StatsBomb
Garnacho’s upward scalability goes beyond goalscoring potential, too. His movement and pace leads to him generating a high number of cutbacks. Garnacho’s technique for crosses and cutbacks is decent, but his lack of dribbling skill and United’s stagnant attack didn’t create too many opportunities for him to play the final ball. Meanwhile, his in-to-out and last-line running will receive greater service in a better attacking unit, which should lead to him racking up a few more assists than he did at United. Additionally, his off-ball skill also allows him to play neat one-twos, giving him the ability to link up well with his teammates.
Plus, Garnacho offers great potential in terms of pressing from the front. His pace, dynamism, and durability allows him to constantly close down passing angles and apply pressure on defenders with the ball. In 2024-25, Garnacho won the ball back 1.76 times p90, which is highly encouraging. Even if he tends to overcommit himself, he cuts off passing lanes well with curved pressing charges, and this can be refined in a more intense high-pressing unit.
Lastly, transitions become increasingly common season after season at the top level. Garnacho’s ability to carry the ball swiftly through large spaces and his dynamic off-ball running can wreak havoc on the counter-attack, and his last-line threat can pin back high defensive lines and create space for his teammates. As a result, he fits the mould of the ‘ceiling-raiser’ that good attacks need to reach the next level in today’s game.
The only concern is how Garnacho would fare against lower blocks. His ineffective dribbling can blunt his ball progression, limit his shooting angles, and lead to a flurry of blocked shots. His straight-line speed simply won’t matter as much with less space behind the backline. But at the same time, Garnacho’s movement to find space to attack crosses and cutbacks – finding opportune moments to trick markers, peel away into space, or crash into the back post – should help a side trying to attack ‘around’ a settled low block. Just, uh, make sure you don’t give him the ball too early.
All in all, Garnacho offers a contrast to all the ball-dominant player profiles that clubs spend tons of money on, and can help make a high-quality attacking side greater than the sum of its parts with his off-ball movement, transition threat, and pressing. This should encourage Chelsea.
What could’ve been at United?
In any football analysis, it’s crucial to separate what a player ‘does’ from what a player ‘can do’. This is even more essential when dealing with stats, because per-90 quantities don’t necessarily imply quality. Much of figuring out this separation comes down to examining team contexts and what different skillsets look like in different environments.
Garnacho’s subpar close-control may not allow him to consistently create shots by himself, but his other skills can make him an end product machine without taking too much away from his teammates. At Chelsea, he’d be surrounded by more ball-dominant creators like Cole Palmer, Enzo Fernandez, João Pedro, Jamie Gittens, and Estêvão, and his off-ball running creates win-win scenarios for him and his teammates, while covering for less-diligent pressers when they don’t have the ball. It remains questionable whether Chelsea need three players for each attacking position, but Garnacho’s profile is perfect to make the best out of what the club already has. And at the end of the day, at a fee around £40 million, Garnacho presents an outrageous bargain, and a great opportunity to seize on United’s spotty decision-making in the transfer market.
For a variety of reasons, Old Trafford has been a nightmarish environment for players to fulfil their potential over the past decade. Here’s just another headstone. RIP Alejandro Garnacho’s United career - oh, what could’ve been.
