Garnacho a victim of bad influences and the star boy obsession

You might struggle to find anyone outside Alejandro Garnacho’s family who thinks the Chelsea winger does not fully deserve the current pile-on being led by his former Manchester United team-mates.

Luke Shaw, Bruno Fernandes and plenty of other Red Devils have revelled in Garnacho’s misery with an unusual lack of public shame, highlighting just how much of a pr*ck they thought the Argentine was.

But perhaps we should have some sympathy for Garnacho. For he, like most of us, is only a product of his environment.

And United are largely responsible for that. There is, though, plenty of blame to spread around the game and its public.

Nicky Butt knows Garnacho better than most . He was working as a bridge between United’s academy and the first team when the Red Devils signed the winger as a 16-year-old in 2020.

“Garnacho was always a bit standoffish. He had a high opinion of himself,” said Butt on his podcast. “I thought he had an edge about him and when he went into Manchester United’s first team… he got above his station way too quick.”

Indeed. But that didn’t stop United over-hyping him when it suited them and their PR machine.

United are hardly the first to fail in such a responsibility to young players. When there’s a sniff of a prodigy, many clubs will prostitute themselves and their values just to be the team to get first dibs on harnessing the potential. And, most importantly, profiting from it.

Garnacho is just one of a long line of young players who were rarely, if ever, told ‘no’ or anything other than how wonderful they are. By coaches, staff and also by the wider public.

United knew Garnacho might be trouble before he broke into the first team. His first senior start only came after warnings from Erik ten Hag over his ‘attitude, resilience, determination’. But United were too blinded by the potential they saw to concern themselves with nipping any problems in the bud.

Across the club, Garnacho was portrayed as the present and the future; the latest superstar to emerge from their academy. Even if he had already left school when they paid Atletico nearly half a million quid.

The hype, as it too often does, ballooned to such a level that it was too late for Ten Hag or Ruben Amorim to rein in him. Rather than check his ego, it paid in the short term, if not the long term, for United to fluff it.

United fans swallowed it whole. Again, this is a criticism that could be levelled at many clubs over many young stars. It’s the star boy phenomenon. We all like to see young players break through but it has got a bit weird. Every club and every set of fans now seem to want one of their own (a reminder: Garnacho was born in Madrid and didn’t set foot in Manchester until he was 16) in which to invest more hope and expectation than the manchild himself can usually repay.

The latest: Max Dowman. That isn’t to say that the Arsenal winger won’t fulfil his obvious potential and there are no reasons to compare him to Garnacho in any way, other than the fact that so many have already decided he’s the future of Arsenal and England without the lad having yet played enough senior league minutes for a full half of football.

If it does go to Dowman’s head, as it did Garnacho’s, could anyone reasonably blame him? How could anyone at 16 years old healthily process such adulation, expectation and scrutiny without solid presences around him to keep him grounded?

We have to hope Dowman has those people close by. It seems Garnacho did not. He did, as is often the case, have an idiot brother. Nobody at United was willing to step up to provide a steady and, if necessary, firm guiding hand.

Butt and Paul Scholes reminisced over a time when United team-mates would act as such a presence.

“He’d have been taken out every single day in training,” said Butt. “He’d have been put in his place very quickly with the likes of the players we got brought up with. Swatted down, taken out… but he’d have learnt from it and got better.”

Such self-policing among players can be effective, but how many squads these days have those guardian presences?

Garnacho had too few standard-bearers at United. The player he looked up to was Cristiano Ronaldo, which explains plenty. So much that the Argentine was labelled a ‘f***ing Ronaldo wannabe’ by one of Marcus Rashford’s entourage. A phrase that itself highlights how Garnacho was doomed to fail.

Garnacho was never blessed with Ronaldo’s gifts. As Chelsea are finding, he’s a winger not blessed with lightning speed and only able to go one way. Combine that with an aversion to the dirty work and you see why only Chelsea were suckered in last summer when they thought there may be a deal to be had. As ever, the Blues thought they were cleverer than everyone else.

Perhaps a chastening first season at Stamford Bridge, where he doesn’t enjoy star boy privileges, might humble Garnacho enough to graft at his game. But it might already be too late; that’s not entirely his fault.