At the collective, tactical level, football is all about marginal gains — but how often do we see the individual try to eke out those smaller wins?
Aleix Garcia has carved out a curious path to the top of the Spanish game. There was his release from Manchester City before a struggle for minutes towards the bottom of the Romanian top flight. A series of free transfers brought him back to Catalonia, the region of his birth, in the space of just over three years.
One thing has stood with Garcia across a tumultuous career, making this once floppy-haired, bit-part midfielder stand out; a distinctive technique that allows him to whip in a devilish dead ball.
Now 26, Garcia is relishing a deep-lying, tempo-setting role at Girona, allowing his effortless ball-striking expertise to breathe.
He has completed more than 250 long passes — a figure that only Toni Kroos can better across Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues this season — and hit 70 switches of play, 27 more than anyone across those leagues. The variety of those raking passes can be seen in the graphic below.
Long-distance playmaking is his game, but things get more interesting when the ball is sat still.
Contorting his body around every free kick and corner, wrapping his right boot around each cross — ankles twisting, hips lurching, his body weight swivelling around a planted standing foot — few players pack as much dip, curl and venom into their set-piece deliveries.
From his coaches and managers to a biomechanics expert, this is how Garcia has perfected his craft.
Like so many Spanish prospects, Garcia’s footballing journey began in the sleepy town of Villarreal. One of his first coaches, Carlos Mulet, has worked with some of La Liga’s finest players during 20 years with the club’s prolific academy. He distinctly remembers Garcia’s arrival.
“He was around seven or eight when he joined”, he tells The Athletic, “A local scout saw him in Ulldecona, a village around an hour’s drive north of Villarreal, where he and his family are from.
“Everyone was talking about him. From the first moment he arrived, we saw that he was a player who could make a difference.
“For his age, he had a very high technical quality. He could strike the ball well with both feet, open up defences and looked comfortable in many phases of play. He was a really important find for us.”
Garcia playing for Villarreal (David Rogers/Getty Images)
Even at such an early age, a breezy technique stood out. Mulet adds: “What you see from Aleix now is the essence of what we saw when he was eight years old.
“He has always had that ball-striking ability, from his first year with us to the under-18s. He could line up a pass and land it perfectly over large distances.
“Things might have changed slightly over the years — his body shape when he strikes the ball, how much he leans and follows through — but his technique is natural. The fundamentals are still there.”
As expected, Garcia’s rise through the age groups at Villarreal was seamless, and excitement was soon brewing that the young midfielder could make an impact in the first team. He was given 18 minutes towards the end of the 2014-15 season against Athletic Bilbao but that was all supporters got to see of a young player they had heard so much about.
Within weeks, the midfielder had been whisked to Manchester after City decided to pay his €4million (£3.4m) release clause.
He would struggle to settle. His difficult first season was epitomised by a bizarre introduction to English football. Manuel Pellegrini protested fixture scheduling by fielding a vastly inexperienced side to take on Chelsea in the FA Cup.
City lost the game 5-1 at Stamford Bridge with Garcia one of the five debutants thrust into the limelight. He came out of the game with plenty of credit — he was the player to have completed the most passes on the visiting team.
Garcia’s debut at Stamford Bridge (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
The teenager enjoyed a smattering of appearances under Pellegrini’s successor, Pep Guardiola, notably earning praise after a surprise start against Manchester United. Garcia could not hold down an ultra-competitive starting berth and was sent out to sister club Girona for his first loan in the summer of 2017.
He settled in Spain and his loan was extended after a collection of promising displays, but City took the surprising decision to send Garcia to Royal Mouscron in Belgium the following season, before making an even more shocking call to cut ties altogether.
Garcia was sold, on a free transfer, to Dinamo Bucuresti in Romania. He had played just 458 senior minutes for City across five flummoxing years.
Sending our best to @97_aleix who has joined Dinamo Bucharest on a permanent deal ⚽
🔷 #ManCity | https://t.co/axa0klD5re pic.twitter.com/wy5QZXuj5i
— Manchester City (@ManCity) October 5, 2020
Even in eastern Europe, with his new side embroiled in a relegation battle, Garcia was still fighting for game time. He was excluded from the squad entirely as Christmas approached. That is when La Liga strugglers Eibar swooped for a winter deal, with coach Jose Luis Mendilibar fronting the decision to bring the midfielder in from the cold.
“We wanted a different kind of player to the group we had,” Mendilibar told The Athletic, “one who could strike the ball well and was technically good.”
But even he would be pleasantly surprised with the talent he had just brought in.
“Bloody hell”, Mendilibar said, “how well can he hit it? You’re watching and you’re saying, ‘Wow, he can put it wherever he wants, it doesn’t matter how far’.”
Unable to save Eibar from relegation, Girona came back for their former loanee at the end of the season. Mendilibar could not quite find a tune from the midfielder but he was always at the forefront of his plans.
“I kept on saying to Aleix, ‘I don’t want you receiving the ball between the centre-backs and the full-back’, because however good his passing is, it’s difficult to hurt the opposition from there.
“He has always hit the ball well, I’m sure he did when he was younger too. After all, he’s been at Villarreal, City… and those boys can play.”
Since then, Garcia’s career revival has been sensational.
He helped Girona back into the Spanish top tier in his first season and returned to La Liga as the beating heart of Michel’s midfield. Barely a year on from their promotion, Girona are third, and Garcia has been one of the best midfielders in the country. His creative spark, as well as his tenacious off-the-ball attitude, has brought an edge to a free-flowing attacking side.
Set pieces play an important part, with the below graphic illustrating that no side creates danger from free kicks and corners quite like the Catalan side. Garcia is responsible for 74.5 per cent of his team’s lucrative dead-ball deliveries.
The below free kick is Garcia’s bread and butter; a floated, in-swinging cross into the path of onrushing teammates.
At the back post, towering striker Artem Dovbyk darts towards the six-yard box to meet the delivery, while David Lopez makes a cunning off-the-ball run, able to meet Dovbyk’s header across goal and bundle home in acres of space.
It is an intelligent free-kick routine that relies on a pacey, whipped delivery that floats just over the defence, but lands plum on the head of the attacker.
Zooming in on Garcia, football biomechanics expert Archit Navandar makes plenty of observations.
“One thing that caught my attention is his approach angle”, says Navandar, “so you can see from this example that he is approaching the ball pretty much perpendicular.
“David Beckham would take free kicks like this, approaching with an angle of 60 or 70 degrees to help him get the swing on the ball. Your support foot is planted next to the ball, and that gives you a direction around which to rotate.
“Then, speaking more theoretically we can see that he uses a long moment arm. He is restricted on the height front, being around 173 centimetres (5ft 8in), so he leans back — Lionel Messi does this, for example.
“It’s like when you have a lever — the longer the lever, the less force you have to apply because the rotational force is higher.
“Then we have a large extension, or backswing, and a high follow through, which means there is a large range of hip motion.”
This is where Navandar’s research provides a glimpse into Garcia’s success.
“We found that the further back you take the backswing, and the higher you take the follow-through, the greater the velocity while maintaining accuracy. It makes sense, right? More range of motion, more velocity.
“Garcia can generate a high rotational velocity and a large range of motion across all of his joints.”
In another example, against Athletic Bilbao, Garcia swings the ball in from a wider position, finding Eric Garcia in the centre to head home.
First, we can see the backswing, during which the hip rotates outwards “a little more than you would expect a normal player to”, according to Navandar, “around 25 to 26 degrees”.
But it is the hip flexion — the inward rotation of the hip — that catches the eye.
“It has to be around 110 degrees, it is so high. His knee is almost touching his chest. The whole movement is like a golf swing, it gives him such a long range of motion.”
This means that Garcia is rotating at a high speed by the time he makes contact with the ball, allowing him to transfer that rotational velocity to his kick.
The force of Garcia’s contact can be seen on his support leg, which absorbs the brunt of the energy he transfers across his body.
Keep an eye on his left ankle in the following images; as he strikes the ball, it points roughly in the direction of his free kick, before his hips swing across and twist him around.
“Remember that your standing foot is the point about which your entire body is going to pivot. Rotation is a key part of his kicking technique.
“If I was working for his team I would prepare him to add some complementary training so that his ankle can support this load so that he can continue working on the rotation because it can result in extra loading at the joint.”
So, Garcia’s technique is quirky and effective, but is it replicable?
“The hard part is not the flexion and the extension — it is the rotation that is way more difficult,” says Navandar.
“Marco Asensio, for example, he can do that entire backswing to follow-through movement, but that rotation is unique to Aleix.”
From a biomechanical perspective, the more pertinent question is whether Garcia should be used as technical inspiration.
“There is no such thing as a perfect kicking model,” says Navandar, “and everybody is different because everybody’s muscles are different.
“An approach can be mechanically sound, but what works well for me does not necessarily work for somebody else. You can change one or two things, you don’t change the entire pattern of movement”
Technique isn’t everything, either, and the quality of impact also has a huge bearing on the outcome of a set piece.
“You work with different impact points. Beckham always said that his reference was the valve, and then based on where he wanted to go, he would know where to kick it.
“But to know that, you have to practise, practise, practise, being careful not to overtrain. At the end of the day, it is down to this.
“So if I’m going to go in as a biomechanist trying to change this person’s technique… I’m going to be out of a job in no time.”
Sometimes, you’ve just got it, and from a scientific perspective, Garcia might well be the only player in the world capable of whipping in that kind of free kick.
(Top photo: Eric Alonso/Getty Images)
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