Will Real allow star Asensio to join the galacticos?
The 21-year-old Spanish striker is a challenge to the Bernabeu policy of transfer shock and awe, writes Jonathan Liew
Some analyses suggest Asensio as a ready-made replacement for Ronaldo
The first goal is pure invention: a 25-yard parabola, dipping into the far corner like a perfectly judged sand wedge. The second is pure power, thudding the ball in from a tightening angle. The third is the best of the lot: a startling surge from his own half and an emphatic finish. The verdict is in: Marco Asensio is very good.
Just how good is a matter of some conjecture. At 21, Asensio has performed against far stronger opponents than Macedonia in the European Under-21 Championship on Saturday. He scored in the Champions League final for Real Madrid against Juventus, and is already being bracketed with the likes of Kylian Mbappé and Ousmane Dembélé as one of the world’s most coveted young forwards.
With Cristiano Ronaldo and Real deadlocked in one of their biennial money dances, some of the more fanciful analyses have suggested that Asensio could be a ready-made replacement.
At which point, we run into the first roadblock. Clearly it would be absurd to posit Asensio as a new Ronaldo, a footballer so utterly unrepeatable that he occasionally seems like a futuristic simulation of what the ultimate footballer would look like: the sort of contraption Peter Snow used to get feverishly excited about on Tomorrow’s World.
Besides, if those slaloming runs and unstoppable left-footed finishes have showed us anything, it is that Asensio’s true analogue is not Ronaldo but Gareth Bale, a player who for all his clanking medals still seems weirdly peripheral in the Madrid-iverse.
But there is another reason why Asensio’s development is one of the more fascinating plot lines swirling around the Bernabéu. Not since Raúl, arguably, have Real fans been able to acclaim a home-grown, Spanish
galáctico. Though he only joined at 18, Asensio has the potential to develop into that role. With a little time, a little tenderness, who knows? At which point, we run into the second roadblock. For this is Real, a place where time and tenderness are not in abundance. Where marquee signings are not simply a means to an end but the end itself, where the transfer market is simply an alternative battlefield upon which Real can enact shock and awe.
Already Real are poised to sink their claws into Mbappé this summer. Ronaldo, for all his general fannying about, is still likely to stay. And so it is tempting to wonder where Asensio, a modest £3 million signing from Mallorca, fits in this grand chequebook spectacle. Perhaps he will flourish and thrive. Or perhaps, like fellow home-grown forward Álvaro Morata, he will find himself endlessly thwarted, every tentative advance buried in a fresh avalanche of new signings.
And so the development of Asensio has implications far beyond the fate of one young player and his employer. It strikes at a broader issue of whether today’s superclub really is a greenhouse of sporting excellence, or simply a travelling circus dedicated above all to bombast, spectacle, intrigue.
Indeed it is not a stretch to describe Asensio as a sort of bellwether player for Real Madrid’s future, a litmus test of their ability to nurture talent from within rather than buying it afresh, one that may reveal a little about what the world’s biggest club is actually for.