On the morning of July 10, 2022, one of the numerous lifts inside the Athenee Hotel in Bangkok was rising slowly to the 29th floor.
Inside the lift stood Alejandro Garnacho, who was sweating profusely — not because the air conditioning in the five-star hotel had broken, but because he knew that he was going to be late for breakfast.
Garnacho, who had just turned 18, sneaked in through the door to see all of his Manchester United team-mates, and staff, eating at their tables. The jet-lagged teenager, who had become annoyed by the fact that the lift moved so slowly, was a few minutes late.
If he thought that he would be let off with such a minor transgression, he was wrong. Erik ten Hag, the new manager, noticed and took a dim view of the Argentinian’s tardiness.
As a punishment, Garnacho did not play a single minute of United’s match against Liverpool in Thailand or the subsequent friendlies against Melbourne Victory, Crystal Palace and Aston Villa in Australia. Ten Hag, as everyone was discovering on his maiden United tour, was a taskmaster, especially when it came to the younger members of the squad.
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It was the first and last time that Garnacho disappointed Ten Hag with his off-field conduct. Now, the 19-year-old is one of the Dutchman’s most trusted players. Garnacho has started the past 21 United games and is the only player to have featured in all 35 match-day squads this season. Bruno Fernandes, Diogo Dalot and Rasmus Hojlund are the only outfield players who have played more than Garnacho, who has been on the pitch for 2,151 minutes this season.
With seven goals, the exciting yet raw winger is third in the United goalscoring charts behind Hojlund and Scott McTominay, and he has set up three more in what remains a largely disappointing campaign for the club overall.
On his previous appearance at Old Trafford, Garnacho sat on an advertising hoarding and drank in the adulation of the United fans after scoring twice in the 3-0 win over West Ham United.
It was a far cry from his first few days at the club in August 2020. Strict Covid laws were in place that limited training sessions to 75 minutes and minimised contact between players. The academy decamped from United’s plush Carrington training base to a satellite site 15 miles away on Littleton Road.
“You weren’t allowed to be indoors so you couldn’t use the changing rooms, but you were allowed to have a marquee, so Alejandro’s United career started under a tent in Salford,” Nick Cox, United’s academy director, said.
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“He’d do 75 minutes’ training, then take his box of food home with him. He’d already done two weeks’ quarantine and had people trying to bombard him with video calls, telling him, ‘You’ve got to learn English, you’ve got to get fit, we have to introduce you to all these people,’ all this stuff.
“He couldn’t get to know our city. We would have ordinarily taken the boys around the museum and shown them The Cliff [United’s former training ground]. He couldn’t go bowling or for a meal with the lads. It was tough for him, and everyone else.”
Garnacho was born in Arroyomolinos, a southeastern suburb of Madrid, to a Spanish father, Alex, and an Argentinian mother Patricia.
A model pupil in the Colegio Municipal de Arroyomolinos, where he also played youth football, Garnacho was snapped up by Getafe after they had scouted him, but in 2015, at the age of 11, he was poached by Atletico Madrid.
A few years later, when the United academy coaches decided they needed an exciting winger, they instructed their scouts to come back with recommendations, and Garnacho’s name was at the top of a list compiled by Gerardo Guzmán, their academy scout in Spain.
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After talks with Steve Brown, the director of scouting, and future talent scout Dave Harrison, United plumped for Garnacho and the job of persuading him to sign fell to Cox and Steve Higham, the head of academy football operations, who were aware of interest from other clubs including Borussia Dortmund.
“I would normally speak to the player, his agent, and family in person and tell them about the support network at the club, and the opportunity that is here, but I couldn’t do that this time due to Covid,” Cox said.
“I had to do it over videocall in my spare room via a translator, and my boys, who were 10 and 14 at the time, were having a scrap in the next room, probably over the Xbox or something. I told them if that argument had rumbled on we might not have signed Alejandro.
“I’ve told Alejandro about the story and he found it amusing. He has signed programmes for them.”
Because he had not signed a professional contract with Atletico, the Spanish club were entitled to only a relatively small compensation fee of £150,000, plus another £175,000 in add-ons.
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Garnacho’s parents, his girlfriend Eva García, who has since given birth to their first child, and his younger brother Robert moved to Manchester with the winger.
After a slow first year, Garnacho’s United career took off in the 2021-22 campaign, when he scored five goals en route to winning the FA Youth Cup.
Staff noticed that his performance levels rose in the biggest games. “He is a showman,” Cox said.
Garnacho reported to Carrington in the summer of 2022 in a bid to impress Ten Hag, but his tardiness did not impress the Dutchman or the club captain, Bruno Fernandes.
“He didn’t have the best attitude that he should have had, and that’s why he didn’t get his chances until now,” Fernandes said in November 2022.
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According to staff who work with Garnacho, the jibes from Ten Hag and Fernandes helped him. Now he has a better attitude off the pitch. He requested a personalised gym programme from United staff last summer because he knew he needed to add muscle mass before what he hoped would be his breakthrough season, while he has also employed a nutritionist.
His compatriot Lisandro Martínez has been a good mentor for Garnacho, who is also close to Facundo Pellistri, Amad Diallo, Kobbie Mainoo and Omari Forson.
Not everything has gone Garnacho’s way this season. Last November he was dropped from the Argentina squad. “Ale’s non call-up is due to a form issue,” Lionel Scaloni, the Argentina head coach, said. “He’s on our radar and will be part of our plans but during the last call-ups he did not have minutes and we have to think about the human aspect too.”
That is something that United are conscious of. When Argentina made it clear that they wanted Garnacho to play for them — Spain had made a concerted effort to persuade him to play for them — Cox and the technical director, Darren Fletcher, held a video call with then-Argentina Under-20 coach Javier Mascherano about how best to ease the winger into the set-up.
Given that he was born in Madrid, some elements of the Argentinian media questioned his national identity when Garnacho received his first call-up for Argentina last March. One commentator asked whether Garnacho “feels Argentinian”. He replied: “I feel Argentinian because I am Argentinian.”
That he once cited Cristiano Ronaldo as his favourite player, rather than Lionel Messi, also caused controversy in the South American country.
“We joked with him about that,” Leandro Paredes, the Argentina midfielder, said last year. “He is very shy and did not answer. Poor guy, we drove him crazy.”
A fortnight after being dropped by Argentina last November, Garnacho responded with one of the goals of the season, an acrobatic bicycle kick in the 3-0 win over Everton.
It was a stunning goal, but the United analysts high in the stands at Goodison Park were not surprised. They had seen him score a similar goal in a youth-team win over Wigan Athletic a couple of years earlier.
The match was not shown live on MUTV so no public footage of the goal exists, but the analysts have clips of it in their archive and they were comparing the two stunning strikes at Carrington the morning after Garnacho had scored his beauty against Everton.
Whatever their preferred choice it seems that the boy who was late for breakfast has finally arrived.
