Julian Alvarez: the rise of Argentina’s ‘Little Spider’ who Real Madrid wanted age 11
James Holden This story was first published when Julian Alvarez signed for Manchester City in August.
“When the referees arrived for games on Saturdays, they would come and greet us and immediately ask if the ‘little spider’ was playing,” says Rafael Varas, who first spotted Julian Alvarez kicking a ball around the football pitches of Calchin at two years old.
Advertisement
“Their colleagues would see him the week before and talk about him — ‘In Calchin, there’s a kid playing; he is an “enanito” (little guy) but he’s just destroying everyone’. From a very young age, he showed that he was the best.”
Back then, Alvarez was “el Aranita”, the little spider, a nickname given to him by one of his brothers — he was so good on the ball that it seemed like he had more than two legs. The little spider grew up to become just “el Arana”, the spider, who starred for leading Argentine club River Plate and is now ready to embark on a much-anticipated career in Europe with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City.
And yet he only joined River, moving 400 miles east from Calchin, at the age of 15 — pretty late for somebody whose talents stood out to anybody who saw him play even in his earliest days.
“He was two years old and he was with his brothers who were training at my football school,” Varas tells The Athletic. “The first time he went onto the pitch, he saw the ball and went running after it, and he ran all over, from one side to the other — I can tell you that the ball was bigger than he was!
“His brothers and their team-mates were training and Julian, so small, wanted to do the same, to imitate them. He joined the school at three and a half years old. We saw his qualities when he was playing with the other kids. I used to joke that, ‘We are in the presence of a “crack” (one-off talent)’, and this ended up becoming reality, eh?”
According to Varas, the young Alvarez always set himself some lofty targets.
“He was a River and Barca fan, he always wanted to play professional football — to play for River, to play with Messi,” he says. “He was always different.”
But had things unfolded another way, Alvarez could have been a Real Madrid player for over a decade already.
Advertisement
“I first saw Julian when he was 11 years old,” says Piero Foglia, who ran Club Deportivo Atalaya in Cordoba, the provincial capital, an hour and a half’s drive from Calchin. “A friend of mine was a referee and told me about him.”
Atalaya have produced players who went on to play in Argentina’s Primera Division and beyond, and Foglia was scouting for Argentina’s youth sides, so he knew a thing or two about young talent.
“I proposed that we work together, thinking about Julian’s future and treating it as a project, imagining that if the time came when he wanted to pursue a career as a professional footballer, we could look for options to get him into a club,” he says.
“And then Ramon Martinez, the sporting director of Real Madrid, came to Argentina and said to me that if I had seen any young footballers who had stood out that I should tell him, so I told him about Julian.
“They invited us to a tournament in Girona, Spain. He played for the youth team and really stood out, so Madrid took note and wanted to sign him, but according to new FIFA rules that had just been brought in, he couldn’t sign at his age. He had to be 16, and he was just 11. Can you imagine? He would have had to wait a long time; too long, in fact.”
In 2010, a year before that trial, FIFA changed its regulations so players under the age of 16 couldn’t move clubs without their parents, and at that stage, it was not a viable option for the Alvarez family.
“If the regulations were the same as when Messi arrived at Barcelona (from Newell’s Old Boys in 2001), Julian would have signed for Real Madrid,” Foglia has said, but it was clear that even a move away from home within Argentina might not have been the best bet.
Alvarez had spent time at both Boca Juniors and their big Buenos Aires rivals River Plate in 2011, too, and he continued to travel to Atalaya for their trials, but it was purely just to get an idea of what life in football entailed.
Advertisement
“Lots of clubs already knew about him, but he wasn’t ready to leave home,” Foglia says. “He would have suffered a lot by uprooting, so it was about waiting for the right moment.
“He had trials at a lot of clubs but it wasn’t so he could join those clubs, it was so he could know what it was like at these institutions so he could make the right decisions.”
So it was back to Calchin, a tiny town of 3,000 people as far from Cordoba as Manchester is from Leicester.
Getting its name from the Quechua language, which is spoken in Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, Calchin means “Salty place” and is known above all else — until now, perhaps — for its agriculture and livestock farming.
A hardworking town, its coat of arms displays the words, “Work, study, well-being” above clip-art-style pictures of a bull, a factory, a cog, a book and, at its centre, an ear of wheat.
So it was in those humble surroundings where Alvarez grew up and, in a similar way to Erling Haaland, who grew up in a small farming town in south west Norway, perhaps some of those values can be seen in his game and character today.
“The best thing was his mentality,” Foglia says, and Varas continues the theme: “He was always better than his team-mates and the opponent, but not just in football terms. How he trained, his behaviour, his humility, it was different.
“He’s a very humble guy, he never fought with the opposition. There were games when players would pull his shirt or push him or foul him but he never fought with them, he never argued with them, never asked why they hit him or anything like that, he never argued with the referees, the opponents, nothing.
“His team-mates and opponents always respected him and congratulated him because of this. When he scored or dribbled or shot from far out, everybody applauded, everybody talked about the little spider of Calchin.”
Alvarez continued playing for Atletico Calchin, where he won four league titles, and was top scorer every season. It was, after all, the only club in the town, like Haaland in Bryne.
Advertisement
“We saw how he hit the ball so hard, how he always ran towards the opposition goal, dribbled with it, even when he was three and a half years old,” Varas adds. “Every day, we saw the great player that he was already.”
Two years ago, with Alvarez breaking into the first team at River Plate, his father, Gustavo, pulled up at Varas’ house in a brand new van.
“I’m a public-sector worker and in the afternoons I sell products to supermarkets,” Varas says. “I had a car that was too small for all of my things. One Friday, I was speaking with Julian’s father about a signed shirt that Julian had sent me, with a dedication that said, ‘To my first coach who accompanied me for my first steps’. It was beautiful.
“The next day, his father called me again and said, ‘I’m coming to your house’. He arrived beeping the horn of a new van! I had no idea what was happening and I cried a lot. I had no words to thank him, I still don’t.
“That night Julian called me, we were on the line for 10 minutes and I could not say more than three words because I was so emotional, I was crying.
“His and his family’s gesture doesn’t surprise me, but the gift itself did surprise me — I was happy enough with the shirt!”
The van also came with its own dedication: the word “Gracias!” next to a picture of a spider and its web.
There was little doubt, then, about Varas’ role in Alvarez’s career — and he now works for River Plate soccer schools around South America — but the story of how exactly the club got their hands on el Arana is a little more complex.
The facts are that in November 2015, when he was 15, he played at a tournament in Embalse, two and a half hours away. There, he was spotted by Alfredo Alonso, a long-time “captador” (recruiter) of young Argentinian footballers, who was then working for Argentinos Juniors, another side from Buenos Aires.
Advertisement
For one reason or another, Alonso spoke to his friend and former colleague, Gabriel Rodriguez, himself a renowned captador, and rather than joining Argentinos Juniors, Alvarez was duly snapped up by River, a few miles to the north.
“I was looking for a goalkeeper, actually, but I saw him and he dazzled me,” Alonso tells The Athletic. “The way he played, the way he moved the ball. He moved from a deeper role to the attack, he played all over.
“He’ll fit in in England, with this Viking Haaland; they’re going to make a hell of a duo, because Julian provides the football and the other is an animal in the area.
“After I saw him, I asked Argentinos Juniors if they could bring him in and give him a bed so he could have a week on trial, but they couldn’t afford it. I worked a lot at River. At that point I wasn’t there, but I have a great friend, Gabriel Rodriguez, who’s one of the best recruiters in Argentina. I told him, ‘I have this player but he can’t get in at Argentinos. He’s a crack, it would be a disgrace to lose him’. He went to River, he played on trial and Gabriel told me, ‘He is a crack, Alfredo’, and they signed him.”
Foglia tells it slightly differently.
“Alfredo called me to see if he could take him to Argentinos,” he says. “I told him no, because Julian didn’t want to go — he wanted to go to River. So Alfredo called Gabriel Rodriguez and said he couldn’t take him to Argentinos Juniors, and that River shouldn’t miss out.”
Rodriguez is the youth football coordinator at River Plate, with 39 years of experience in Argentine top-flight football. As well as discovering the club’s current manager Marcelo Gallardo when he was a 12-year-old midfielder, he brought through Pablo Zabaleta, Hernan Crespo, Manuel Lanzini and Erik Lamela, among many others. He vouches for Alonso, and admits he had to be creative when he approached Alvarez’s father about the move.
Advertisement
“Alfredo told me Julian’s level, I took the phone number and I called his father,” Rodriguez tells The Athletic. “I told him who I was, and to be honest, I had to tell a little lie. I said that a captador from River Plate had seen him and we were offering him a week to come and get to know the club, where he would stay, to welcome him, to offer him a bed and also to give him an idea of what River can offer away from football in terms of schooling, which he was very enthusiastic about.”
Four years after returning from that trip to Spain with Real Madrid, Alvarez had decided he was ready to leave Calchin.
“In reality, the only thing that was missing for Julian to go to River was his own decision, for him to say, ‘This is my moment’, and he decided that in 2015,” Foglia says.
Others quickly shared the view that it was indeed his moment.
“He showed me in 10 minutes — just 10 minutes — that he had what it takes to be signed by River Plate,” Rodriguez says.
“He has a great panorama of the game and I think this is his biggest virtue. We say here in Argentina that a player understands the game, that before they receive the ball, they already know where their team-mate is positioned, they already know what they want to do before they get the ball. Not every player has that but for Julian, that is something that stands out.
“And he is a player with very, very explosive acceleration, he leaves rivals in his wake very easily.”
Alvarez started in the youth ranks at the beginning of 2016 and didn’t impress so much immediately, but Rodriguez describes his rise since then as “giddy”. A trip to the United States in 2018 to contest the Dallas Cup, which hosts youth teams from some of the biggest clubs around the world, propelled his career forwards.
“Julian had a great tournament, scored a lot of goals, and this helped us reach the final against Flamengo (of Brazil), which we won 1-0,” Rodriguez says. “When we returned, the type of opportunities that every kid dreams of were open to him.
Advertisement
“It was where he got some confidence, to feel decisive, because really he’s an introvert. I’m not saying that he’s timid or withdrawn, but he’s a very respectful and well-behaved kid who’s just not capable of causing problems, not just for the manager but for any other player. He’s an exemplary person in that respect.
“Maybe he didn’t want to be the main man, he never looked for that, he was always a team player. But after that tournament, he realised his qualities and what he could offer on the pitch, and his confidence grew from there.”
Matias Manna, now part of Argentina manager Lionel Scaloni’s coaching staff, has got to know Alvarez well over the past few years.
“He doesn’t believe that he is a crack,” Manna tells The Athletic. “He doesn’t go through life thinking he’s a superstar.
“His face is always a picture of happiness. He’s the same as when he used to play on Saturdays in the River youth teams.”
Sensing things needed to be pushed along, Rodriguez, given his stature in Argentinian football and his role in starting Gallardo’s own career, was able to speak to the River boss and reinforce just how highly he rated Alvarez. Late in the 2018 season, a few months after that Dallas Cup win, he made his senior debut at the age of 18.
In his first two full seasons, the kid scored a pretty unremarkable 12 goals in 48 games, but then suddenly burst into life in 2021, scoring 24 times in 46 appearances, including 18 in 21 in the league. This season, by the time he departed for Manchester just under a month ago, he had 17 in 23.
At the end of last year, with Alvarez already established as the best striker in Argentina, Gallardo reflected on his breakthrough.
“It is difficult to determine when he clicked, but processes are called processes for a reason,” the River Plate manager said. “He went through many situations because he was young, and your opponents target you when they know you’re in your peak form.
Advertisement
“Today, after three years of working with us, without accelerating his development and giving him too much responsibility, which could do him a lot of damage, he is showing the kind of player he is.
“He picked up a lot of things to get to where he is today, with a very good head on his shoulders, maturity, and a level of football and physicality that is remarkable.”
In January, thanks in no small part to the insistence of Joan Patsy, City’s man on the ground in Buenos Aires, a deal was struck to take Alvarez to the Etihad.
Again, there are two versions.
In England, the fee is said to be closer to £14million ($16.8m). In Argentina, it is £20million, a figure that ensured River Plate would receive the full amount of Alvarez’s $20million buy-out clause after taxes and other fees (including $1m to Atalaya) were deducted.
He remained on loan at River until the English summer and continued to shine, the highlight being a double hat-trick in an 8-1 Copa Libertadores win over Alianza Lima of Peru in late May.
“Julian plays every game as if it is his first, and that is infectious,” Gallardo said in June, and he was emotional a month later when the player finally departed for England.
“It was Julian’s last match and I told him, ‘It is a source of enormous pride to have coached you, to share these years of growth’.”
City’s South American operation urged their Manchester counterparts to take a close look at him before the deal was struck, and it was agreed that he would be a contender for the first team. In the months since his signing, Guardiola is said to have been more and more excited by Alvarez’s abilities, and he impressed in his first days of pre-season, with coaches impressed by his hold-up play, believing that his upbringing in the often-physical Primera Division back home must have helped.
Advertisement
“Julian was incredible,” Guardiola said of the striker’s debut against Mexican side Club America on City’s US tour last month. “Defensively, he is quite like Gabriel Jesus.
“Gabriel is probably the best but he is close to him in aggression, and how intuitive he is — he makes the runs — and with the ball, he’s absolutely brilliant. He can keep the ball and you can link with him without a problem.
“We have the feeling we signed a top-class young player for the next years to come and we are delighted.”
Alvarez said at his City unveiling that he can contribute on either wing, although in Argentina the expectation is that he will strike up a formidable partnership with Haaland, perhaps by coming in from wide to link up with the big Norwegian. Guardiola, presumably, will find a way to make it happen.
“He reminds me of the best complementary strikers, he can fit into any system,” Manna says. “Maybe he is not as strong holding up the ball, but he can be similar to Jose Maria Bakero when he played with Romario at Barcelona, for example.”
There is a note of caution from Rodriguez, and it should not be forgotten that the step up from Argentina’s top flight to the Premier League is considered huge.
“There will be a period of adaptation. Don’t forget that he is very young. Your country is not like Argentina, where we are accustomed to throwing players onto the field at precocious ages to play in the Primera, where they debut at 16 years old,” Rodriguez says.
“In England, he will play with so many stars with a lot of experience. It is not easy for a youngster. He will also have to get used to the tactical plans that the coach will ask of him.”
The famous captador does believe, though, that Alvarez will continue to grow in Manchester, particularly alongside Haaland.
“At River, he has been very isolated in attack,” Rodriguez says, “almost as the only striker, and that perhaps did not allow him to play and show his greatest asset, which is that panorama he has of the field, of understanding the game and being able to start a few meters further back, so he can burst through and make that final decision to either shoot or assist.
Advertisement
“At Manchester City, with a player like Haaland, he will surely play as a second striker and be very decisive.”
Referees of the Premier League, keep your eyes peeled for a spider.
(Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
