Don’t pin all your hopes on Alexis Mac Allister saving the Albion season
Alexis Mac Allister has landed in Brighton. After the shock of a surprise work permit being granted and a successful bidding process to Boca Juniors so that we could actually sign our own player, Mac Allister is in England and could make his Albion debut away at Sheffield United.
Lord knows that Graham Potter’s side could do with some inspiration. Brighton haven’t won in 2020. In four winnable fixtures against opponents who were all below us in the table at the start of January, we’ve picked up three points and zero wins.
Relegation looms and while Potter mutters after every game “We’ll learn from this” or “We’ll take the positives,” every Albion fan can see two real problems – performances haven’t been good enough over the past six weeks. And even when performances were good enough, we didn’t score enough goals.
It’s easy to see why Mac Allister’s arrival has generated such excitement. Here we have a genuine number 10 who has starred over the last six months for Boca Juniors, one of the most famous names in world football.
Boca were gutted to lose him. South America is admittedly a continent like no other when it comes to footballing emotions, but Boca fans were so distraught with the Albion recalling him that they wished upon Mac Allister serious injury and religious intervention to end his career. Boca’s president has also taken an absolute hammering for allowing Mac Allister to leave for Brighton.
Watch a YouTube highlight reel of Mac Allister and you’ll see threaded passes and goals scored from outside the box. We’ve pretty much forgotten what a shot from outside the box looks like this season, let alone an actual goal.
He appears to be unlike any other player we’ve got. A pacy, creative forward who can play either on the left of a front three or in the hole behind. Not to mention that he’s a full international with Argentina, albeit it in a couple of friendlies in which Lionel Messi, Sergio Aguero and Angel Di Maria were all absent.
Mac Allister is already being billed on social media as the saviour of our season. Read Twitter and he’s going to set the Premier League alight. Over on Instagram, there’s talk about how a Mac Allister inspired Albion could still make the top 10.
We have been here before of course. So many times. Players decreed the best thing since Colonel Sanders came up with his secret blend of 11 herbs and spices based on nothing more than YouTube videos and sheer hope.
Alireza Jahanbakhsh was the most recent. Brighton fans were crowing from the rooftops about beating Leicester City to his signing for £17m from AZ Alkmaar, despite the fact that none of us had ever seen him play live.
People spent days tracking Jahanbakhsh’s every movement across Europe via Instagram and flights coming into Biggin Hill, like it was a movie from the Taken franchise. All that excitement and all that blind optimism led to zero goals and zero assists in 18 months.
The same thing happened with Jurgen Locadia, another record buy decreed as a player who would set the Premier League alight before he’d been seen in a Brighton shirt.
The fact Locadia has just been loaned to the worst club in the MLS last season tells you everything you need to know about that one.
You might think this is an Amex-era thing, but you’d be wrong. It’s been going on long before the Albion gained a generation of fans who will happily write off proven players like Dale Stephens and Pascal Gross in favour of footballers who’ve never set foot in England before.
In the summer of 2010, Gus Poyet brought in two young Argentinians in Augustin Batipiedi and Cristian Baz. League One versions of Mac Allister, if you like.
Poyet said at the time not to have too big expectations of the duo. “At the moment they are here for a year and they need to prove they are good enough to stay for longer.”
The Albion boss and his assistant Mauricio Taricco knew a thing or two about coming from South America to Europe of course. Needless to say, not many Albion fans heeded the words of warning from Poyet and once Baz and Battipiedi had been spotted on YouTube doing things not-too-dissimilar to Mac Allister at an albeit far lower standard, the hype machine went into overdrive.
Which just goes to highlight the dangers of judging a player based on what you can find on the internet before you’ve seen him play live. The beautiful thing about YouTube is that you can splice the footage together to make quite literally anything look good.
Take a Sunday League goalkeeper making 15-20 quality saves and put it into a compilation and they will look like Manuel Neuer, even if they’ve made 50 horrendous mistakes in amongst those stops.
Select a half-decent song from Lilly Allen and you can easily mask the fact that her music is terrible. We were going to make a Mrs Brown’s Boys comparison here, but that’s probably going too far. Anyway, you get the message.
The point is that it’s a risky game for Albion supporters to be pinning so much hope and faith in Mac Allister. This is a young man, 21 years of age, who’s never left Argentina before.
He’s travelling to the other side of the world to a country whose way of live and footballing culture is a million miles away from what he is used to in his homeland.
Most successful South American imports to English football arrive via Europe. The likes of Spain and Italy are seen as halfway houses between Argentina, Brazil and their like and the Premier League, the style and intensity of which is not found anywhere else on the planet.
Not many players come direct from South America and make an instant impact. Di Maria failed in England and he’d had the benefit of seven years with Benfica and Real Madrid prior to rocking up at Manchester United.
It’s asking a lot for a player of Mac Allister’s youth and inexperience to be Brighton’s saviour. He’s already got a tough enough job making the transition from Superliga to Premier League, without the added pressure of Albion fans expecting him to be the man to keep us up.
Having such lofty expectations of a young player who, let’s be honest, none of us actually know much about – let alone how well he is likely to adapt to English football – is a dangerous game.
Fingers crossed, everyone will be reading this article back in 18 months time and laughing at the absurdness of it. Don’t get overexcited by Mac Allister? How ridiculous you’ll all be saying by the summer of 2021 when he’ll have set the Premier League alight, the Albion are in the Europa League and Potter’s new six year deal signed in November 2019 doesn’t look as completely insane as it currently appears.
But don’t expect too much too soon. Mac Allister is a young. He’ll need time to adjust to the Premier League. It’s not down to him to keep us up – and that is why it would be foolish to pin all your hopes on MacAllister saving the Albion this season.
