This article is part of Football FanCast’s In Numbers series, which takes a statistical look at performances, season-long form and reported transfer targets…
All good things must come to an end, as the saying goes.
For Real Madrid, their brilliant unbeaten record from the start of the 2019/20 La Liga season is finally broken and it came courtesy of none other than little Mallorca.
Before the game, not many would’ve predicted this outcome. After all, Los Blancos were first in the table while their Saturday night hosts were fighting to stay out of the relegation zone.
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But now, Zinedine Zidane’s troops have yielded the top of the table to their bitter rivals, Barcelona, who beat Eibar.
And yes, the Frenchman did deploy a somewhat rotated squad but the players who were finally given a chance did not really perform in the way they were supposed to.
One of those players was the 21-year-old striker Luka Jovic, a Serbian forward who arrived in the summer.
Jovic has had a rocky start to his career at the Spanish capital and the 66 minutes he mustered against Mallorca now mean he has just 264 under his name in total; he has started three times in the span of the nine games Real Madrid have played in La Liga so far.
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But if anything, this performance might only make Zidane less willing to pick him.
The young Serbian couldn’t muster a single shot during his stay on the pitch and didn’t deploy any key passes.
As a matter of fact, he was, for the most part, largely invisible against Mallorca, only tallying 29 touches on the night, which was the fifth-lowest on the whole team – including the goalkeeper and the three substitutes that were introduced later in the game.
Jovic really didn’t have a good game but even though he shouldn’t be looking for excuses, it also wouldn’t be too big of a stretch to stay that some of this is on Zidane.
After all, it’s difficult to expect a young player who’s still pretty fresh at the club to perform at the highest level whenever he’s selected, especially when he isn’t allowed any continuity at all.
Being so sporadically picked is definitely not helping him at this stage of his career, while it remains to be seen how long will Zidane tolerate these sub-par performances in the future – which really don’t help his case either.
It feels like six of one and half a dozen of the other, but whichever perspective you view Jovic’s situation from, it’s starting to become a major problem for Real Madrid.
