“Wildcard”, “a street player”, “different from what there is now”. These are some of the descriptions you hear when speaking to people who know Bryan Gil and his game well.
“Watching him is like travelling back in time,” as one observer in Spain has put it — encompassing both the mop-top hairdo that earned him the nickname “the Beatle of Barbate” and his dribble-heavy left-footed left-winger profile that recalls an earlier age.
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Even his name — pronounced Bryan Hill — sounds like the sort of name you might hear popping up on an early Premier League Years episode for a manager who’s just been sacked by Oldham Athletic.
Gil though is by no means some sort of novelty act. He is extremely intelligent and effective, and considered one of Spain’s most exciting prospects alongside Barcelona’s Pedri, who starred at Euro 2020, and Ansu Fati. There are shades of Jack Grealish in the improvisational way he plays. A sort of tiki-taka antidote.
Aged 20, Gil has already been capped three times by Spain and is currently in Tokyo representing his country at the Olympics. Once Spain’s tournament is over — the final is on August 7, a week before the Premier League season starts — Gil will head to London to link up with his new team-mates.
One of those will be Sergio Reguilon, who The Athletic revealed last week had spoken to Gil about joining Spurs. The pair played together at Sevilla during the 2019-20 season, and the prospect of them linking up on the left-hand side together is an extremely exciting one. On that flank is predominantly where Gil has played in his career, but there is an expectation that he will develop into a more versatile option and be able to play off the right (as he did at times last season) and through the centre. Head coach Nuno Espirito Santo should now have plenty of attacking options this season, and felt Gil would give the side an extra dimension.
There was more on how the deal came about in The Athletic’s report last week, but the upshot is that Tottenham have landed an extremely exciting, talented youngster on a five-year deal for around £21 million plus Erik Lamela.
How good a purchase it is will only become clear in the coming months and years, but Sevilla’s supporters are extremely disappointed to have lost a player who’s been with the club since he was 11.
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On the flipside, Tottenham fans should be very excited.
This is what they’re getting and how we got to the point of Monday’s announcement.
It’s easy to watch Gil and think of him as an ephemeral, flighty winger — but he’s always been extremely dedicated and hardworking alongside all of the talent. Even before joining Sevilla there’s a story of him as a child when he had to miss the final game of the season for Barbate CF because it clashed with his First Communion. Gil’s body was in the church, but his mind was elsewhere — spending most of the day on the phone trying to find out what the score was and offering his team-mates encouragement.
At that point, Gil, or indeed anyone from Barbate, emerging as an elite footballer would have seemed unlikely. It is after all a footballing outpost, a small fishing town of roughly 22,000 inhabitants in Cadiz with barely any famous players to speak of. It’s around 150km from Seville, but the word quickly spread to both big clubs in the city, Sevilla and Real Betis, that this was a special player worth pursuing.
In the end it was Sevilla who acted more decisively and signed 11-year-old Gil. There were still big obstacles in his way though. His father Alfonso had been hit hard by the economic crisis of the late 2000s and, unemployed, could barely afford to drive his son the 300km round trip each day so he could train with his new club. In the end, Sevilla offered to pay the costs of the petrol, while Alfonso helped out around the club as a makeshift plumber, gardener, and electrician — whatever needed doing, really. As soon as Gil could afford it, he moved his parents and brother to Seville.
But to get to that point, Gil had to prove he had the talent and mentality to make it as a professional.
It didn’t take long.
Soon after joining, Gil was put up against a physically imposing defender in training to test his mettle. “We had a very tall and very strong boy,” Gil’s first coach at Sevilla Ernesto Chao told Spanish newspaper Marca earlier this year. “We called him The Russian because he looked like Ivan Drago, the one from Rocky IV. His name was even Ivan! Bryan led him a merry dance. He began to dribble one way and then the other, The Russian looked to one side but the ball would just come out on the other… it was like, ‘Come on!’ — just like he does it now.”
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Soon after, Gil shone at a youth tournament to such an extent that the Juventus representatives there were going crazy asking who this mop-haired winger was. “He made them look shit,” as one witness put it. Such is Fabio Paratici’s forensic knowledge of his team and potential youth signings that Spurs’ new managing director of football, then at Juve, most likely remembered it as he negotiated to sign the player last week, almost a decade on.
Back then, Sevilla’s coaches wanted to tough Gil up so they made him train with older kids. Gil welcomed the challenge and asked his opposite full-backs to be as robust as possible. He was and is extremely tough. “He is brave,” Chao says. “He always wants the ball and to take on defenders. He does it once and asks for the next one, and the next one.” Gil remains someone who will happily take kicks from full-backs, and he doesn’t mind telling his team-mates if he thinks they need to put in more effort.
Gil’s groundedness also stood out to Chao: “He is an excellent boy. I have never heard him speak ill of anyone. No jealousy, no problems. How he is today is the same as the day I saw walk through the door.”
Jose Luis Mendilibar, Gil’s manager last season at Eibar, where David Silva and Xabi Alonso also once spent time on loan, agrees and told Marca in March: “He is very mature for his age. Just like David (Silva), but David was quieter. Bryan is more lighthearted, but very down to the earth. And with the personality to demand things.”
Gil made his first-team debut for Sevilla in January 2019, and three months later scored sharply in a 5-0 win over Rayo Vallecano to become the first player born in the 21st century to register a La Liga goal. He joined Leganes on loan the following January for the second half of the 2019-20 season, and scored a well-taken volley from a tight angle against Real Madrid last July during Project Restart.
Gil had made the step up to elite-level football, but he was doing so with the same freedom of expression that had defined his youth days. At Eibar last season, where as a loanee he registered four goals and three assists for a team that was relegated, Gil was a shining light. “Watching Eibar last season was entertaining because Bryan Gil was involved,” says Spanish football expert and regular on the Totally Football Show European edition Alvaro Romeo. “He managed to catch everyone’s eye despite playing for a club that offered little going forward. He is a very entertaining player because he tries to go at the full-back or central defender in every action. He is relentless in trying to dribble past you.”
Even playing for a struggling team like Eibar, which often meant dropping deep to receive the ball, Gil could come alive. There’s a moment against Real Madrid in December for instance when in his defensive third, he receives a pass near the touchline, flicks it past Dani Carvajal and starts a counter. Against his parent club Sevilla in March, Gil glided away from three defenders around the halfway line — the last of them with a nutmeg.
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These kind of tricks made a big impression on Mendilibar, who has since left Eibar. “Bryan is different from what there is now, that football with so much possession,” he said in March. “I don’t like it — every time it happens you take children to watch the game and they get bored! There are no players like Bryan anymore.”
Comparisons with Silva were tempting given the left-footed and Eibar links, but Gil is much more of a classic touchline winger. Now the challenge is for him to improve his right foot — though he did score twice with it in La Liga last season — and develop the sort of positional intelligence that allows players like Silva to roam around the lines behind the central striker. As his first couple of matches have shown, Nuno will want his attackers to be able to rotate between the flanks as well as taking up central positions.
As for other development points, Mendilibar also worked with Gil last season to improve his defensive awareness and willingness to track back — again this is something Nuno will expect from his midfielders.
Looking at the numbers from last season, Gil played predominantly as a left midfielder in a 4-4-2, but has spent a bit of time on the right too, and in advanced positions on each side.
And using data from smarterscout, which measures an individual’s ability in specific metrics out of 99 relative to other players in their position, we can see just how effective Gil is at taking on his man. Gil’s smarterscout rating of 94/99 for one-vs-one dribbling puts him ahead of most of his positional peers.
Taking players on, and carrying with the ball, is something he loves to do. He rates 91/99 for his tendency to do so on a per-touch basis, showing that while he doesn’t get a lot of the ball as players in a more possession-heavy system, he looks to be direct with the ball as often as possible.
By way of comparison, Burnley’s Dwight McNeil and Roma’s Leonardo Spinazzola are a couple of players with similar profiles. Gil has similar tendencies to run with the ball, be relatively quiet from a defensive point of view and not often receive the ball inside the box.
Gil’s rare gifts are part of the reason why Sevilla’s supporters are so sad to see him go — the latest homegrown talent to leave young. Like Jose Antonio Reyes, Sergio Ramos, Alberto Moreno and many others before him. The club feel they can reinvest the money in someone a bit more experienced who is instantly ready to help them challenge Barcelona and the Madrid clubs for the La Liga title this season and that, with only two years left on his contract, now was the time to sell.
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“You can see why the Sevilla fans are so sad,” says the Seville-based journalist and editor of Football Espana Alan Feehely. “Gil is able to express himself on the pitch and looks like he could be about to explode. He’s been compared to Grealish and I see that in the way they’re not built for the current age of systems and processes. They’re wildcards. But if he is with the right coach he could do really well.
“In Spain, everyone has earmarked him along with Pedri and Fati as being the stars of a new era of Spanish football.”
As well as his technical gifts, it’s Gil’s attitude and focus that have separated him from his peers. “Once young players have the ability then it’s about the mentality and he has that in spades,” says Feehely.
“His mentally above all is great. Like Pedri, he’s completely fearless and alongside that he’s aggressive, combative, tenacious, and is no respecter of reputations. It’s unusual to be that tenacious as ostensibly a fleet-footed winger.
“There’s lots to develop and improve but Gil has so much potential. He’s such an exciting player for fans — hence Sevilla’s supporters being so gutted he’s moving on.”
Off the pitch, Gil is relaxed and calm, said to sit nicely between being laid back without appearing too relaxed. He remains humble from the days when his family couldn’t afford the petrol to take him from home to Seville, with little interest in the trappings of fame and the stereotypical lifestyle of a footballer. He’s determined, softly-spoken, and simply loves playing football. That commitment impressed his team-mates at Leganes, Eibar and Sevilla — including Reguilon, who he will now link up with again.
As with any young player, there are plenty of rough edges Nuno and Spurs will have to smooth out but, for the moment, this is a signing Tottenham fans should feel no shame in getting excited about.
Gil is fearless, unencumbered by past failures and something a bit different. And after a difficult, sometimes monotonous, couple of years, that’s everything the new Spurs should be about.
(Top photo: Pablo Morano/BSR Agency/Getty Images)
