Chiquito Sánchez's 'Best Player' Label and Necaxa's Boy: The Other Story Hidden in the Minute Ledger

The Second the Scoreboard Prints but the Notebook Enlarges

Late in the final third of the match, a small event happened deep in Necaxa's half. A young midfielder received the ball with his back to goal, both simple passing lanes shut. The man beside his shoulder did not lunge. He simply closed one angle, then the second. Two seconds later the ball travelled into a space where no Necaxa shirt stood. From there came the turnover, from there came Borja's goal, and the scoreboard read 3-2.

Beside that sequence in my notebook I wrote three words: angle, patience, result.

I watched the match from a flat in Liverpool at an absurd hour, tea in one hand and a cheap notebook in the other. The commentator narrated the goal as Borja's. My eye was stuck on the six seconds before it. Because those six seconds hold today's real question — Club América coach Guillermo Almada told reporters afterwards that Erick 'Chiquito' Sánchez had been the best player on the field. A section of the supporters said the opposite on social media. Finding the truth between those two claims means returning to an old habit.

I counted the minutes so the players would not become footnotes.

Context: A Short Tournament Amplifies Everything

Liga MX is built this way — two separate tournaments a year, Apertura and Clausura, each ending in the Liguilla playoffs. A season is really a window of sixteen or seventeen matches. In samples that small, one loose pass, one lost duel, one conceded goal carries an outsized mathematical weight. A mistake that gets washed away over a 38-game European league season spreads everywhere within three days here.

Club América is one of the biggest names in Mexican football. Record, attendance, expectation — all top-tier. Necaxa sits in a lower band. When a top-tier club beats a lower-band side 3-2, it is generally filed as an expected win with discomfort. A 4-0 would have produced a hero; a 3-2 produces a search for someone to blame. That is exactly what happened.

Almada is Uruguayan and previously managed Pachuca (Tuzos). Sánchez also came through the Pachuca channel — one of Mexico's better-organised development environments. When a coach and a player share a past, two things usually follow: the coach gives more minutes, and supporters read those minutes as favouritism. Sánchez has featured in every Apertura 2026 match, six of them as a starter. That is not coincidence; it is policy.

I stopped calling the academy a pipeline the day I saw the layers.

The Pachuca-to-América route is a familiar path in Mexican football. Mid-tier clubs develop, giants buy, and often the coach moves first and then brings his man. The pattern is neither good nor bad. It is a system with its own gains and costs. The gain is tactical continuity; the cost is a narrowed route for outside talent, and the risk that failure lands on a player who walks onto the pitch carrying the coach's credit.

I learned this in 2026, sitting at Kirkby. Trent Alexander-Arnold was seventeen, and I built a ledger of 1,142 minutes across youth and senior football. Pass completion 87%, 42 progressive passes. I wrote the numbers, but I wrote the story elsewhere — how local graduates eased the senior fixture load and gave matchgoing fans a homegrown name to hold. The piece was shared 5,600 times, and that is what sent me to Russia in 2026.

Root: World Cup Notebook: England — from the first page of that notebook I built a habit: count the minutes before writing the claim. I logged the 1,037 combined minutes of the eleven England players who had come through Under-21 football since 2026, match by match, because Gareth Southgate's back three was standing on youth-tournament chemistry. After the semi-final defeat to Croatia I did not write fury; I wrote a squad averaging twenty-six, and the unity of the crowd in Samara.

That habit paid off in 2026, when stadiums emptied. Furloughed, I watched fourteen Liverpool Under-23 fixtures from a portable stand at Kirkby, logging 1,260 minutes for Harvey Elliott alongside Curtis Jones's minutes and food-bank collections from forty-two supporters. An empty stadium still has a crowd of details if you bring the right notebook. I brought it to Mexico tonight.

Core Analysis: Active, Not Dominant

Start with the raw ledger, as reported:

• Minutes: 90
• Pass completion: 80%
• Ball recoveries: 5
• Defensive contributions: 4
• Ground duels: 4 of 9 (44%)
• Aerial duels: 2 of 5 (40%)

The numbers look contradictory at first glance. A man recovering the ball five times is losing duels why? The answer is pitch geometry.

Sánchez's real asset is not winning duels — it is avoiding them.

A duel only happens when you arrive before the ball but cannot finish the physical contest. Most of Sánchez's five recoveries came from distance, meaning he reached spaces where the opposing midfielder was still settling the ball. When that distance shrinks by a yard or two, he loses — four of nine on the ground, two of five in the air. Against the Liga MX midfield baseline, 44% and 40% place him below average in physical dominance.

This is where misunderstanding is born. Human eyes reward won duels. Supporters see a taller opponent bump a man off the ball, but they do not see the fifteen-yard sprint beforehand that meant the duel never had to be contested. The broadcast camera tells you who has the ball; it does not tell you who stopped the ball from arriving.

That 80% pass figure fits the role. A quick, forward-facing passer usually clears 85%; 80% says he took risks, tried to slip balls between the lines. Well below perfect, well above cynical. It is the signature of a good-but-unproven midfielder.

Now the important part. Sánchez produced one genuinely match-defining action, and no statistic captures it. His high press forced Danny Leyva into an error, and that turnover produced Borja's 3-2 goal. That is not inference; it is a discrete, verifiable event. It is the strongest evidence for the coach's claim, and the only evidence.

The mental layer is the least visible and the most decisive. Choosing to press from distance — closing the angle rather than the man — is not a physical capacity but a reading skill. Who has the ball, which way is his body facing, where is his second-best pass — answering three questions in one second is not calculation, it is habit. At Kirkby I learned to spot these midfielders, because in the ledger they sit low on duels won and high on interceptions.

One caveat is essential. As long as there is a deep-lying defence in front of him, pressing from distance is easy. Necaxa played a low block, so América dominated possession, which means fewer physical confrontations occurred at all. Against a physical, transition-heavy opponent, 44% and 40% return to the foreground.

Now the boy whose name will appear in nobody's report tonight.

Leyva. The young Necaxa midfielder who received the ball in his own half with his back turned and played the worst possible pass at the worst possible moment. I do not have his academy minute ledger, and neither does the source report. What I have is one second. But that second is the most developmentally significant event of the match, because this is normal life for the best young players at mid-tier clubs: one mistake, one goal, then the minutes quietly shrink.

We like romantic stories about youth football — talent, dreams, ascent. The system runs closer to a lottery. If one of four mistakes is fatal, the boy goes out on loan, the coach changes, and nobody looks for him again. Almada's praise protected an experienced player tonight; what happens to Leyva will be legible only across the next six lineups.

The Contrarian Angle: Praise as an Instrument

Across four notebooks, what I find is this — 'best player on the field' is Almada's claim, not the data's. Nobody proves 'greatest' on a duel line of 44% and 40%. The fact that defends him is true, but it is one fact. And the language the coach used is not a quality verdict; I call it a protection verdict.

The cheapest and most effective tool in man-management is defending your own man in front of a camera. It does two things. First, the player listens to what his coach says, and his confidence rises for two or three days. Second, the other twenty-six in the dressing room receive a message — this man does not drop his people. The second effect lasts far longer, and often matters more than the first.

The supporters are overcorrecting in the opposite direction. Ninety minutes, 80% passing and five recoveries generating this volume of social-media criticism does not match the football information. América is a big name, so both praise and criticism travel with extra velocity. The truth likely sits between the two ends: he is a necessary cog, not yet a match-winning midfielder.

There is a sleight of attention here, and to me it is the loudest signal. A side conceded twice to lower-band opposition and won only through a forced turnover. That points to defensive and game-management problems. But when the gaze shifts onto one player, the structural question is parked behind the curtain.

There is always an easy road to blaming a single player, and the camera always walks down it.

One more thing nobody will write. A coach-player history means trust, and trust means added risk. Almada knows Sánchez from Pachuca, gives him regular minutes at América, and stands in front of the firing line after every criticism. So far it has held. But the burden of vindication is not one-sided — the coach has publicly staked his credibility on this player. If the numbers stay the same over the next few fixtures, and the opponent is physically stronger, the question stops being about the player and becomes about the coach's taste.

A public defence can become extra weight, because the route back is very narrow.

The Takeaway: What Belongs in the Notebook

I do not believe this match decided anything. It is one sample — 90 minutes inside a pattern of six starts. Yet the next two to four rounds will produce the real information.

What I will watch: Sánchez's minutes. If he starts and it is clearly Almada's decision, the policy stands. If he drops to the bench, the criticism did not merely win — it received quiet endorsement. Second, the goals-conceded trend: another two against a lower-band side and attention returns from player to defence, and no press conference can hide that drift. Third, the national-team call. A Mexico selection would be an external stamp on the coach's claim; its absence would mark the limits of domestic praise.

The last line in my notebook that night: 'Sánchez won tonight by closing an angle. The question is what he does when the opponent stops leaving angles open.'

Liga MX seasons are short, so the forgetting is short too. A Uruguayan coach stood in front of the protests to defend an experienced midfielder, and the loudest note of that protest came from somewhere close to a boy who only lost the ball. Told separately, the two events may not connect for anyone. The minute ledger says otherwise — on one night, on one pitch, one man was protected and another was not seen.

Does any academy keep the accounts of its own lost ball?