The promising white midfielder makes his debut as a goalscorer for Real Madrid in the Club World Cup.
Sergio Arribas is a Real Madrid youth player who plays for Castilla and is part of the generation that won the UEFA Youth League for the first time in the history of the merengue club. There are names like Luis López, Miguel Gutiérrez, Sergio Santos, Morante, Pablo Román, Sintes, Salazar or Sergio Arribas that have gone down in history.
The player is one of the best in the Primera RFEF, where Raúl González Blanco’s men play, and he never tires of scoring goals, leading many to talk about him as one of the first-team alternatives.
Ancelotti has given him a chance at the Club World Cup, just two minutesbut he has put pressure on them for taking advantage of it to score his first goal with the white shirt against Al-Ahly, the final 1-4 in the semi-final of the tournament.
ALL ABOUT AL-AHLY VS. REAL MADRID OF THE CLUB WORLD CUP 2023
The Youth League title had eluded Real Madrid several times and it was one of the current accounts held by La Fábrica, the name by which the white club’s lower categories are known. The merengue team had reached the finals in 3 of the 6 previous editions, but the title resisted. Prestigious homegrown players who now shine in elite football, such as Óscar Rodríguez, Fede Valverde or Borja Mayoral, were left behind at the gates of glory.
It wasn’t until 2020 that Real Madrid secured the long-awaited title at the hands of Raúl González Blanco’s Juvenil. It was not easy, as the whites saw the competition stopped in March due to the corona virus when they had to face Juventus in the round of 16. In addition, the team’s coach, Daniel Poyatos, announced that he would be leaving his post to make the leap into professional football at Panathinaikos. The club chose the legendary Raúl González Blanco, coach of Real Madrid Castilla, to take charge of the team at the resumption in Nyom. The bet was a winner and the meringues took the title after beating la vecchia signora, Salzburg and Benfica.
Arribas, the first of the golden generation to take the plunge
Sergio Arribas was the first to make his official debut at Real Madrid. Zinedine Zidane called him up for his 2020-2021 LaLiga debut against Real Sociedad and he ended up playing his first minutes with the elite without having made his debut for Castilla practically before. It was the award presented to him by the French coach after being part of the whites’ atypical pre-season, marked by the coronavirus, the impossibility of playing friendlies and absences due to national team matches.
Before that, he was key in his team’s European victory, as he dished out 5 assists, including one in the final, and scored 3 goals in the 10 games he played in the Youth League. Particularly memorable was his quarter-final performance against Inter when he split the 3 assists among the three goals his team scored.
The 21-year-old midfielder has been wearing white all his life having joined the club in 2012 from the lower divisions of Leganés when he was just a youngster. Since then he has set fire to all the podiums until he stood out with his left foot at Real Madrid Castilla.
At only 173 centimeters Arribas is not the tallest but he is one of the fastest and he always comes a second ahead of his rival to have the advantage in actions and although he is not a striker his left foot has a good relationship with the goal as you step on the field. In a football that may have gotten too physical, Arribas is of an expansive sort: a dribbler who moves well between the lines and who dominates the final pass.
Having been crowned King of Europe with Real Madrid’s youth team, Arribas already knows what it’s like to step into the elite and the club protected him with a contract until 2023 which he extended until 2025. Still, his place at Real Madrid is Castile with Raul.
In the Club World Cup, his debut with Ancelotti
Although Zidane gave him the alternative in the 2020-21 season, in which he played in several League and Champions League matches, Carlo Ancelotti did not include him in the following season, 2021-2022, in which Madrid won the League and Champions.
In 2022-23, he hasn’t given him any minutes until this Club World Cup, where he made his debut in style.
Source: Goal
Gregory Robert is a sports aficionado and a writer for “Social Bites”. He provides in-depth coverage of the latest sporting events and trends, offering a unique and knowledgeable perspective on the world of sports.