Mario Rivas has been a pretty solid player for Real Madrid this preseason. He has played a lot of minutes under Jose Mourinho as a centre-back, and even scored a pretty impressive goal the other day.
Only 18 years old, Rivas is currently playing for Castilla, which is highly unusual since there is a separate team for the under-19s.
His talent is very much there, and the player has not looked out of place whenever he has played for the first team.
Rivas is a very solid presence in the back. His on-the-ball abilities are pretty good, and he is a solid defender who plays everything by the book.
It just seems to me that he is such a Nacho Fernandez-type player. The build for both players is quite similar. He is a very young player who presumably loves Real Madrid and wants to have a career at the club. And a player who was given his first minutes for the first team by none other than Jose Mourinho.
Rivas looks to have higher potential than Raul Asencio, who is currently a first-team player. And it's just the way that both Nacho and Rivas play very similarly to each other.
Rivas is great on the ball, just like Nacho, and despite Nacho not being the tallest, he is still a very solid physical presence at the back and loves to go up and pressure strikers into giving the ball away.
Mario Rivas has a lot of potential - more than people give him credit for
Rivas, in the last few games for Real Madrid's first team, has done exactly that. He doesn't look fazed by any opportunity that's given to him, and he just loves to have the ball and pass it around, which is also something that Nacho was really good at.
Obviously, Nacho is the better player at the moment, but Rivas is still very young, and he can improve to be a player like him.
Whether he actually accepts a role like Nacho, where you'd have to sit on the bench for long stretches of the season and then play minutes when a first-teamer gets injured, that is a completely different debate.
But the way they play and the love that they have for Real Madrid, as well as the way they've come up the ranks at the club, are very similar.
You would rather play at a club like Real Madrid as a substitute than play for a second-division club or a low-tier top-division club regularly. Whatever is going on in Rivas' mind and whether he will actually get those opportunities in the first place remains to be seen.
But he is a very talented player, and I'm sure Mourinho would love to see more of him before he makes a decision on whether he would want Rivas to play for the first team or not.
He did say Rivas is a bit too raw at the moment, but things can change rapidly for young players at Real Madrid. Raul Asencio used to be a very average player at Castilla, and then he ended up being a senior player within a season or so of joining.
So with things like that, no one can really know what will happen, but it just seems right for Rivas to play as much as he has. Hopefully, he continues to play well for the first team, and gets opportunities later on in the season as well.
Add us as a preferred source on Google