The ball was dropping into the penalty area from a high, looping cross. Alejandro Garnacho had his back to goal, four yards from the Everton goalkeeper, with the ball arriving at knee height and no time to control it. What happened next — a full overhead bicycle kick, struck cleanly through the ball with the outside of the right boot, curving into the far corner from fifteen yards — happened in approximately one quarter of a second. It was November 26, 2023, at Old Trafford, and in that quarter of a second, a nineteen-year-old from Madrid won the Premier League Goal of the Month, the Premier League Goal of the Season, and ultimately the FIFA Puskas Award for the best goal scored anywhere in the world in 2023. There are goals, and then there are moments that stop football cold and force it to look at itself. The Garnacho bicycle kick against Everton was the second kind.
Alejandro Garnacho Ferreyra was born on July 1, 2004, in Madrid. His father is Spanish, his mother Argentine. He grew up with both identities, playing football in the Spanish capital from childhood with the dual inheritance of Argentine passion and Spanish technical formation. At a young age, he joined the youth system at Getafe, and in 2015, moved to Atlético Madrid's academy — one of the best youth development structures in Spain — where he spent five years developing the pace, dribbling, and direct attacking style that would become his signature. Manchester United's scouts identified him in 2020 and moved quickly: in October of that year, Garnacho arrived at United's academy, eventually winning the FA Youth Cup in 2022 and the Jimmy Murphy Young Player of the Year award — a trophy previously won by George Best, Ryan Giggs, and Paul Scholes.
His senior debut came in May 2022 — a brief appearance under then-manager Ralf Rangnick — but it was under Erik ten Hag, who took charge in the summer of 2022, that Garnacho's first-team career properly began. Ten Hag trusted him with starts from early in the 2022–23 season, and Garnacho responded with performances that made the trust look completely justified. He was fast — genuinely quick, with an acceleration that defenders struggled to contain — and he was direct in a way that the Premier League's most gifted attackers typically are: not merely quick but purposeful, always running towards goal rather than away from it. His ability to operate effectively on either flank, combined with a finishing instinct that improved markedly in his first full season, established him as one of the most dangerous wide forwards in England by the time he was eighteen.
The question of international allegiance — Spain or Argentina — was resolved when he chose the Albiceleste. He made his Argentina debut in June 2023, joining a squad that still included Lionel Messi, Di María, and the core of the 2022 World Cup champions. For a nineteen-year-old, stepping into that dressing room requires a particular kind of psychological assurance. Garnacho had it. In 2024, he was part of the Argentina squad that won the Copa América in the United States, adding a first major international honour to his growing collection.
The bicycle kick goal defined his public identity in a way that occasionally frustrated coaches who wanted to discuss his broader development. But the goal was not a fluke — it was the expression of an athlete whose physical gifts and technical confidence had combined into something genuinely unusual. The technique required to execute a proper overhead kick — the timing, the contact, the spatial awareness to calculate the angle while completely inverted — is among the most difficult in football. Garnacho did it at nineteen, in the Premier League, and made it look effortless. Manchester United sold him to Chelsea in the winter of 2025 for a fee reported at around €55 million, with both clubs and the player understanding that the move to a club with Champions League ambitions represented the next phase of a career that was, by any rational measure, just getting started.
He wears the number 11 shirt — Messi's old number at Barcelona — and has spoken openly about his admiration for the Argentine captain. The influence is visible in his play: the low centre of gravity, the explosive change of direction, the preference for running at defenders rather than around them. He is not Messi — no one is — but the desire to play with Messi's ferocity and directness is evident in every performance. For someone twenty years old, still learning what he is capable of, that aspiration points in the right direction.
"That goal against Everton — it was one of the best goals I have ever seen in person. The technique, the timing. Extraordinary."— Erik ten Hag, Manchester United manager, November 2023
"I want to be the best version of myself. I watch Messi, I watch Cristiano — I study how they work. One day I want to be at that level."— Alejandro Garnacho, 2023
| Player | Year | Age | Goal Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alejandro Garnacho 2024 | 2024 | 19 | Bicycle kick overhead vs Everton, Premier League |
| Marcin Oleksy | 2023 | 29 | Overhead kick while playing on a prosthetic leg |
| Erik Lamela | 2022 | 29 | Rabona finish, North London derby |
| Éder Militão | 2021 | 23 | Volley vs Valencia, La Liga |
| Marta | 2018 | 32 | Dribble and lob, Women's World Cup qualifier |
"The bicycle kick was perfect. The technique, the contact, the angle — there is no better way to score a football goal. He is nineteen years old."— Gary Neville, Sky Sports, November 2023
The Bicycle Kick — Overhead Goal vs Everton (2023)
Garnacho — Manchester United Best Goals & Skills
Garnacho matters because he is an anomaly in the contemporary English football environment. The Premier League has become increasingly focused on physical attributes — speed, pressing intensity, aerial ability — in its recruitment. Garnacho has all of those, but what distinguishes him is something older and harder to systematise: an innate desire to produce the spectacular. The bicycle kick against Everton was not a trained response; it was a moment of athletic instinct that most players, at any age, would have resolved by letting the ball bounce. He didn't let it bounce.
For Argentine football, he represents a genuinely novel profile: a player formed entirely in Spain's tactical and technical tradition, who then chose to bring that formation to the Albiceleste. The combination of Argentine attacking mentality with European tactical discipline is exactly the blend that made the Argentine national team so effective under Scaloni. Garnacho is the next generation of that combination, younger and, physically, faster than most of his predecessors.
His transfer to Chelsea in 2025 signals the next phase of his development — a player who has already demonstrated the capacity to produce world-class moments now needing to demonstrate the consistency that separates excellent footballers from generational ones. At twenty, he has time. He has talent. He has the goal that made the world stop and look. The rest is a question of what he chooses to make of the next decade.