Chelsea have signed Villarreal striker Nico Jackson for around €38m this summer, despite him never putting together an entire season of consistent performance. But that is no doubt because they feel is ceiling is near the very top.
Jackson was a Villarreal B player two seasons ago, and only really found form in the final couple of months of the season. In the end, he finished 12 goals and 4 assists in 26 La Liga appearances. More pertinently, during those final stages, he looked unstoppable.
Guardian writer Sid Lowe spoke to Jackson’s former manager at Villarreal B, Miguel Alvarez, who highlighted a similar feeling the first time he saw Jackson play.
“I remember perfectly the first time I saw him with the juvenil you could immediately see that he was a level above,” says Miguel Álvarez, the coach soon entrusted with Jackson’s development in the B team. “He was superior to the rest, like a man playing against boys.”
The story goes that Villarreal owner Fernando Roig spent just a few minutes watching him in a friendly with their under-19 team before he gave the order to sign Jackson. He was also on the verge of a €25m move to Bournemouth in January, before a failed medical scuppered that move.
“He’s very special, different. When he takes off he’s very hard to stop and you can’t knock him off the ball,” Alvarez continues.
“He had that daring. He didn’t care who was in front of him, he would always take them on. He didn’t have the instinct for scoring goals he has now but he created a lot of chances.”
Jackson used to be used as a winger, but excelled when he was placed centrally, first by Unai Emery, and then by Quique Setien.
“Physically he is a machine but that position requires stamina, constant up and down. Above all, though, it takes him away from the areas where he can do real damage: the last 30 metres. We played him as a second striker and he was superb. We went up and in a few months he was in the first team.”
Lowe admits that Jackson is still raw, and lacks some of the fundamentals that others his age might, but points out that Jackson’s own agency believe he is only operating at around 30% of his potential.
“Nicolas played in the street. In academies, we teach them to understand the game, but football is an open sport where of the 10 things a coach talks about, one happens. Sometimes I think we make players who are robots. When it’s all mechanised, it limits them and in certain scenarios, they can’t find solutions. Who changes the game when it is tight? The player with something else. He can do that. He is going to fit well in England.”
Lowe and Alvarez’s analyses certainly fit with what Jackson has shown so far, sometimes unorthodox, but of late, highly effective. With the extra space available in the Premier League, Jackson should be empowered to exploit it with his power and pace. If he can retain his finishing touch from the final stages of last season, he could become a fearsome forward for Chelsea.
