When Racing Santander signed Gustavo Puerta, Chema Aragón said it felt like the club had won the lottery.
At the time, it sounded like just another sound bite from a sporting director selling a new signing, a club talking up a player they had worked hard to get. Less than a year later, with Racing Santander promoted to LaLiga and with Puerta’s consistently brilliant performances at the World Cup, it looks like an understatement.
Puerta looks every bit the modern central midfielder capable of surviving almost any tactical context.
The 23-year-old has confirmed at international level what many suspected during his 12 months with Racing Santander and probably what made him go relatively unnoticed until now. He is not easy to define because he can do a bit of everything. He can run, duel, receive, carry, combine, press and protect. He can play as a 5, as an 8, to the right, to the left, deeper or slightly higher.
Puerta summed it up neatly when asked about his role with Colombia.
“The Profe asks me to be very versatile. He puts me on the right, on the left, as the 5… He wants me to duel when it’s time to duel and play when it’s time to play.”
He was second (145) in offering himself to receive the ball inside the opposition team’s shape for Colombia after striker Luis Suarez and no Colombian received the ball under pressure more than him (116) during the tournament. No Colombian player applied more defensive pressures (147) or direct defensive pressures (30) than Puerta during the tournament.
He can play when he needs to and does not shy away from a duel. That was also true at Racing. And this is what makes Racing such an interesting team and the platform from which Puerta had built the confidence to go and boss the midfield on the biggest stage of all.
José Alberto López’s side won promotion to LaLiga with a fluid, relationist style of football that drew attention far beyond the usual confines of Spain’s second tier. For the uninitiated, Racing often used a 4-2-3-1 on paper, with Andrés Martín given freedom to come inside from the right, Iñigo Vicente drifting into central areas to pull strings, and Peio Canales offering another attack-minded presence between the lines. The entire point isn’t the starting shape but the movement around it and the connections made when players are given the freedom to interpret space.
José Alberto explained that distinction himself when speaking to Sky Sports.
For me, the nuance is important. Positional play is more about structuring the team through predefined spaces and very precise occupation of zones. Our ‘relationist’ approach focuses more on the interactions between players than on fixed positions. We don’t give up on structure because we want balance, but we aim to be a team that can adapt, move and create advantages through connections, not just through positioning. In the end, it is less about where you are and more about who you connect with and why.
That is exactly the kind of environment that reveals Puerta’s value. Prior to landing in Cantabria for the ridiculously low fee of €3.5 million, the 22-year-old had never quite fit in. Leverkusen bought him from Bogotá FC because, as ever, the German side’s eye for talent allowed them to see the raw tools of a potential top-level player. From there he went on loan to Nuremberg where he barely played and then to Hull City.
For the Leverkusen scouts, they saw the raw tools but every manager until then wasn’t quite sure of where to put him. Ruben Sellés, who arrived at Hull when Puerta was there says, “we found ourselves a very combative player with a real willingness to learn.”
Little by little, he earned his place and he ended up directing our play despite the fact we were fighting for relegation, the play went through his head and his boots. He’s an all-round midfielder - todocampista. He likes to move the ball, he knows how to play one and two-touch football, play in tight spaces, he can arrive in the second line. And then on a defensive level, he is remarkably committed, really aggressive when he presses.
That description sounds impossible and almost unnecessary. There’s no way he can do all of these things at a high level. If you’re everything at once, you’re nothing in reality. But the premium is no longer just on specialists, it is on midfielders who can survive across phases.
The Perfect Modern Midfielder
The modern midfielder is becoming harder to define.
In Scouted’s discussion on Mapping the future of midfield, Jon Mackenzie makes a useful point: “We’re not really thinking about footballers having profiles or skillsets anymore. We’re thinking about footballers having skillsets within phases.”
That feels like the right way to think about Gustavo Puerta.
Formations and player profiles have always been attempts to simplify something much messier. But the map is not the territory. A player might be listed as a 6, an 8 or a 10, but the game rarely asks him to be one thing for 90 minutes. It asks different things in different moments. You have to receive under pressure, cover a transition, jump to press, carry through midfield, combine in tight spaces, protect the centre, arrive in the box, slow the game down or speed it up. His heatmap from last season with Racing Santander confirms his ability to ‘get himself about’.
Two stats from his domestic campaign stand out too. He had 8.6 progressive carries, second in the Segunda last seaosn among players with 900+ minutes. And he won the ball back 6.4 times per game, fourth in the division among the same group of players – an excellent number given he played in one of the most attacking teams in the league.
The need to interpret the phases and what is required has become even more obvious in the current era, where matches are increasingly shaped by transition, pressing and controlled chaos. Andoni Iraola’s Bournemouth are one Premier League example of that shift. They were a team built to provoke chaos, embrace it and play within those conditions. In that kind of football, fixed positional labels become less useful. What matters is not simply where a midfielder starts, but what he can do when the game changes state.
That is a long way from the cleaner midfield map we associate with Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona. Sergio Busquets at the base, Xavi controlling rhythm beside and ahead of him, Andrés Iniesta operating closer to the final third. The roles weren’t perfectly captured by naming their profile either, of course, but the general structure was still easy to understand. The map reflected the territory more clearly.
Modern football is less forgiving. The athletic demands are higher, the spaces open and close faster, and midfielders are judged not only by what they do in possession but by how quickly they can affect the game when possession changes hands. And every coach or player who talks about Puerta speaks about his ability to ‘interpret’ the game, or understand what is needed in any situation… and then go and do it.
That is why the cost of signing all-phase midfielders has exploded. Declan Rice is the obvious example. He is not Toni Kroos or Sergio Busquets, but he is technically secure enough to play in possession, physically dominant enough to affect the game without it, and versatile enough to solve problems across different phases. That is why Arsenal paid so much to sign him from West Ham two summers ago.
He might be lacking top-end speed but he does everything at a sneakily high intensity and he just keeps going. He had the highest average speed among Colombian players during the World Cup (6.63km/h). He also led the team in high-speed running and total distance covered. He just never stops.
That is the version of midfield Gustavo Puerta has shown for Colombia this summer. And it is the version Racing Santander saw before almost anyone else was paying attention.
Football, as we know, tends to move in cycles. This may not be a trend that lasts forever, but we still have not reached the tipping point for clubs searching for this kind of rare talent.
Puerta proved his credentials at Racing last season and revealed to the world that he was ready to assume an even larger role this summer. His release clause is set at around €20 million and, as strange as it might sound, that may one day feel like a bargain.
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