There is a brazen directness to Angeliño that is equally evident when he speaks as when he plays. On the field, he tears up the left flank with pace and precision, the full-back who also happens to be RB Leipzig’s second highest scorer this season. Off it, he speaks with a blunt and often brutal honesty: no punches pulled, no hidden agendas, just calling it as he sees it. Both feel equally refreshing.
Perhaps time alone has allowed him to focus his thoughts. Holed up on his own in his Leipzig home, cut adrift from his family back home in Galicia, the 24-year-old has spent much of his pandemic-enforced downtime watching box sets and pacing the floors. His partner returned to Spain with his young son, whom he misses terribly. “When you live abroad, this is the worst side,” he says. “Not seeing the family. Not being able to go home or have people coming over when you want. The only good thing is playing games.”
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And so for much of the last year, football has been not simply Angeliño’s job, but his release. Uncaged and allowed to run riot on the wing, Angeliño’s boundless, restless energy has been one of the major factors why Leipzig are giving Bayern Munich an almighty fight in this season’s Bundesliga. And why, even with a 2-0 deficit to claw back against Liverpool, they still cannot be counted out in Wednesday night’s Champions League last-16 tie.
It was the promise of freedom – tactical and literal – that convinced Angeliño to trade Manchester City for Leipzig, first on loan and then in a permanent deal signed last month. The player was characteristically unsparing in his criticism of Pep Guardiola for not having the “courage” to give him more of a chance after re-signing him from PSV Eindhoven in the summer of 2019. But he is far happier now under the tutelage of Leipzig’s prodigious 33-year-old coach Julian Nagelsmann, where he has a regular first-team berth and the licence to get forward and finish off attacks.
“It’s the approach he has to the players,” Angeliño replies when asked to explain Nagelsmann’s strengths. “He gave me his trust and confidence since the first day and it was something that gave me a massive push in my career. When someone believes that much in you, and he keeps playing you week in week out, you have to pay back.”
Nagelsmann has said he has already turned down the Real Madrid job and yet it feels inevitable that one of Europe’s super-clubs will manage to prise him away before long. “He’s a great coach,” says Angeliño. “He can coach anywhere he wants. He’s managing a really good team, but imagine what he can do if he has even a better team. He’s so young as a coach.”
View image in fullscreenAngeliño says of his rival full-back: ‘Trent Alexander Arnold [right] with the ball is unbelievable, but sometimes he’s too attacking.’ Photograph: Istvan Derencsenyi/Shutterstock
When Nagelsmann’s Leipzig are on song, there are few teams on the continent you would rather watch: the intelligent movement, the relentless forward momentum, the speed in transition. “Everything we practise is to reach the box as quickly as possible,” he adds. “We want to play offensive football and kill teams with runs in behind. My position is to be as high as possible, and if my position is good I’ll get a chance, or at least put the final ball in.”
Historically, there has perhaps never been a more exciting time to be an elite full-back, a position evolving and mutating before our eyes. Perhaps the most gripping element of Liverpool’s first-leg victory last month was the duel on the flanks between Tyler Adams and Andy Robertson, Angeliño and Trent Alexander-Arnold. “We got behind their full-backs a few times,” says Angeliño. “Their technique is really good. Alexander-Arnold with the ball is unbelievable, but sometimes he’s too attacking. So we have to explore the weakness, get a few more chances like we did in the first game. That was our mistake: we didn’t put them away.”
Angeliño has some sympathy for Liverpool’s travails this season and is wary of the danger they pose. “They didn’t win the Champions League and the league for nothing,” he says. “You can’t be perfect all the time. [Virgil] Van Dijk was very important for them at the back. But every team has their ups and downs. They can beat anyone when they have a good day, and everyone is fit. So we just have to be very focused.”
And yet despite losing the “home” leg 2-0 – although both games have been moved to Budapest for quarantine reasons – Angeliño feels Leipzig are by no means out of the tie. “We gave them two mistakes and a team like Liverpool with their quality up top, they kill you. But we are positive because we played a strong match. There are still 90 minutes to go, and the pressure I would say is more on them than us. We’re still alive.”
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After missing two games with injury, Angeliño is fit and ready to be thrust into the fray. At Leipzig, where he has played the most minutes of any outfield player this season, they have long since accustomed themselves to the Spaniard’s determination to take the field. Before last month’s game against Borussia Mönchengladbach, the club Twitter account announced that Angeliño had been omitted from the squad because of a “minor muscle issue”, only to receive a rebuke from the player himself: “No muscle issue, I’m fit.” (“We’ll discuss it with him, it wasn’t the most clever move,” Nagelsmann wryly observed afterwards.)
But then, when you are in his sort of form, you can scarcely blame him. For a man of just 24, Angeliño is unusually well-travelled: from the Deportivo La Coruña academy to Manchester City, spells in New York, Mallorca and the Netherlands, and now eastern Germany. “It was something that I was looking forward to: being stable in a place,” he says with the contentment of a man who, after a decade on the move, has finally found a place to call home.
