Álvaro Morata deserves more minutes with Real Madrid. His numbers this season are superb but the competition with Bale, Benzema and Cristiano Ronaldo put him on the bench very often. However, every time he has a chance, he takes it, scoring some important goals in the last minutes, like the one against Villarreal.
Morata could start the game against Betis from the beginning but he was unable to score any goal. Actually, the Spanish forward didn’t have any chance to score, because Betis were defending really well with five players in the defensive line. And this is not new. Morata has better numbers when he is on the bench than when he starts the game. Is he better as a substitute than from the beginning?
Álvaro Morata has scored 13 goals this season, only two goals less than in his best year in Italy with Juventus. In La Liga he has scored 8 goals, some of them very important, and in the Champions League he has scored 3 goals, including a crucial goal against Sporting Lisbon in the debut in the competition this year. This season, Morata has started 14 games, but he has only found the net 6 times in those games, needing 184 minutes to score, four times more than when he’s on the bench. When he starts as a substitute, he only needs 45 minutes to score one goal.
In the two season spent in Italy, Morata was never a high scorer striker. In Serie A, the Spaniard found the net 8 and 7 times per season and he wasn’t use to start the games neither. In his first season in Italy he started the games 11 times and in his final year the numbers improved up to 16 matches.
The numbers show that Morata is more lethal when he comes in from the bench. Actually, he doesn’t need a lot of minutes to adapt to the game but he’s always focus and appear in the decisive moment. We saw it against Napoli, when he only played the final minutes and he wrote his name in the scoreboard. It’s very valuable for Real Madrid having a striker like this, especially when Bale, Benzema and Cristiano Ronaldo are always in the front.
