Juan Mata could have been David Silva’s equal

Juan Mata’s has had a respectable career in the Premier League, but with a little more luck it could have been so much more.

Juan Mata could have travelled by road to Manchester from London to his new club’s training ground. It was a Sunday, traffic would have been light. Manchester United didn’t have a game until Tuesday night, either. He could have spared the few hours it would have taken to drive up the M6. But Mata’s journey to his new club, who’d just splurged a club record fee of £37 million on the playmaker, was more than just a commute.

The world watched Mata arrive at Carrington by helicopter because Manchester United wanted the world to watch. It was a symbolic presentation. Here was a savior, somebody good enough to drag the Old Trafford club out of their post-Sir Alex Ferguson slump. Somebody good enough to save them having fallen from the skies.

Since then, Mata has gone on to make over 150 appearances for United, more than he made for Chelsea and even Valencia before that, scoring 41 times and contributing 34 assists. There are few at Old Trafford as popular as the Spaniard, and yet he has been no savior. Now, he could leave the club as a free agent at the end of the season.

Mata, both at Chelsea and United, has been the unfortunate victim of circumstance. He’s the sort of player an elite team could, and should, have built around, a pliable dynamo to play through, and yet at both Stamford Bridge and Old Trafford Mata has found himself a peripheral figure through very little fault of his own.

Contrast this to the esteem David Silva is held in across Manchester. He was Mata’s contemporary at Valencia, making the move to the Premier League just one year before. But while Mata has coasted through four years at United, to the point where he could leave Old Trafford on a free, Silva has gone on to become arguably the greatest player in City’s history.

What’s more, at the age of 32, Silva’s influence at the Etihad Stadium has arguably never been greater. Last season was a fragmented one for the playmaker, but this season he has been consistent in his brilliance on a week-to-week basis. Bernardo Silva has come to the fore as City’s player of the season so far, but City’s philosophical core can be found in Silva. He’s the purest distillation of their philosophy under Pep Guardiola.

Mata could have reached similar heights. He is, it could be argued, just as technically adept as Silva, forged from the same mould that has seen so many Spaniards become true greats over the past decade or so. But while Silva has found a club and now a manager in Guardiola to harness his talent, Mata has been stuck with Jose Mourinho at two different clubs.

Mourinho hasn’t ostracized Mata at United like he did at Chelsea, but the Spaniard has been forced to alter his natural game to satisfy the Portuguese. He’s still capable of changing a match or providing a game-defining moment, like the one served up against Juventus earlier this month, but it could never be claimed that Mata is central to things at Old Trafford.

There’s more reason for Mata to leave United when his contract runs out at the end of the season than there is for him to stay. At 30, there’s still time for him to find an environment that suits him. The great irony in Mata’s situation is that Manchester is the perfect place for him. It’s just that he finds himself on the wrong side of the divide. Had he joined City, like Silva did, rather than Chelsea, things might have panned out differently for Mata. He might not have had a helicopter to take to training, but career fulfillment may have come his way.