David Silva is a freak among footballers. He is universally adored. Cristiano Ronaldo’s achievements are unquestionable, but many people can’t stand his preening machismo. Lionel Messi is possibly the greatest player ever, but still Ronaldo groupies pit him against their man and mark him down. Meanwhile Silva continues to be quietly loved by one and all.
The Premier League has been graced with his presence for 10 years. And graced really is the word. Never has a more graceful footballer plied his trade in England. When he leaves the country at the end of this season, football, and in particular Manchester City, will lose so much. There is the obvious stuff – the assists (94 in the Premier League, the highest since 2010), chances created (794, again the most in the top tier since 2010), the goals (60) and the trademark Silva spin in which he turns on the ball, loses a couple of opponents, and threads a pass through the eye of a needle to set up yet another chance.
But there is so much more. Understated, unobtrusive Silva became the moral core of Manchester City – not because of anything he said or did, but because of what he didn’t say and didn’t do. In an age of obscene bling, loadsamoney grotesquery and shouty social media, he brought a Zen-like calm to City. He became our miniature samurai – ferociously competitive, outrageously skilled, yet utterly serene as he went about his business.
Silva is nicknamed El Mago, the magician – a soubriquet also bestowed on one of his heroes, Pablo Aimar. Like Silva, Aimar is 5ft 7in, wore the same No 21 shirt at Valencia, and was an attacking midfielder. Later, at City, Shaun Wright-Phillips started to call him Merlin because he was “the greatest wizard of all”.
El Mago and Merlin suit Silva perfectly – and not simply because of his sleight of foot. In his playing life and his private life, he has mastered the ultimate disappearing trick. Silva slips on his invisibility cloak and he’s gone. Look for Silva on the pitch, and he’s gone – impossible to mark, finding space where none exists. Look for Silva after the match, and he’s also gone.
Some might say his unobtrusiveness has cost him. He never played for the Spanish giants, Real Madrid or Barcelona. When he came to City, aged 24, they paid a bargain £24m – though, the critics said they had paid over the odds. Despite starring to help Spain win the European Championship and having played a (somewhat lesser) role in the World Cup victory, he was still largely unknown. On Match of the Day, Alan Shearer mistook Silva for David Villa, for whom Silva had created so many Valencia and Spain goals. Advisers suggested he should do more interviews, get himself better known. Silva wasn’t having any of it. He was happy with his anonymity.
David Josué Jiménez Silva was born on 8 January 1986 in the Canarian fishing village of Arguineguín. His mother, Eva, is of Japanese descent, while his father Fernando is a Spanish ex-police officer and former semi-professional footballer. Young David was goofy, cute and small for his age. He was also single-minded. His mother has said she once brought him a toy truck, but he didn’t look at it. His grandmother would give him oranges and potatoes to kick in the streets, then he progressed to playing with real footballs on the black volcanic sand of the beaches near to his family home.
Despite his size and ludicrous ball skills, he initially wanted to be a goalkeeper. But not for long. At the age of 11, by which time he was dictating games as an outfield player, parents complained that Silva was playing for the opposition and it gave them an unfair advantage – he was too young for the team, they said. Three years later, he signed for Valencia and went to live there. He was lonely and weepy in the big city. Eventually his father joined him, getting a security job at Valencia’s Mestalla stadium. At 14, he was playing in the under-17 and under-18 teams. At 16 he scored a hat-trick in the final of Spain’s equivalent of the FA Youth Cup, and bagged another hat-trick in an Under-17s World Cup match against South Korea after coming on as sub and despite carrying a hip injury.
At 18, he was loaned to Eibar in the second tier. Eibar had a reputation for playing bruising football and his friends worried for his safety – particularly in training. But Silva loved it, and gave out as good as he got, if not more. The head coach, José Luis Mendilibar, said: “He learned to get stuck in during training sessions. And I think he was one of the hardest or a bit of a bastard in a sense when he trained.” The following season he was loaned out to Celta Vigo before returning to Valencia and establishing himself in the first team. He made his Spain debut aged 20 in 2006.
Four years later Roberto Mancini signed Silva for City. Despite having just won the World Cup with Spain, there were plenty of sceptics – he was too small, too slight, not fast enough, he wouldn’t be able to stand the cold, let alone the bull-necked Brobdingnagians that dominated Premier League defences. In El Mago, a book produced by Manchester City to mark his decade with the club, the City manager, Pep Guardiola, admits he was one of the doubters until he started working with him. “You can tell he learned his football on the street. Like he’s threatening, ‘There’ll only be one winner here’.”
There were no fireworks in his first few games. Then in October he came on as a substitute against Blackpool and scored his first league goal in the 90th minute – jinking past one challenge, cutting inside another and curling a beauty into the far corner. Silva soon became talismanic for fans such as me. In his first season, we won the FA Cup, and he set up the final’s winning goal for Yaya Touré – City’s first trophy in 35 years. The next season we won our first league title in 44 years. Silva will leave City as our most decorated player – four Premier League titles, five League Cups, two FA Cups and hopefully still counting. If, as expected, he leads the Blues out for Saturday’s FA Cup semi-final against Arsenal, it will be his 433rd match for the club.
Meanwhile for Spain he formed a great midfield triumvirate alongside Xavi and Andrés Iniesta – three sublime players who could have passed as accountants (albeit Silva a sexy accountant). He retired from international football in 2018, finishing with the sixth-highest number of caps for Spain (125), as the fourth-highest goalscorer (35) and second only to Cesc Fàbregas in number of assists.
Historically, the great England midfielder Colin Bell has been the City fans’ favourite. But Silva may well have superseded him. Even Mike Summerbee, the winger who played alongside Bell during the glory years of the late 60s and early 70s thinks so. “Colin Bell was outstanding, he was world class. But there was no one with David’s ability in our team. We didn’t have a playmaker as good as David. I have never seen anyone like him.”
Summerbee says Silva never has a bad match. “I think he’s the best player on the pitch nearly every time I see a game, but he hardly ever wins man of the match. Don’t get me started.” He mentions the fact he’s only twice been in the Premier League team of the season. “He never gets the praise he deserves. David Silva should be in every Premier League team of the season.”
Yet the strange thing about Silva is that many fans would struggle to find a special moment – Vincent Kompany is defined by the winners against United and Leicester that helped secure league titles, Sergio Agüero for the last-second winner that won City their first league title in the most extraordinary finish to a season, Yaya by his FA Cup winner. Silva? There isn’t one obvious standout (though his astonishing trap and cross-field volleyed pass to Edin Dzeko to score City’s sixth goal at Old Trafford in 2011 comes as close as any). And yet in virtually every game there is a special Silva moment. Their regularity make them seem unremarkable – and often unremarked upon.
What makes him so good? He has the balance of a ballet dancer, the silkiest skills, supreme close control and vision (normally in the crowd we can spot passes before the players, but Silva invariably sees them before us). He is selfless (often providing the assist to the assist, particularly for overlapping full-backs), tenacious and he rarely loses the ball. And despite being a lightweight he knows how to handle himself. He is by no means the fastest runner in the Premier League, but he is the fastest thinker. Whereas most players trap a ball, look, then pass, Silva receives it, turns, and passes in one movement – often without looking. There is a fabulous eight-minute video on YouTube of Silva spins and passes.
Silva is four world-class players for the price of one: the playmaker (the creative hub, linking defence to attack); the metronome, constantly keeping the ball moving (footballing metronomes are rarely magicians – they tend to be dull, reliable and crab-like); the winger and the centre-forward scoring tap-ins. Midfield generals tend to score bangers form 20-30 yards, and Silva has scored with a couple of crackers in his past three matches. But most of his goals are poached in the six-yard box. Perhaps most important is his temperament. Silva has never been sent off playing for City.
His former teammate, the defender Micah Richards, was Silva’s first landlord when he moved to Manchester. We Zoom to talk about him. It’s 10.30am and Richards is still in his underpants. You couldn’t imagine Silva agreeing to a Zoom chat let alone one in his undies. Richards says the only way he could stop him in training was by “smashing” him. He tells me they struck up a deal. “We had a little agreement didn’t we? He wouldn’t go near me in training and I wouldn’t go near him, so he wouldn’t get no injuries and he wouldn’t expose me! David was just the most naturally gifted player I’ve ever played with.”
What did he learn from him? Richards laughs. He says he wasn’t a good enough player to learn from Silva on the pitch. “I learned more off the field than on the field from David. I could never replicate what he did on the field. He showed you don’t have to be arrogant or self-obsessed to be a top player. You can just be a nice bloke. Footballers now – especially towards the end of my career – care more about their image than what was actually going on on the field. With David it was different. He was so humble.”
At City we had plenty of narcissists. We loved many of them, and sang songs in celebration of their solipsism. When Yaya threatened to leave because the club hadn’t made him a birthday cake and demanded a wage rise we sang “Oh Yaya Touré, I think we should pay him some more!” When some of the more outre stories emerged about Mario Balotelli we sang “Oooh Balotelli, he’s a striker, he’s good at darts. An allergy to grass but when he plays he’s fucking class. Drives round Moss Side with a wallet full of cash.” But our songs about Silva were more prosaic because there were no headline-grabbing stories about him. So we sufficed with “David Silva Olé” or “David Silva, he scored the fifth goal at Old Trafford”.
The only time he’s been discussed outside football is when his son, Mateo, was born 15 weeks premature and was fighting for his life. Silva had to frequently return to Valencia where Mateo was hospitalised for five months. In a desperately moving moment in the Amazon film All Or Nothing, Guardiola told the squad before a match against Spurs: “We have to win for David and his girlfriend. He’s fucking suffering in life. When you go out there and enjoy it, you enjoy it for him. If we go out there and we suffer, suffer for him.” After Kevin De Bruyne scored he raised two fingers on one hand, and one on the other to form number 21 for Silva. The players love him as much as we do.
Around this time Silva shaved his hair off, and it had a reverse Samson effect. At 32 he reached his apogee. We were all curious. Silva had such a lovely moptop, why would he get rid of it? Then we noticed a second hairline growing. Despite his full head of hair, Silva had had a transplant. If it had been any other player we may have laughed. But with Silva it seemed to humanise him – rather than a sign of vanity, it suggested vulnerability. You can be a top footballer, have model looks, and still feel lacking in some way.
“I just thought he’d cut off his hair,” Richards says. “Then everyone was like, ‘David Silva has had a transplant’ and I was like, ‘No he’s not, he’s got a good head of hair’. It was strange, but we live in a society now where everybody just wants to be the best possible version of themselves don’t they? We all look in the mirror.”
Under Guardiola, who took him from the winger and made him the kingpin playmaker, he has played his best football. After Kompany left City last season, Guardiola also made him captain. Though he is so unassuming that we tend to forget he is the skipper until we see him tossing the coin before the match. Even as captain, he rarely gives post-match interviews.
I ask Richards if it’s because his English is poor. Again, he laughs. “His English is perfect. He just doesn’t like doing interviews. He doesn’t like taking the credit. I don’t think he knows how to take compliments. If a teammate tells him he’s had a great match, he shrugs it off. He’d just put up his hands and put his head down and say no problem and walk off.”
What will City miss most? Brian Marwood, managing director at City Football Group, says: “To get that level of quality to a consistent level is really, really hard to attain. I think that’s what we’ll miss. He just brings a level of quality to matches that very few can ever get close to.”
Silva has still not announced where he will play next season – Qatar according to some reports. With only a matter of weeks to go in his City career, he is still hoping to win the FA Cup for a third time and the Champions League, the prize trophy that has eluded him. It would be a fitting finale to see the little man lift the giant trophy and hear his teammates chant David Silva olé one last time.
