The Empty Seat at Karaiskakis: González and the Rewriting of Olympiacos' Attack

Minute 90 at Karaiskakis. The stands were still full of song, that thick sound that breathes like a port city. On the bench, González sat still. He had warmed up along the touchline. He had taken off his jacket. Then the referee blew the final whistle, and he was still sitting there, letting 90 minutes of the Athens derby pass in front of him like a film he was not allowed to act in. Three weeks earlier, he was the man who equalised for Olympiacos against Jagiellonia in the UEFA Europa League, opening the way for a 2-1 comeback. That goal will live on in end-of-season compilations. A place on the bench in the derby will not. Football remembers moments and forgets, very quickly, the people who sat outside them. When football cannot be touched with the hands, we touch it with memory; but memory only reaches what appeared on the grass. Karaiskakis is not a place where anyone can hide. Olympiacos' ground in Piraeus holds more than thirty thousand seats, and in Athens derbies it turns into a furnace. It is also the home of the first Greek club to win a European trophy: Olympiacos beat Fiorentina 1-0 in the UEFA Europa Conference League final on May 29, 2026, in Athens itself. A club that has touched the top of Europe changes its internal yardstick too. A starting place stops being a reward for potential. It becomes a tool for winning points. On September 10, 2026, Olympiacos changed the man at the helm. Alguacil replaced Mendilibar. For González it was both a new beginning and the moment his minutes began to evaporate. Alguacil made it clear he wants to build his own idea of play, and a new idea always drags a new list behind it. The data needs no embellishment: 67 minutes against OFI Crete, 62 against Jagiellonia, about 14 against Levadiakos, and 0 in the derby against Panathinaikos. A total of 143 minutes in three matches under Alguacil, with one goal in Europe. Being withdrawn early once can be a decision for one match. Four times in the same direction is a policy. And the team kept winning, which is the hard part. Olympiacos came from behind to beat Jagiellonia 2-1, then beat Panathinaikos 1-0 at Karaiskakis. In the derby, Alguacil picked Marius Mouandilmadji as the highest forward. González was in the squad, sat the full 90 minutes, and watched his team win without adding a single run. Read more closely, and this is a story about position, not about form. A new coach at Olympiacos does not merely change people; he changes the way the team climbs up the pitch. In Mendilibar's old system, the forward was encouraged to separate from the centre-back, find space between the lines, then burst in behind the defence. That is the habitat of a quick, small, weaving player, exactly the type of González, the man nicknamed Hormiga, the ant. In the way Alguacil is building, the centre-forward has to do something else: hold the ball high, pin the centre-back, contest in the air, and open room for runners from the second line. That is Mouandilmadji's job. When the default choice shifts from the man who creates space to the man who occupies it, a forward who is best at the first job naturally slides down the queue. Not because he plays badly, but because the question has changed. The Athens derby is the harshest test of that shift. Derbies in Greece, as anywhere, are decided by duels that no data table measures: who wins the first header, who keeps his balance when shoved from behind, who forces the opposing centre-back two metres backwards. Alguacil chose the forward who can absorb contact. The 1-0 result confirmed that choice, at least on the scoreboard. Based on my experience following matches across the European leagues, I always check one thing before trusting any chart: minutes. The source material offers no expected-goals figures, and that does not bother me. Expected goals has been abused to the point where it usually explains a shot rather than a decision. It cannot tell you why a coach sends a forward on in the 76th minute, and it cannot tell you why he leaves him on the bench for an entire derby. The power here sits on the bench, and the bench speaks only one language: minutes. The most valuable detail sits in the least glamorous match. Against Levadiakos, González came on around the 76th minute and played about 14 minutes. That is not a stolen starting place. That is a rotation place still being kept. A coach who has closed the door on a player does not send him on in a phase of the game that needs rhythm protected. He leaves him sitting, week after week, until the bench becomes a room with no door. Here I want to read the derby the other way round from the usual reflex. González sitting out all 90 minutes against Panathinaikos is treated as the heaviest signal, and in one sense that is right. But a derby is a match with its own rules, where a coach picks people according to a physical problem rather than a form table. Inferring a player's future from a derby means inferring it from the noisiest data available. The Levadiakos match, with its 14 minutes, is more honest: it shows González is still inside the rotation, only at its edge. What makes González's situation harder is not that he has been abandoned, but that the team wins when he is absent. Olympiacos won both matches mentioned here. Every victory is a vote for Alguacil's decisions, and every vote weakens the argument for starting González a little more. This is the familiar paradox of every substitute at a flying team: you need the chance to prove yourself, but the team's own results take that chance away. And then collective memory does its work. At the end of the season, people will remember the equaliser against Jagiellonia, the moment the ball flew into the far corner and the whole stadium rose. Nobody remembers an afternoon of sitting out all 90 minutes on the bench. It is not the trophy, but the story behind the trophy that is immortal; yet that story is usually written by the men on the pitch, not the men beneath it. The transfer window will ask the question differently. The source material notes that González is a former Chivas player but gives no transfer fee, no contract length, no release clause. That silence matters. When the value of a deal is not public, the only measurable thing is minutes, and the minutes are falling. For a Mexican player working far from home, every week on the bench is a week of market value eroded, and agents understand that better than anyone. If the trend does not reverse before January 2027, a negotiation, as a loan or a sale, will appear on its own, without anyone needing to pick up the phone first. The source analysis itself stays cautious: it writes that it is still too early to affirm that González has been definitively pushed out of the plan. I agree with the caution, but for a different reason. What is unclear is not Alguacil's intention; what is unclear is the speed of the new system. A football idea needs about ten matches to take shape, and at match three, every conclusion is a rushed conclusion. I find the truth in football in the spaces between what is said. The UEFA Europa League fixture against Olympique de Marseille will be a clearer test than any derby. If González gets on from the 60th minute onwards, he is still part of the rotation and the story is simply competition for places. If he sits out another full 90 minutes, then the seat at Karaiskakis is no longer a temporary place but an address. Football does not judge a man by one derby. It judges him by an entire winter.