Las Palmas starlet Alberto Moleiro – ‘People always compare me to Pedri, but we’re very different players’

“We’re very different in the way we play,” declares Alberto Moleiro, who has been lazily compared to the boy in the year above for the last three seasons or so. As it happens, the boy is Pedri, and there’s no bitterness from the Las Palmas playmaker, but there is a calm confidence and defiance in his words. Moleiro believes he is good enough to make his own name, rather than hanging onto the tail of someone else’s.

“People have compared me to Pedri, he also played for Las Palmas, he left a year before I started playing, it’s only natural that people compare us, and I feel proud that people do so,” Moleiro tells Football España.

“But we’re very different in the way we play. I like a lot of players, Pedri, Fermin from Barcelona, any player that likes the ball, players that are technically gifted, I can’t give you many names, but that type of player,” he replies when asked for the ones he likes the most.

The 20-year-old is sharing a dressing room with Fermin Lopez this week, after the two were called up for the under-21 Spain squad by Santi Denia. All three are reminders that development is not linear by any means.

Pedri burst onto the scene as a 17-year-old, quickly establishing himself as one of the best players on the planet, and yet is probably having the hardest season of the trio, his future surrounded in a heavy injury fog.

Lopez on the other hand has just signed his first major contract. He was an afterthought for the Barcelona academy, until Xavi Hernandez thought about him preseason. A successful season with Linares in the third tier was believed to have earned the 20-year-old another with Barca Atletic, but now he’s taking pointers from Ilkay Gundogan and assists from Robert Lewandowski – all in the space of nine