Franco Mastantuono and the Legacy of Real Madrid’s Failed Wonderkids | OneFootball

Cast your mind back to August 2025. Just eight months ago, River Plate’s golden boy, Franco Mastantuono, was being signed by Real Madrid for a seemingly bargain 45 million euros.

The winger’s highlights had turned heads across Europe for over a year, scoring a famous free kick against rivals Boca Juniors at just 17 years of age. The Argentinian was getting comparisons to Lionel Messi, Lamine Yamal, and the world was his.

Now, the situation surrounding Mastantuono is much, much different. After nearly a full season at Real Madrid, just 1200 minutes, three goals, one assist, and not much to write home about.

While Mastantuono is turning 19 this summer, and has a long time to come good, it appears the odds are against him at Real, being behind Arda Guler in Madrid’s team sheet as well as Rodrygo, when fit, and may also be behind Nico Paz, if he rejoins his childhood club this summer as he’s linked to be.

Mastantuono’s Madrid future is looking grim at the moment, and he may soon join a long list of Los Blancos wonderkids who never worked out. Let’s look at some players off that list, what ended up happening in order to see them fail, and how their careers after Madrid turned out.

Reinier Jesus

Reinier Jesus, like everyone else in this list, broke out early into the professional game. Born in Brazil in 2002 to former futsal player Mauro Brasilia, Reinier spent most of his youth bouncing around elite Brazilian academies. At the age of nine, he joined the Vasco de Gama academy, moving to Botafogo and Fluminense before finally settling at Flamengo at the age of 12.

At Flamengo, Reinier would spend five years in the academy before making his debut at 17 in the Copa Libertadores. After, he would become a sprightly player for Flamengo, scoring six times and assisting twice in just 700 Serie A minutes.

It was at this point that Florentino Perez decided to spend an incredible 30 million on the then-18-year-old, likely predicting successes like the Vinicius and Rodrygo signings made in the past year and a half preceding Reinier’s. However, the expectations were far higher than the actual reality. Reinier came in at a much lower skill level than the club expected, and was forced to play with Madrid’s reserves, in Spanish football’s third division, for half a season while training with the senior squad.

Reinier would follow this with a series of loans. He would join Dortmund for the next two seasons, scoring one goal in less than 1,000 minutes total with the club and would then go to Girona for the 2022/23 season on loan. Same story. After similar stints with Frosinone and Granada, Reinier would finally leave Madrid permanently in August 2025, joining Atletico Mineiro for free. He never made a competitive appearance for Madrid’s senior team.

Since his move, Reinier has started to feature semi-regularly for the Brazilian club in the Serie A, where he broke out. However, his transfer remains a cautionary tale to Real Madrid and all European clubs as to just how quickly you can waste massive amounts of money on an unproven wonderkid.

Jese Rodriguez

A completely different story to Reinier, Jese Rodriguez is the only player on this list who came straight from the Real Madrid academy. Born in the Canary Islands, Jese made the brave journey to move to Madrid at just 14, rejecting the Barcelona and Espanyol academies in order to join his dream club.

At the age of 18, Jese began to be selected for Madrid squads under Jose Mourinho, and after Carlo Ancelotti’s arrival in 2013, started to get more consistent game time, making 18 La Liga appearances and 31 in all competitions before tearing his ACL late in the season, forcing the 20-year-old to miss eight months of action.

Jese was a winger for Madrid who grew up playing in a False 9 role in the Real Madrid Castilla teams, causing Jese to have a unique goalscoring playstyle for a winger. That combined with his cut inside style drew him comparisons to Cristiano Ronaldo, and being eight years younger than Madrid’s Portuguese star, Madridistas thought they hit the jackpot.

However, after returning from his ACL injury in the 2014/15 season, Jese found it hard to break into the team, still behind Cristiano Ronaldo and after signings like James Rodriguez and Toni Kroos during his injury spell. The Spaniard would end up playing just 533 league minutes spread out across 16 matches, and would similarly the next year get just 824 minutes across 28 matches. Despite the lack of game time, the promise was evident for the rising star, netting eight goals and assisting just as many in those minutes, averaging a goal or assist every 84 minutes for Los Blancos.

Feeling his talent could be better used elsewhere, Jese would ask to leave Real Madrid and would end up joining PSG in the summer of 2016, where he would embark on a death spiral of loans, including an odd one at Stoke, before having his contract terminated in December 2020 having played just 393 minutes in all competitions for the Parisiens.

Since then, Jese has traveled around the world looking for a home, playing for clubs in Turkiye, Malaysia, Brazil, and Italy, but poetically, he finds himself back home in the Canary Islands, in his third stint with hometown club Las Palmas. Perhaps Madrid’s now 33-year-old fallen star will find a home in Spain’s second tier.

Martin Odegaard

Obviously not a failed wonderkid, but Martin Odegaard did fail for Madrid.

Odegaard was destined for a big move from the beginning. Ever since he joined Stromgodset at the age of 10 and immediately started playing in higher age groups, scouts everywhere were alerted to this potential future supertalent.

Odegaard would have trials with Bayern Munich and Manchester United ahead of making his debut in senior Norwegian football in 2014 at just 15 years of age. Across the rest of the 2014 season, Odegaard would play 23 times for his boyhood club, scoring five times and assisting a further seven, netting a goal contribution every 121 minutes in Norway. He was 15 at the time. This kid was special.

Of course, this is where Real Madrid come in, signing the kid a month after his 16th birthday for three million euros in a deal that could have risen to eight. Despite being Madrid’s youngest ever first team player, Odegaard spent a vast majority of his time playing for the Castilla team in La Liga’s third division.

By January 2017, Odegaard had played nearly 60 games for Madrid’s reserve side, and would secure a loan to Eredivisie side Heerenveen for 18 months. During the loan, the Norwegian would become a critical part of the Dutch side, starting all of the 24 league games for which he was available in the 2017/18 season.

In the 2018/19 season, Odegaard would be loaned again from Madrid to Vitesse, where he would once again play a major role in the side, playing nearly 3,000 minutes for the team throughout the season and being voted Vitesse Player of the Season by the fans.

While it seemed that after two good loan spells in the Netherlands, and after getting serious first team football under his belt, a now 20-year-old Odegaard would be ready for first team football, he was once again loaned out, this time to Real Sociedad.

Now with a chance to get some La Liga experience, and he would take the opportunity with everything he had. Consistent minutes, a critical part of the team and an elite performer, Odegaard was delivering on all the promise he had showed as a teenager, and surely once he returned to Madrid, a bigger role was coming.

That assumption appeared to be true after Real Madrid rejected the option to keep their youngster at Sociedad for another season, and to integrate him in the first team for 2020/21. However, in the first six months of the season, Odegaard would play just nine times, and in search of first-team football, would leave on loan, once again, to Arsenal in January.

This would be the last time Odegaard would be a part of Madrid’s first-team squad, joining Arsenal permanently six months later for 35 million euros, a pittance for such a talent. After Odegaard’s explosion at Arsenal, perhaps Real Madrid will be left wondering how they let the Norwegian slip through their fingers.

There are the stories of three of Real Madrid’s more recent failed wonderkids, what went wrong, and perhaps there are some lessons to be learned for Madrid’s current wonderkids, like the aforementioned Mastantuono as well as players like Endrick, Gonzalo Garcia, and Thiago Pitarch.

For now, though, there are larger-scale problems at the Bernabeu that need fixing, which I’m sure will be a topic for another day.