What’s driving a remarkable turnaround at Las Palmas?

Martinez leads Las Palmas revival

While Carrion’s Las Palmas side were quite easy on the eye and caused problems for a number of teams, Martinez’s impact was immediate, as Las Palmas won 3-2 at fellow strugglers Valencia in his opening game.

The former Granada boss, once viewed as arguably the brightest young Spanish coaching talent given the work he did at Los Carmenes between 2018 and 2021, always felt like a pretty smart choice.

It was certainly as positive an appointment, as a team winless in more than half a season could have seriously expected to make.

While scarred to some extent by difficult spells at Espanyol and Olympiacos, Martinez has brought a much needed dose of pragmatism to a Las Palmas side that has been defined by the possession-based approach of Garcia Pimienta, and more latterly Carrion, over the past couple of years.

Las Palmas 2024/25 LaLiga stats

The most basic stats point to the most dramatic of transformations. All five Las Palmas victories in LaLiga this term have come under Martinez, and so have 84% of their points.

They are scoring more goals and conceding less since the change and their form under the 44-year-old is loosely in line with what’s needed to qualify for the Champions League, as opposed to merely beat the drop.

The latter will still very much be the primary objective in Gran Canaria this term though. To realise the importance of not getting too carried away with their current good run, they only have to look back to last season, when talk of an unlikely European push midway through the campaign, quickly made way for the realities of a survival scrap.

A shift in style, and a slice of good fortune?

LaLiga xG data actually suggests that very little has changed in terms of the quality of opportunities that Las Palmas are creating and giving up under Martinez. That may come as some comfort to Carrion and highlights how fine the margins can be in football.

Martinez himself was quick to recognise that the foundations he inherited were slightly stronger than the league table suggested, when he took over LaLiga’s bottom club in October.

“This victory also belongs to Carrion and his coaching staff” claimed Martinez following the victory at Mestalla which stopped the rot.

“They fought hard. Sometimes things happen and, fortunately, today we got three points that give us a lot of strength.”

There is certainly a sense that Las Palmas have enjoyed some good fortune since the change, having perhaps been down on their luck under Carrion.

However, there has also been a stylistic shift, with Martinez placing much less focus on ball retention than his two predecessors. That has been most obvious in their last two away games against Barcelona and Real Sociedad.

Las Palmas only enjoyed 29% and 38% shares of the ball in those two games respectively, but took four points from the fixtures, only conceding one goal across 180 minutes against two of the strongest teams in the division.

While their xGA tally is only slightly better under Martinez, there is also a greater sense that stronger defensive foundations are present, which has enabled them to sustain spells of heavy opposition pressure at times.

The players who have stepped up since the change

Key performances from individuals at both ends of the pitch have also been factors in the recent improvement.

Prior to the sacking of Carrion, Las Palmas had a total psxG (Post shot xG – Goals allowed) tally of -1.00 according to FBREF. That suggests their goalkeeper, in most cases Jasper Cillessen, was doing a slightly worse than average job of stopping shots.

Under Martinez, that figure has reversed to +1.2, with Cillessen in particularly inspired form in the 3-1 win at Rayo Vallecano, when the Madrid side peppered the visiting goal with 34 attempts in the game.

At the other end of the pitch, Las Palmas have also been much more clinical since the switch.

Sandro Ramirez has scored three goals in his last three league games, to move onto six for the season, already his best league goal tally since a breakthrough 2016/17 campaign at Malaga.

Martinez has also managed to get the best out of Fabio Silva, in a way that no other manager truly has since he made a €40m switch to Wolves as a teenager four years ago. The Portuguese international has either scored or assisted in six of his seven LaLiga matches so far under his current boss.

Kirian Rodriguez, one of the stars during the initial rise of Las Palmas under Garcia Pimienta, has also started to deliver more consistently in recent weeks, while youngster Dario Essugo is doing a solid job at the base of the midfield.

Individually and collectively, Las Palmas are likely to experience a dip in form at some point in 2025, with their underlying stats not quite as impressive as their recent results. However, they’ve already done much of the hard graft in terms of turning a season that looked doomed to failure, into something much more promising.