Matheus Cunha has been likened to Manchester United legend Eric Cantona with the club's chief executive optimistic he can have a transformative effect on the club. Cunha was signed from Wolves after United met his £62.5million release clause to make him their first summer signing. Cantona is renowned for leading United to their first Premier League title in 1993, ending a 26-year drought, and is one of the league's greatest ever players.
And Omar Berrada, United's chief executive, believes that Cunha, 26, shares Cantona's charisma and playing style, and could be a contemporary version of the enigmatic Frenchman at Old Trafford. "He's a player that I think fans are going to love," said Berrada. "We can talk about his technical abilities and he can play in three different positions. He's a playmaking attacking midfielder; he can score goals, he can make assists.
"I think he's going to lift people off their seats. He's got a bit of a swagger about him that people are going to really like. Dare I say, Cantona-esque. He was an important one to get done. We're going to do our best to do more signings quickly.
"Sometimes, when you're not quick, it's because you're negotiating and you're trying to make sure you get the right value for money. So being efficient or quick isn't necessarily the best thing for the club."
Berrada also reiterated his belief that United can win the title by 2028 – despite finishing last season in 15th place – their worst finish of the Premier League era. "Of course. We've just finished 15th and it seems like an impossible task. But why not aim for it? Why not do everything in our power?"
"I firmly believe that we can do it. We have two or three summer windows to build a team to start competing to win the Premier League and if we can achieve it before then, we'll all be happy - and so nobody's saying that we don't want to win it until then."
He acknowledged that bringing in Ruben Amorim midway through the season was likely to make it more challenging for the team to perform. He explained: "We saw it as an investment for the following seasons, because we were going to give time to Ruben to get to know the squad, the club, the Premier League.
"So by the time that we got to now, we'll have had all the discussions about what does the squad need, the two-to-three-year plan to get to a squad that's capable of winning the Premier League."
"We have a very clear roadmap of how we're going to get there. Had Ruben started on July 1, 2025, we wouldn't have been able to have all that knowledge, right? And that's what I feel these seven or eight months that he's had.
"He's suffered in the Premier League, and the team has suffered. That's why I feel that it's really going to help us in the future." Berrada, who previously worked at Manchester City before moving across town to join United, drew parallels between Amorim's start at United and Pep Guardiola's first season at City.
"Very much so," Berrada told United We Stand. "Pep stuck to his principles and given what he'd won, he had an enormous amount of credit in the bank. He was allowed that first year to be below-par by his standards.
"The club backed him that summer, the team started winning and created this winning cycle that lasted until this season.
"We've taken all the short-term pain in this season, but as of this summer, the worst bit is going to be behind us. We will have settled the management team; we will have settled the coaching team with the technical team around them.
"On the football side, there's a clear idea of what we want to do, what players we want to get, how we want to see the team playing, how we're going to integrate academy players, how we're going to go and invest in future talent.
"I'm actually very optimistic and quite positive about what's ahead. Of course we need to get a lot of decisions right. And we will make mistakes, there's no doubt. We'll try to minimise those. But what we want is to build something that's sustainable for the long, long term."
"We've put ourselves in the best position possible by doing everything that we've had this year around cost-cutting. I'm confident that we will come out of the window with a much stronger team than what we've gone into."