Is Senne Lammens ready to start for Manchester United? The stats and tape tell different storiesplaceholder image
Is Senne Lammens ready to start for Manchester United? The stats and tape tell different stories | BELGA/AFP via Getty Images
With André Onana set to leave Manchester United, Senne Lammens could quickly become their number one - but is he ready?
The André Onana time at Manchester United seems to be crawling to a disappointing but unavoidable conclusion. Dropped for the start of the season and poor when given a chance in the dismal defeat to Grimsby Town, the Cameroonian is set to leave Old Trafford – and a goalkeeper that few English fans had heard of a month or so ago will soon be thrown to the wolves in his place.
Although Onana’s loan transfer to Turkish side Trabzonspor has not yet been finalised, the player himself has reportedly agreed to the move and it is widely expected that the goalkeeper will be a Süper Lig player in time to feature against Fenerbahçe this weekend. As such, 23-year-old Senne Lammens could make his United debut at the Etihad in the Manchester derby.
For a player with just one season of senior football under his belt, it’s an enormous amount of pressure and expectation to take on. But is Lammens ready for one of the toughest jobs in the game right now? And just how good is he really?
Senne Lammens – the ‘calm’ goalkeeper set to be Manchester United’s new number one
“One of the best attributes you can have as a goalkeeper is staying calm under pressure,” Lammens told United’s club website following his deadline-day transfer last week. “Even if you make a mistake or something. You just move on and try to give your best to the team.”
Easy to say, perhaps less easy to do. The role of United’s goalkeeper has become one of the most challenging in the Premier League thanks to a combination of high expectations and poor performances. This is a club that haven’t had a reliable number one since David De Gea started to show signs of decline, but whose fan base simultaneously expects almost every shot to be saved and every game to be won.
It got to De Gea, at first, before the Spaniard found his footing having been given time and patience by his manager – but then, Sir Alex Ferguson had won so much at that point that he could afford to give his players some grace. His job was never on the line if the goalkeeper had a bad game. That has not been the case for his predecessors, who have always been a defeat or two away from immense pressure.
“Before and after the game, I just write key words down and my thoughts a little bit,” Lammens continues. “Sometimes, if you don't do that, it can be a lot going through your mind. It helps me with staying calm and staying in the moment a little bit, and not overreacting in situations.”
A little LinkedIn, perhaps, but at least the inexperienced Belgian has some coping mechanisms in place. He may need a pretty big piece of paper to contain all of his thoughts if he’s asked to start against Manchester City on Sunday.
Lammens only really established himself as the first-choice goalkeeper at Royal Antwerp in 2023. This is a player with only 61 senior starts and a handful of age group international caps to his name. The leap from the Pro League to the Premier League has proven too large for many players with far more experience in considerably less pressurised situations.
As such, it wouldn’t be any great shock if Ruben Amorim eased Lammens in and gave Altay Bayinidir another start against their local rivals this weekend – but then again, the Turk has been no more convincing than Onana thus far and there will be a certain degree of excitement among United fans to see what their new signing can do. But coping mechanisms aside, is Lammens good enough to succeed where Onana failed?
The stats suggest that Lammens could be great – but there are flaws
There is, of course, a very good reason that Lammens went from obscurity (at least outside of Belgium) to an £18.1m transfer to Manchester United – in his one full season as a starting senior goalkeeper, he was quite exceptional.
Lammens made an impressive 173 professional saves in 2024/25, more than any goalkeeper playing in one of Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues managed, and his save percentage in the Belgian Pro League was an astonishing 81.4% - including no fewer than four penalty saves.
His reactions are breathtakingly quick and his knack for making improbable stops at close quarters rather remarkable – and to top it off, he’s both a capable distributor of the ball and can boast an exceptional 13.3% success rate at stopping crosses, which would have made him the second best in the Premier League last year.
So far, so very promising, but there are caveats, not least in the fact that he was often guilty of pushing saves back into dangerous areas rather than away from opposing players – his save stats were bolstered by quite a few double saves necessitated by his own failures to get the ball to safety.
And while he has dealt with crosses very efficiently, there have been plenty of incidences of his flapping somewhat unconvincingly at high balls. In short, this is a goalkeeper who always seems to get his hands to the ball but doesn’t always do so in convincing fashion, and whose reflexes bailed him out on a number of occasions.
If the more predatory strikers of the Premier League punish him for the same errors which turned into highlight reel moments in Belgium, then public opinion could turn on him rather quickly. Perhaps he will live up to his mantra and remain calm in those moments, but he can’t afford to put himself in awkward positions as often as he did for Antwerp.
None of which changes the fact that he has all of the attributes required to be an immensely successful goalkeeper – it just means that his inexperience is visible upon closer inspection, and it may generate rather more negativity in Manchester than it did while he was slugging it out in a mid-table battle in Belgium.
If Lammens is immediately promoted to be United’s number one, there are likely to be brilliant saves and frustrating mistakes, and there is little evidence that either the fans or his own club will be especially patient with him. This is the ultimate test of a young man’s capacity to handle that pressure, and a stiff challenge for the effectiveness of his writing regime.
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