Manchester United are going to spend more than £100m to ‘buy’ six players they already own this summer. They need guarantees and Victor Osimhen is closest.
“This summer, we will ‘buy’ Antony, we’ll ‘buy’ Sancho, we’ll ‘buy’ Casemiro, we’ll ‘buy’ Martinez, we’ll ‘buy’ Hojlund, we’ll ‘buy’ Onana, and they’re all about £17m each. If we buy nobody we’re buying those players.”
It was one of the least problematic claims made by the cost-cutting, self-flagellating Sir Jim Ratcliffe; at least Gary Neville couldn’t offer an obvious and immediate solution which had somehow not been considered before.
As it is, Manchester United have put on a blindfold and tied their own shoelaces together before taking to summer starting blocks which were already placed a few hundred yards behind everyone else’s. They must drag that £102m millstone through a transfer window they cannot afford to get wrong again.
January was one small step for Manchester United. Ayden Heaven and Patrick Dorgu are signings in the new Old Trafford mould: young, relatively inexpensive, versatile low earners who fit the tactical template of Ruben Amorim without being hilariously and hopelessly hitched to him and his future.
The caveat of Marcus Rashford having to be sacrificed in the name of standards and wage bills means it can only be considered a qualified success thus far, but it is vaguely possible to see the seeds planted this season growing into green shoots and then eventually something more meaningful.
Yet the concern for Manchester United is that they must buck the trend and get most if not all decisions right from here, having barely nailed any over the last decade and the INEOS regime proving no more shrewd.
“This is our unpleasant year, when we have to make all those not particularly nice decisions, letting people go, that sort of stuff,” Ratcliffe said with all the detached nonchalance of a madman during those series of interviews. “That’ll all be done in the summer and then it’s about recruitment.”
And that is the pressure, because these cuts cannot be made while season ticket prices rise if Manchester United continue to flounder on the pitch. Becoming an established presence at the top table again will not make the loss of jobs or charging fans exorbitant amounts any more palatable, but failing to do so would make things considerably worse.
They need their recruitment to be perfect and nowhere is that more pronounced than in attack. Half of the players Ratcliffe namedropped as drains on this summer, next, last and the one before were forwards. Manchester United are the 14th-highest scorers in the Premier League. The reliance on Bruno Fernandes as chief creator and biggest goal threat in unison is unhealthy.
Their four-man striker shortlist offers some hope. Viktor Gyokeres is the holy grail but surely beyond Manchester United if any other clubs of repute enter the race, while the same could be said of Benjamin Sesko.
Hugo Ekitike is in fine form for Eintracht Frankfurt but struggled under the weight and pressure of a super-club at Paris Saint-Germain, which leaves Victor Osimhen.
Ratcliffe might be disinclined to take the advice of anyone who has contributed to Manchester United’s slide into mediocrity, but as Jose Mourinho said last year: “He is a player that if I was in a club with the potential to pay 70 to 75 million, I would buy.”
It isn’t difficult to see why. In 30 appearances this season Osimhen has scored 26 goals and assisted five, largely remained fit and available and, perhaps most pertinently, has already dropped a few rungs down the ladder from the spotlight of Serie A to the unheralded Super Lig. That loan from Napoli has opened a door Manchester United might have found inaccessible otherwise.
There is an element of obvious caution which comes with signing the imminent successor to Mario Gomez, Vagner Love, Bafetimbi Gomis and Enner Valencia as recent top scorers in Turkey, but even that is counteracted by Osimhen’s 76 goals in 133 games for Napoli before their mutual separation and his Galatasaray sojourn.
At a time Manchester United need something as close to a guarantee as possible when sourcing a new striker, a 26-year-old proven quantity whose game suits the Premier League far more naturally than Rasmus Hojlund or Joshua Zirkzee, whose desperation to leave should offset any reluctance to join a bottom-half club, has truly established himself as a ‘dream’ signing that has become strikingly realistic.
Manchester United are already ‘buying’ six players, many of whom they do not want, this summer; spending a little more on Osimhen feels like a no-brainer.
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