Should Matheus Cunha play as a striker for Manchester United, or stick to the position he played at Wolves?
At first blush, Cunha, who can play across the front three but generally operated on the left as an inside forward for Vitor Pereira’s Wolves side, looked set for a role as one of the two number tens in Ruben Amorim’s 3-4-3 system, tucked in behind or wide of a central striker whose identity was yet to be determined.
United wanted (but missed out on) Liam Delap, a move which would certainly have pegged Cunha as a ten rather than a central striker despite his evident goalscoring prowess – but after Delap agreed to go to Chelsea, United turned their attention to Bryan Mbeumo, a very different type of player whose arrival would imply that Cunha would operate as the primary centre-forward. So which role should he play at Old Trafford?
The case for playing Matheus Cunha behind the striker at Manchester United
The argument for playing Cunha alongside Bruno Fernandes as one of the two narrow supporting forwards is relatively straightforward – it’s the closest role in Amorim’s formation to the position in which he has played and succeeded at the Molineux.
Cunha scored 15 goals in the league last season, all but three of which either came from cutting inside from the left side of the area into space or from long-range efforts with runs starting from outside the box. Cunha has become an expert at timing late runs and exploiting space left between defenders, with dangerous results from opposing teams.
Outside of Fernandes, United have lacked threat from the players around the number nine this season (and, to be fair, from the nine themselves most of the time), with too many players who can either pass or run or cross but not find a half-yard in the box and put the ball away. Cunha can be expected to deliver in spades in a similar role.
Fernandes has mostly played on the left side of the pair of tens under Amorim, but has been perfectly effective on the right as well and including Cunha in the pairing behind the striker shouldn’t blunt the Portuguese attacking midfielder’s impact too much.
Slotting Cunha in behind a striker only has one evident downside, which is the need to buy one. With Delap out of the window now after his move to Stamford Bridge, United have been linked with a number of more traditional centre-forwards, including Gonçalo Ramos and Viktor Gyökeres, but would need to splash out. It’s reasonably plain, at this point, that Rasmus Højlund doesn’t cut it, and may take more time to develop than United feel that they have.
That caveat aside, this is the simplest and most straightforward way of integrating a highly effective attacking player into the club’s system – by mirroring his role at Wolves as closely as possible, it’s low risk and likely high reward, even if it does mean finding another player up front, potentially at quite a high cost.
Why Cunha may be even better as a central striker
The move for Mbeumo, however, perhaps changes things. While the Cameroonian winger has played up front before, he has made a right-sided role his own and would seem likely to operate behind the striker at Manchester United if he does make the switch to Old Trafford.
That would leave Amorim with a glut of players battling for two places. Alejandro Garnacho seems likely to leave, granted, but there is world in which Cunha, Mbeumo, Fernandes, Mason Mount, Joshua Zirkzee and Amad Diallo are all scrapping for just two spots. That would involve a waste of resources.
It could be that Amorim is plotting a move away from his usual formation and on to something like a 4-2-3-1, which would make a lot of sense if both Cunha and Mbeumo signed, but he has thus far proven to be extremely ideologically attached to the system which brought him success at Sporting, arguably to the point of sheer dogmatism.
If Mbeumo does arrive and Amorim does stick to his tactical guns, then, there is a strong economic and practical argument for making Cunha the number nine, even if it isn’t the role in which he is most comfortable – and there is every chance that he happens to be very good at it.
After all, this is a player whose finishing quality is such that he has scored 27 Premier League goals in two seasons from just 18.1xG. Very, very few players in the top flight can maintain a strike rate like that, and if the service is good then there is plenty of statistical evidence to suggest that Cunha would score an awful lot of goals as a pure striker, even if his creative and technical quality wasn’t used to maximal effect in such a role.
Manchester United haven’t had a truly first-rate goalscorer for years, and while the squad has many faults and holes, nothing would go further towards reversing course than finding a striker who scores 20 or more goals a season. In Cunha, United now have a player who can score 15 from deeper areas, playing for a side that creates fewer chances than United would hope to next year. He could easily make the jump.
It's also worth noting that at Sporting, Amorim used Gyökeres in a hybrid role which saw him operate both as a traditional number nine and as a wider striker who dragged defenders out of position to let his supporting forwards in, drifting down the left-hand channels to find space. There seems to be little reason that Cunha couldn’t mirror that successfully.
Cunha also happens to be an excellent pressing forward – another trait that defined Gyökeres’ role at Sporting under Amorim – and could perhaps fit the brief once handed to the Swede pretty closely. It’s also worth noting that Cunha has played as a centre-forward for most of his time on the pitch for the Brazilian national team.
If United do indeed sign Mbeumo in the coming weeks, it could well indicate that they believe that Cunha will be best suited to the central striker’s berth. Not every transfer move that the club has made in recent years has been especially logical, admittedly, but spending north of £100m on two players who would essentially be competing for the same place in the team would be tough to countenance, even at Old Trafford. Something would surely have to give.
Cunha has the class, technical skill and finishing touch to succeed as a striker with the right supporting cast and coaching. It might be a safer bet to install him as a number ten and sign a true striker instead of Mbeumo, but it doesn’t look like that’s the road the club is going down right now. Or they’re simply signing everyone and hoping it all works out somehow. Based on the last five years of work in the transfer market, perhaps that isn’t so implausible after all.
Continue Reading