1 week ago
10
Old Trafford problems
©IMAGO
Manchester United fans were certainly treated to an impressive spectacle of attacking football on Monday night, when Rúben Amorim’s side scored no less than four goals against Bournemouth. That would have been more than enough to give the Old Trafford faithful a Christmas cheer, if not for the fact that the visitors also scored four goals and condemned the Red Devils to their second draw in their last three Premier League games. Not for the first time this season, Man Utd had little problem sticking the ball in the back of the net, but continued to come undone by conceding too many goals down the other end of the pitch.
Indeed, few could doubt that Amorim’s side have plenty of firepower to work with this season. In the Premier League only Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City side have scored more goals than Man Utd, who sit level with league-leaders Arsenal with 30 goals scored in 16 games to date. However, the consistent problem with the Red Devils is the fact that they also have an unenviable defensive record of 26 conceded goals to date - only five English top-flight clubs have conceded more goals in the league this season and Amorim’s side haven’t kept a clean sheet in the Premier League since October 4. In no uncertain terms, Man Utd’s defence is holding Amorim’s team back.
Of course, Amorim would point to his notable absentee defenders on Monday for the reason behind such a porous performance from his back line - with Matthijs de Ligt, Harry Maguire and Noussair Mazraoui all missing through injury or international duty - but when we take a closer look at Man Utd’s defenders we can see that the club simply don’t have a collection of players that can rival or even come close to matching the biggest and richest clubs in the Premier League.
As we can see in the table above, the average market value of a Man Utd defender currently stands at just €21 million. That, somewhat unsurprisingly, is the worst average among the so-called “Big Six” in the English top-flight, with Man City’s average standing at almost twice that of their cross-city rivals at €39m and league-leaders Arsenal enjoy an incredible average of €55m. In total, Man Utd’s defence has a combined market value of €252m, which is the second lowest among the “Big Six” clubs, but with the largest assortment of defenders among the six clubs it certainly points to a squad made up of many defenders, but very few good ones.
This, undoubtedly, points to Man Utd falling into the trap of quantity over quality. When we rank every defender in the Premier League by the highest market values, the Old Trafford club have just one player in the top 25 ( Leny Yoro sits 10th with a market value of €55m), while Arsenal have five, Man City have four, Tottenham have four and Liverpool have two. In no uncertain terms, Amorim simply doesn’t have the kind of defensive talent to hand that managers like Mikel Arteta or Guardiola can call upon each and every week. And that is evident when we look at Man Utd’s transfer policy over the last five years.
When we take a look at Man Utd’s spending in the transfer market over the last five seasons, we can see that the club have spent €270m on signing new defenders. That figure in isolation is quite impressive, especially when we consider that only two clubs - Chelsea (€399.4m) and Man City (€306.8m) - have spent more on defenders in that period of time. But when we draw a comparison to Man Utd’s spending in other areas of the pitch, we can see that they’ve spent more than twice that amount on attacking players in the same period of time.
In total, Man Utd have spent just 25% of their transfer budget in the last five seasons on defenders. Which is a relatively low number when we consider that Amorim’s starting XI is often made up of four or five defenders in any given match. That perhaps explains why the club have such a low average market value for their defenders in comparison to other “Big Six” clubs in the Premier League: comparably little has been spent on fixing Amorim’s defence and as such the Portuguese tactician has a broad selection of average or sub-par defenders to choose from each and every week in the league. Which Bournemouth were only too happy to point out in Monday night’s game.
