Manchester United wants a real defensive midfielder

This newsletter has given a lot of time to dribbly boys and classy passers in recent weeks, so we thought we’d spice things up by talking about a dude who’s really good at running around and kicking people: Manuel Ugarte, who’s been linked to Manchester United.

It feels like Manchester United have been consistently seeking solutions at defensive midfield since Michael Carrick started slowing down a decade ago, and finding very few satisfactory ones. Casemiro appears to be on his way out after suffering a steep decline last season, and the club haven’t picked up the £21.4 million option they had to purchase Sofyan Amrabat at the end of his loan. Enter Ugarte, who Paris Saint-Germain paid €60 million to sign from Sporting CP last summer. L’Equipe is reporting that an initial bid has been rejected, but PSG is still very much open to negotiations.

It’s pretty clear what Ugarte would give United that Casemiro does not. If nothing else, this is a guy who covers ground and puts pressure on the ball.

Some big defensive metrics look great for Ugarte: 6.41 possession-adjusted tackles, 42.05 possession-adjusted pressures, and 6.55 pressure regains per 90 are all best among Ligue 1 midfielders with more than 600 minutes last season.

That’s the good news for United fans, but it’s not clear how much more than ball-winning Ugarte is going to be able to give a team. There are some… let’s call them orange flags, in Ugarte’s resume. Not dealbreakers, but stuff that United has to think hard about before committing to a £50m+ fee and a long-term contract.

Ugarte’s 92% passing accuracy looks pretty nice paired with a midfield destroyer profile, but he’s dead last among those aforementioned Ligue 1 midfielders in StatsBomb’s pass OBV metric, and his 4.49 deep progressions per 90 is decidedly mid.

He’s good at making safe passes, but when you compare him to the incumbent defensive midfielder on the other side of town, you can see how much Ugarte is lagging behind in the ball progression department.

Ugarte is also more of a fitness and work rate freak than he is a skilled ball-winner. He successfully defended 38% of dribbles against him in Ligue 1 last year, which is a touch below average. This fell to 32% in a small sample in Champions League, with a particularly poor performance in this department in a 2-1 loss to AC Milan appearing to be a significant turning point in his manager Luis Enrique trusting him to start big, consequential matches. Ugarte didn’t start any of PSG’s six CL knockout stage games, and was only subbed into two of them.

Whether or not Ugarte would make a good signing for United depends on what they want him to do. He’s a pretty classic water carrier. Erik ten Hag turning to that profile for his deepest-lying midfielder would represent a significant change of heart from 1. a former Ajax manager, 2. who has given Christian Eriksen a lot of run in that role. Ugarte does plenty of things well, but if they expect him to progress the ball forward as well as the starting defensive mids at the other big Premier League clubs, they’re going to be disappointed.

-KM

Rumours and News

Because of the PSR flurry and the fact that it’s July 1, there are way too many things to report on today. If your favourite story isn’t here, either be patient or send us a reply asking us to cover it and we’ll try to work it in later in the week.

• Dan Ashworth can start immediately. Apparently Manchester United agreed to pony up the compensation fee Newcastle were demanding, and the highly-regarded, well-travelled Sporting Director can finally get started on the massive renovation project in Manchester.

• Yankuba Minteh has joined Brighton for a £30M-ish fee from Newcastle. It’s always nice when you get excited about a player, put that stance out into the world, and Brighton’s recruitment department comes out of the blue and backs that up for you. It’s far LESS exciting for that to happen when you are working at a club and were hoping to sign that player for yourselves. We have lived both of these things.

• 21-year-old Newcastle Midfielder Elliot Anderson joins Nottingham Forest in a deal worth up to £35M. It feels to me like Newcastle had to sell two future stars to dig their way out of PSR problems that they weren’t entirely expecting to face. Combine that with the loss of Dan Ashworth, and it makes sense for fans to express some concerns about where the project is headed.

• Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall [nee “Bridgerton”] has joined Chelsea in a deal worth approximately £30M, with Michael Golding joining Leicester City for 5M in an ahem separate deal. We like Bridgerton as a Premier League player a decent amount… but a Champions League player? That I am far less certain about, and that is the actual profile of players Chelsea should be signing.

• All of these transfer swap fees are actually some weird accounting nonsense and fuck knows how TransferMarkt and the media are going to report them going forward. It feels like consultancy work for Kieran Maguire or SwissRamble to create a process that allows the world to talk about these in a sensible way for the future.

• We’ll discuss Archie Gray later in the week. Honest.

• “Bayern Munich have made a final offer of between £38-39m for 28-year-old Fulham and Portugal midfielder Joao Palhinha, who has already verbally agreed a deal with the German club.” That is a remarkably specific range coming from Sky Germany. Fulham need to get younger and should probably accept the deal.

• Fulham are set to work on deals to keep Brazil forward Willian, 35, and Jamaica winger Bobby De Cordova-Reid, 31, even after their contracts with the club run out on Monday. Or Fulham could do that. That is also an option. A thing, if you will. That they could do.

• Hull’s Jaden Philogene has been listed as a player of interest to some of the biggest clubs in Europe so far this summer. Everton are the latest team to consider a transfer for him. This last one might be realistic, but it’s more likely at this point that his agent has been happily shopping the player to any news outlet that might be interested in suspending their disbelief.

P.S.
We’ve signed Kim McCauley to help us on the content front. Kim is a highly experienced addition on both the media and transfer fronts. The Rumours section will continue to be aggregated everyone, but when we do a feature, we’ll start to sign off our work with “KM” or “TK” as above.

We will also have a new podcast production addition next week. Both of these additions should help increase the professionalism of our little enterprise here, while keeping quality and content volume high.