The men who could shape Ruben Amorim’s Manchester United were sat side by side in the Old Trafford directors’ box, Jason Wilcox and Omar Berrada resplendent in club suits. The man whose transfer business helped Amorim get the job was on the other side of the aisle. There was a theory that, when Hugo Viana was lined up as Txiki Begiristain’s successor as Manchester City’s director of football, it meant Amorim would leave Sporting CP for the Etihad Stadium.
Not now, and not with Pep Guardiola signing a contract extension. And yet two rebuilding jobs are required in Manchester. Viana at least has the benefit of knowing he will not need to sell in order to buy, that he has vast leeway within PSR regulations and that City’s huge profits from trading in recent years mean that, even after spending in excess of £170m in January, he can anticipate a significant budget.
And yet the scale of the job was inadvertently outlined by Guardiola. City had seemed experts in planning but, as he admitted, they scarcely envisaged this.
“When you start the season and say you are going to play Matheus at right-back and Nico at left-back you would say, ‘what are you talking about?’” he said. His full-backs in a Manchester derby stalemate were midfielders, in Matheus Nunes and Nico O’Reilly. He was damning about Nunes, the £50m misfit who seems to have little future in the centre. “He's not a player to play in the middle because he's not clever enough with composure,” said Guardiola.
Look around his starting 11 at Old Trafford and the centre-forward was a midfielder who is soon to turn 34 and will leave in the summer, in Kevin De Bruyne. The £50m holding midfielder bought in the winter window was only on the bench, in Nico Gonzalez.
Of the entire 11, only one looks guaranteed to remain a first-choice next season in the position he occupied at Old Trafford: Ruben Dias. Josko Gvardiol will probably be in the team, but there is a question if it will be as a centre-back, the role for which he seemed to be recruited, or on the left, where he emerged as a goalscorer.
If it is the former, City have to target two full-backs: it has long been apparent they need Kyle Walker’s long-term replacement on the right, and that it is neither Nunes nor Rico Lewis. Perhaps, given his recovery pace, Abdukodir Khusanov could be used on the right. Yet if he and Gvardiol are bracketed as central defenders, City have seven, and Viana would surely have to shed at least one, presumably from the ...
