The cash-strapped Sir Jim Ratcliffe has already spent £200m on a whole new front three for Ruben Amorim and is currently searching sofa crevices for an extra wad in order to sign him a new goalkeeper and central midfielder.
Gianluigi Donnarumma makes an awful lot of sense to replace Andre Onana as No.1 and won’t cost the world, but while we can absolutely see why Amorim has pinpointed Carlos Baleba as his ‘perfect’ midfielder, reports suggest the Red Devils aren’t able to drum up the £100m-plus required to sign him from Brighton this summer.
They absolutely need a midfielder in a similar mould though, and as luck would have it, the great guys at FBRef have a very nifty list of 10 players from across Europe’s top five leagues who have similar characteristics to Baleba. Namely being an aggressive, tough-tackling midfielder who can go past opponents with the ball at his feet.
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Abdoulaye Toure (Le Havre, £2.5m)
Ten Ligue 1 goals from midfield for Le Havre last season sounds very promising indeed but a 15th-place finish having conceded 71 goals does raise the question as to how good Toure was at his primary job of protecting the defence.
And there’s a suspicion of him taking a ‘f*** it, I’m going to enjoy myself’ approach to football at the age of 31 given his 11 previous seasons of senior football have yielded 17 goals in total.
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Felix Nmecha (Borussia Dortmund, £24m)
One that got away from Manchester City, not in the sense that he would ever have played for them, but because he left them on a free transfer in 2021, two years before being sold by Wolfsburg to Borussia Dortmund for £26m.
United have been linked with the 24-year-old, but David Ornstein claimed ‘interest’ hasn’t turned into anything more concrete.
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Amadou Onana (Aston Villa, £43m)
Signed for £50m from Everton last summer, Onana had a largely forgettable first season at Villa Park, partly down to a couple of injuries but also because of Unai Emery’s typical preference for Youri Tielemans and Boubacar Kamara at the base of midfield.
That’s a tricky partnership to break in fairness to Onana, who would undoubtedly improve United’s midfield but his transfer may also feel a tad underwhelming, as often appears to be the case when he plays.
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Jean-Eudus Aholou (free agent)
Unconfirmed reports suggest Qatari side Umm Salal SC have already swooped in ahead of United to sign the 31-year-old journeyman, who represented seven Ligue 1 clubs before ‘amicably terminating his contract’ with Angers this summer.
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Mario Martin (Real Madrid, £1.3m)
After 20 La Liga games for Real Valladolid last season the 21-year-old’s off to Getafe on loan this term. We wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Manchester United making a £50m-plus move for the graduate of the Real Madrid academy in 2027, because why sign burgeoning talent on the cheap when you can pay big bucks for them after developing elsewhere?
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Johnny Cardoso (Atletico Madrid, £22m)
Linked with a move to Old Trafford earlier in the window as part of a possible Antony haggle, to the extent that there are several ‘Welcome to Manchester United’ videos on YouTube of the USMNT international, who instead swapped Real Betis for Atletico, which is in itself enough to suggest he would be the right sort of player to aid United. Diego Simeone loves a midfield pr*ck.
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Rodrigo Bentancur (Tottenham, £26m)
He was excellent against Paris Saint-Germain in the Super Cup and we love watching an on-song Bentancur, but he’s arguably the most Tottenham of all the Tottenham players, somehow managing to have the mercuriality of a 20-year-old winger as a 28-year-old defensive midfielder. We have every confidence that a move to Old Trafford would swallow him whole.
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Anton Stach (Leeds, £12m)
As much as we would enjoy the volume of boiled piss leaching into the rivers of West Yorkshire as a result of a player Leeds signed this summer moving immediately to Manchester United, it’s unfortunately unlikely to happen.
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Dario Essugo (Chelsea, £17m)
We have a sneaky feeling Chelsea may have another very, very good midfield destroyer on their hands in Essugo, who’s only just arrived from Sporting but will need at least one significant injury to play anything more than a bit-part role under Enzo Maresca this season, with Moises Caicedo, Romeo Lavia and Andrey Santos all very much above him in the pecking order. A loan move would be a smart option, but that’s not going to be to United.
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Seydouba Cisse (Leganes, £2.6m)
Relegated with Leganes last season and a lack of interest in his services from sides remaining in the top tier suggests Cisse is not the big fix Amorim needs as the base of his midfield.
