Why Sofyan Amrabat Would Solve Man United's BIGGEST Problem
Erik Ten Hag's Manchester United have had a troubling start to the new season, with concerns raised over the solidity and fitness of their midfield. A move for Fiorentina's Sofyan Amrabat has been rumoured, and with the player's ability to both defend and attack, he would be the perfect solution to their various problems
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00:00 Sofyan Amrabat, wait I didn't say hello there did I?
00:06 Hello everybody, Adam Cleary from 442 here.
00:09 How are you doing?
00:10 Is that a new coat?
00:11 It's absolutely gorgeous.
00:12 Sofyan Amrabat, he looks like he might be going to Manchester United.
00:17 And in all my many, not years, like weeks I guess, as a football analyst I have never
00:23 seen a single player more likely to solve more problems currently being had by one football
00:29 team.
00:30 And that is because my friends, there are not one Sofyan Amrabat, there are two Sofyan
00:36 Amrabat and Manchester United really badly need them both.
00:43 Okay so Sofyan Amrabat, you may well remember him from last year's World Cup.
00:49 Now being a Fiorentina player at the time, and indeed still now, he probably wasn't someone
00:55 who was on everybody's radar prior to this.
00:58 That genuinely showed me someone who said, "Oh I watched a lot of Morocco last year and
01:02 I will show you either A, a liar or B, just like literally a Moroccan."
01:08 But he turned a lot of heads in that tournament and was one of the main reasons for Morocco's
01:11 really impressive surge into the semi-finals because he sat right in front of a back four.
01:18 He was the single pivot in that midfield and he did stuff like this.
01:22 That may well be one of my favourite tackles any football player has ever done right after
01:26 Scott Parker's one on Joe Cole.
01:28 That never stops being entertaining to watch and I promise you right now I'll be showing
01:33 that at least two more times in this video.
01:35 So that's who he is right?
01:36 He's a big guard bastard defensive midfielder who breaks everything up and he stops other
01:41 teams playing.
01:42 If we look at his FB ref profile purely from the World Cup, those numbers do support that.
01:47 Per 90 he was winning the ball back in his defensive third more than pretty much anybody
01:50 else.
01:51 If we look at the middle third and the attacking third, that shows that he very rarely ventured
01:55 out of that position.
01:56 He was getting loads and loads of touches both in this sort of area and just in his
01:59 own penalty area but wasn't making any kind of progressive passes or long passes so clearly
02:03 his job was to just sit here, hover, protect the back four, win the ball back and then
02:08 just give it to somebody else.
02:09 He was stopping players dribble around him, he was blocking the ball, he was recovering
02:13 the ball.
02:14 It's pretty easy to see what kind of player he is right?
02:17 Ha ha ha said the fat controller, wrong.
02:20 These are Amrobat's exact same stats but not from his World Cup performance from the last
02:25 year playing for Fiorentina.
02:27 And even though he plays in largely the same position, like he still operates as a single
02:30 pivot in that Fiorentina team, the contrast between what he's being asked to do there
02:34 is bananas.
02:36 He very rarely wins the ball back in this area of the pitch, instead he's far more likely
02:40 to be recovering it in the attacking third instead.
02:43 And if you're not already sitting down for this one I would advise you to take a seat
02:46 pal given he wasn't asked to do any passing whatsoever for Morocco, what he's doing at
02:51 Fiorentina is simply staggering by contrast.
02:55 That is literally the profile of one of the best and most progressive passers of the ball
02:59 across the entirety of European football.
03:03 And again just for contrast, it's the same guy who did this.
03:07 And in fact as anybody who watched Fiorentina last year, like even if you just caught them
03:10 in the conference final against West Ham will be able to tell you, he is so vital to everything
03:15 about their build up.
03:16 Like Fiorentina are an excellent, excellent team and the reason for that is Amrobat's
03:20 passing ability, his distribution, his positional awareness, not his tackling or his ability
03:25 to disrupt things, his ability to create things.
03:28 Like even from this really deep sitting position that he has, he gets the ball into the penalty
03:33 area loads, he gets the ball into the final third, he switches it.
03:36 If you look at his completion numbers for his medium and long passes you can see this
03:40 is one of the most incisive and accurate passes of a ball in the world.
03:45 Like you can start to see the picture that's getting painted here can't you?
03:48 For his national side he plays as one of the best defensive and destructive midfielders
03:53 in the world and for his club side he plays as one of the best deep playmaking creative
03:57 players in the world.
03:59 Now here's the thing, we are only two games into the Premier League season, by the time
04:02 you watch this video Man United may well have stuffed Nottingham Forest and a lot of these
04:07 concerns may well just feel like old news.
04:10 But in those first two games, these are two really specific problems they've had.
04:14 As we mentioned in the other video that went out this week, it'll be here or maybe I'll
04:18 put it behind me through my shirt which will look really silly.
04:20 Ten Hog want Man United to be the best team in transition in the entire world and half
04:26 of that job is that when you win the ball back, like in your opponent's third or in
04:30 the middle of the pitch, you are then really incisive, able to create chances out of that
04:34 turnover.
04:35 And we saw that in the Spurs game, Man United were able to win the ball back in these areas
04:39 on occasion and they did get a couple of chances out of it, but it's difficult to say that
04:43 they were particularly incisive with it.
04:46 They weren't ruthless, they weren't hitting that killer ball early.
04:49 By case in point, here's an excellent start that Opta have got at the minute.
04:51 Man United currently lead the league in terms of the number of high turnovers they've been
04:57 able to create.
04:58 They are pressing teams really well in this area of the pitch and they also lead the league
05:01 in terms of the number of shots they've been able to create from a high turnover, which
05:05 means that's clearly the plan and it's working reasonably well, but they haven't yet scored
05:09 one single goal from doing that, which means that either the finishing's not great, something
05:14 they'll fix when Hoyland comes into the side, they hope, or the chances they're making just
05:19 aren't that good.
05:20 Like, it really is something to be literally top of the league in the thing you are trying
05:25 to do and literally be bottom of the league for how effective the thing you're trying
05:31 to do is.
05:32 That's football, baby!
05:33 Man United's other problem though, indeed their far bigger, more glaring and much funnier
05:38 to fans of every other club in the world problem, is that when they lose the ball, they're
05:42 about as open as Will Smith's marriage.
05:44 We saw time and again against Wolves and Tottenham, this policy of pushing for high turnovers
05:49 with both Mount and Fernandes left this huge glaring gap between them and Casemiro and
05:54 all these other teams who've got these players who like to get on the ball and run in counter
05:58 attack situations was leaving him embarrassingly exposed.
06:02 Now when the defence as a whole pushed up against Wolves, because they were at home,
06:06 they were far less afraid of them, this left all this space in behind that they kept getting
06:10 into and they should have scored repeatedly from it.
06:13 Obviously having learned that lesson against Spurs, they sat a little bit deeper trying
06:16 not to leave as glaring a hole, but that just left this gap again and Casemiro kept getting
06:21 dribbled past by Madison.
06:23 What they tried to do to combat this was to stay actually a little bit more compact, trying
06:26 to deny the space in the middle, but that's exactly where Spurs' goal came from because
06:31 all of this room on the right hand side was just filled by players who can do things with
06:36 it.
06:37 And again, as we discussed in the other video, the only way to protect against this, the
06:40 only way to stop this being a major problem is to be super, super intense in every single
06:46 thing you do.
06:47 Because over the course of a game, you are going to press the opposition, you're all
06:50 going to crowd around it and get drawn into one area of the pitch and you're not going
06:54 to win the ball and Premier League teams will occasionally wriggle out from this and get
06:58 an attack going with the space you have invited them to do so in.
07:02 But the thing is, unless they've got one immediate, highly accurate killer pass that's going to
07:06 take everyone out of the equation, players still have to run and have to travel and if
07:11 you are determined to match them in doing this, you'll kind of get away with it.
07:15 But Man United were only doing that on and off across the game.
07:18 Like sometimes they would be really alert to it, they would match Tottenham's runs,
07:21 they would match them for intensity, but as the game went on, they started doing that
07:25 less and less, which meant the space they were being left was free to be played in.
07:29 And does that sound to you, my friends, like something a player who did this would ever
07:35 allow to happen?
07:36 And one other very important stat from that World Cup is that Amrobac covered the most
07:40 distance on the pitch of any single player in that tournament.
07:45 So you can't accuse him of lack of intensity, of lack of running.
07:48 He will go anywhere, chase anybody down if that is a job he's being given.
07:52 So if we just really quickly look at Man United's system currently so far, that's obviously
07:57 Casemiro, we've got Fernandes and Mount and the three attacking players, they're going
08:00 to change as people come back to fitness.
08:02 But these three in the middle here, on paper, it's a 4-3-3 with Casemiro as the single pivot,
08:07 but obviously occasionally over the course of the game, Fernandes will move into the
08:11 middle and it winds up being a 4-2-3-1.
08:13 Now this is a system that works great for every single player in it except Mason Mount.
08:18 Now if you're a Man United fan, you still don't really get the Mount thing, he's been
08:22 rubbish, like trust me, if you watch him over time, you'll start to see why Ten Hag is so
08:27 big on him.
08:28 Genuinely, if you're watching a Man United game and you can't see what Mount's doing,
08:31 stop watching the ball.
08:32 Just watch him whenever he's on screen and you'll see the movement he makes and how he
08:36 reads space and how that's that about how good Man United have been at turnovers, he's
08:40 so important to that.
08:42 Whether he's the one winning the ball back or not, he closes down the areas, he shuts
08:46 off passing angles, he's a reason that's happening.
08:48 But when they get into this formation, this is not really where he wants to be, he's not
08:52 really a deep player, he does carry it but not brilliantly, he does win the ball back
08:56 but not brilliantly, he wants to be floating around in these inside channels, cutting off
09:00 passing lanes and getting on the ball here.
09:02 But Amrabat in this scenario does want to do these things, he does want to get on the
09:06 ball in deep areas and as we've seen, hit those long medium passes to the flanks or
09:10 the players in behind, he does want to progress the ball that way and he can of course cover
09:14 all the space in that area and win the ball back if that's what you want him to do.
09:18 But the thing is you swap him out for Casemiro instead and all of a sudden, Mount can sort
09:22 of float and be in these positions he wants to be in because Amrabat will cover across
09:26 and be around this space a lot better than Casemiro will.
09:30 Not because he's a better defender, he's not really in terms of how he wins the ball back
09:34 and his technique and all that, but his engine and his distance covered and his determination
09:39 will see him across the pitch more than Casemiro will.
09:42 And that's why at the start I said that there are two, that's four, there are two Amrabats
09:46 that exist because one is the perfect foil to Casemiro, he'll allow that midfield to
09:50 be more expressive and to be more incisive and the other one's a perfect foil to Mount
09:55 because he'll allow him to be more expressive and play further forward and he'll do all
09:58 the dirty work behind him instead.
10:00 The way to think about Amrabat, right, is that he's kind of like a footballing vape.
10:05 Like he's still fiery and dangerous and ultimately quite bad for you but he's also very sleek
10:11 and elegant and he looks good doing what he's supposed to be doing so, I mean don't smoke
10:16 obviously but just as an image.
10:17 And also, whisper it Mount United fans, but if you don't go out and get him, if you don't
10:22 spend the money on getting him, Liverpool probably will and you don't want that.
10:29 You really don't.
10:30 He profiles about as close to Fabinho as any player who's ever existed so you don't want
10:36 them to have that, you want to have that.
10:39 Look, so the bottom line here is that Amrabat is a very dynamic and very versatile midfielder
10:44 but all the things that give him that versatility and that dynamism, dynamism?
10:50 The dynamism or whatever are the specific problems, the holds that Mount United currently
10:54 have in their game.
10:56 So it's not so much that he's like a Swiss Army knife, it's more that he's like...
11:04 A few moments later...
11:06 Nope, haven't got one for that.
11:08 Can't think of anything.
11:09 Here's that Mbappe tackle.
11:10 Anyway, so Manchester United fans, if you did enjoy that video, please do let us know
11:14 in the comments below.
11:15 Would you like to see Amrabat as another player you'd much prefer they got instead or is everything
11:18 just fine, is it all going to work out in the end?
11:21 All comments appreciated.
11:22 If you do want to subscribe to the channel, that is the one thing that really, really
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11:38 Thank you ever, ever so much.
11:39 The brand new 442, my favourite one we've ever done for obvious reasons, is in stores
11:45 now.
11:46 But until next time, thank you very much for watching.
11:47 I've of course been Adam Cleary.
11:48 Get me on Twitter, Instagram, Threads or X, whatever they're calling it, @AdamCleary,
11:52 C-L-E-A-R-Y, 442, socials are in the corner.
11:55 And wow, that was a long outro, wasn't it?
11:57 Goodbye.