Why Andre Onana Would Transform Manchester United
Manchester United are on the verge of completing a transfer for goalkeeper Andre Onana. While plenty has been made of his ability with the ball at his feet, what he brings to Erik Ten Hag's side could go way, way beyond some tidy control and building out from the back.
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00:00 Hello there you absurdly handsome bunch, Adam Cleary from 442 here and today we're here
00:08 to talk about goalies, and specifically crazy goalies, and even more specifically how much
00:13 fun crazy goalies are.
00:14 Actually you know what, that's not true at all, I've just lied to you there, what we're
00:17 here to talk about is Andre Onana and how he's almost certainly going to be incorrectly
00:22 classified as a crazy goalie over the coming weeks and months, because he's gonna go to
00:27 Man United.
00:28 In fact by the time this video goes out they may well have completed that deal, so if so,
00:32 this is why Man United have bought Andre Onana, and if they haven't, this is why Man United
00:37 really want to buy Andre Onana.
00:40 All bases covered.
00:41 Right so Andre Onana is, Onana, sorry Rihanna's here, Onana, Onana, why do you keep asking
00:50 me that, Onana, are you doing a bit, are you doing a bit, she's doing a bit.
00:53 But anyway yes sorry, Andre Onana is, and this is a big statement, probably the most
00:58 modern, modern goalie you can go out and buy, and what that means is he's just really really
01:03 good with his feet.
01:04 And what that means isn't just that his distribution's good, like he can play short excellently, he
01:08 can play long really really well, but also his close control is really good, he can receive
01:12 the ball under pressure, he can play his way out of tight situations, he can even beat
01:16 a man if he wants to.
01:17 And for obvious reasons, the way football is currently played, and specifically the
01:21 way Eric Ten Hag is going to want to play, it's incredibly beneficial to have a goalkeeper
01:25 with those skill sets.
01:26 So this is pretty much Man United last season, I know they changed Fernandez's position
01:30 a lot and people were in, people were out, but this is sort of roughly where they settled.
01:34 And one of the big problems with this, as well as needing a man who scores loads of
01:38 goals up front, is David de Gea.
01:40 If you look at the players Ten Hag brought in, specifically Martinez, who was an incredible
01:43 ball player in centre back, and Casemiro who's one of the best pivots in world football,
01:48 and Christian Eriksen who's really comfortable getting on the ball in deep areas, there's
01:51 a lot of emphasis on building out from the back, of playing the ball around your own
01:55 third to try and unlock things in the final third.
01:58 And the thing about David de Gea, right, this is going to sound unnecessarily flowery and
02:02 poetic but I'm a goalkeeper so just let me have this, he's one of my favourite in the
02:07 Premier League era because some of the saves he makes defy belief, they defy convention,
02:12 but he was pretty much the last great goalkeeper who came along when being a goalkeeper.
02:18 Pretty much just meant your ability to save shots.
02:20 And I can see people taking issue with that sentence because obviously it's always been
02:23 about command of your area and taking crosses and leadership and all that other stuff, but
02:28 fundamentally if your goalkeeper couldn't save things, he was worthless.
02:32 And that hasn't changed, you still need to be a great shot stopper, but now so many teams,
02:36 especially at the top level, need you, not just as a nice thing, need you to be able
02:40 to get involved with the build up, and if you can't do that, you can't play for them.
02:43 And David de Gea, as much as I love him, can't do that.
02:46 And the most glaring way this manifests itself is if you just look at Man United in the build
02:50 up, they tend to be five or ten yards closer to their own goal than all the teams around
02:54 them at the top of the league, and that is because pushing any further up than that would
02:58 ask too much of de Gea.
02:59 And what I mean by that is he is capable of getting involved in the build up, but what
03:03 Man United will normally do is push their full backs on as much as they can get away
03:06 with and the two centre backs will stay in the middle to be the first point to pass,
03:10 and then Casemiro will drop to form this little triangle here.
03:14 Eriksen's around as well, so he'll float, he'll find a bit of space, but effectively
03:17 it's always these three players and de Gea is there as an option in case they get stuck.
03:21 If teams pen them in and they can't get to the full backs or they can't get between the
03:24 lines or they can't go to the attackers, he's the one they'll go to, it'll come straight
03:27 back to him, he'll be in a nice, safe, very deep position, and he can either try one out
03:32 to the flanks himself or just punt it long.
03:34 Or even sometimes the centre backs will split as wide as they possibly can, Casemiro will
03:37 come here, Eriksen will come across to help, and they'll try and get some kind of little
03:41 triangle going between the wide players.
03:44 Either way you can see, however they're setting this up, de Gea is not included in it.
03:48 Now when building up from the back was first being popularised, first becoming a far more
03:52 common sight, that's how you did it.
03:53 Your goalkeeper wasn't going to be one of the best ball players in the team, so you
03:57 got him in a situation where he's a useful option, you can use him to effectively bounce
04:00 balls to other players, but he was never going to be included in it.
04:03 That was like 10 years ago, that's how everyone did it.
04:05 Actually, and I'm going to try and not go off on a tangent here, this is kind of why
04:08 pressing became a thing, because teams had set patterns at the back, so if you could
04:12 identify those patterns, if you could learn those patterns, if you could exploit those
04:15 patterns, you could win the ball really high up, potentially.
04:18 But the interesting thing about pressing coming into the game is you didn't really see teams
04:23 deliberately try and press the goalkeeper.
04:25 They were always taken away from that situation, they were the other team's get out.
04:29 And obviously with pressing becoming a bigger part of the game, like whether you're a pressing
04:32 team or not, you tend to have at least a plan for pressing the opposition in this area.
04:37 The value of a goalkeeper who could get involved with this at a competent level and effectively
04:41 add an extra man became just invaluable.
04:44 Like if you're normally building up with five players, say, and the opposition decides,
04:48 well, we're going to press that, so we'll commit five players to press you, you introduce
04:52 the goalkeeper into the equation as a major part of it, and all of a sudden either they're
04:56 completely outnumbered and it's completely ineffective, or they then got to commit six
05:01 players forward.
05:02 And obviously their goalkeeper isn't then going to go mark the centre forward, so that
05:05 will give you an overload somewhere else in the pitch.
05:08 And thus now what the best teams with really competent goalkeepers like to do is not have
05:11 this triangle here, but they can push 10 yards further forward, the goalkeeper can play here,
05:16 and instead they have a diamond.
05:18 That'll either allow your other pivot player to just go where he wants, or if you're playing
05:21 a 4-3-3, it means you've got the entire structure of the team nicely moved up the pitch.
05:26 And if you're building up from this area, the rest of the team can push a lot further
05:30 up the pitch, can get into more dangerous areas, and all of a sudden you're not Man
05:34 United building up on the edge of your own box, you're Man City or you're Liverpool building
05:38 up in the middle of your half.
05:40 And this is what Eric ten Hag will want to do next season.
05:43 He's got Martinez, who will do this role really well, he's got Casemiro, who will do this
05:46 role really well, they've even got Mason Mount now, who is the perfect sort of attacking
05:49 number eight, he can sacrifice a little bit of that stability in the middle to get a player
05:53 who can do a lot more.
05:55 But this does not work without the goalkeeper.
05:58 To put David de Gea in this position where he'd be playing outside his own box a lot,
06:02 where he'd be getting put under pressure, where he would be a part of the build up and
06:05 thus a part of the opposition's press.
06:07 It's not what he's good at, that's not his skill set.
06:09 He has disasters in these areas.
06:11 I think probably the moment that will have convinced ten Hagas was never going to work
06:14 was the Europa League game.
06:16 Like this is a fairly routine ball to deal with.
06:18 He just needs to bring it under control or hit it away first time and he does that.
06:24 That ain't gonna run.
06:25 So very straightforward, that is how Manchester United would be transformed by having a goalkeeper
06:30 who was better with the ball at their feet.
06:32 But why do they specifically want Onana?
06:35 Because I'll be honest, there's plenty of other goalkeepers on the market right now
06:39 who can get involved in the build up, who would be a big upgrade on de Gea in that area.
06:43 Can play tidy, can play under pressure, can do all that stuff.
06:46 So why him?
06:47 And I mean, if we look at his FB ref profile, there's nothing that really jumps out at you
06:52 there as like exceptional, exceptional numbers.
06:54 Like a lot of those are just, you're playing a really good team who build up from the back.
06:57 So of course you're going to concede fewer goals and of course you're going to get more
07:00 touches and more passes.
07:01 There's not really anything that screams spend bajillion pounds on me.
07:05 But why you do spend the money on him is, well, first of all, levels.
07:09 Like there are goalkeepers who can do this very well, but he doesn't do it very well.
07:12 He does it absolutely exceptionally.
07:14 Like I said at the start, there's virtually no goalkeeper you go and buy who is better
07:18 with the ball at his feet.
07:19 Not good.
07:20 There's loads of good ones, but nobody better.
07:22 So in my opinion, you don't actually buy Andre Onana for his short passing and his build
07:26 up ability.
07:27 You could buy other goalkeepers to do that.
07:28 But what you buy Onana for is his creative abilities.
07:32 There have been several times this season for Inter Milan where he has effectively worked
07:36 as not just a deep line playmaker, but a very, very deep line playmaker.
07:41 He ends up being the man in space to receive the ball to then play a long, a killer pass,
07:46 a through ball, something that splits the lines.
07:48 He is one of Inter's best passes and one of their most dangerous attacking players.
07:54 And he's a f***** goalie.
07:55 And if you want any examples of this, just look at the last half an hour of that Champions
07:59 League final.
08:00 Pretty much from the moment Sidney go 1-0 up, they start trying to smother Inter Milan,
08:04 stop them building up and Onana is always the player left.
08:07 And he plays some unbelievable passes into Sidney's final third.
08:12 He was repeatedly breaking the first line of Manchester City's press.
08:15 He was finding players between the lines as they were sort of moving side to side.
08:18 And when he wasn't doing that, he was firing dead eye accurate balls into either Dzeko
08:24 or Lukaku, who were then using that as a way to get other players in.
08:27 Like these aren't just hopeful long balls into the final third.
08:30 They are the correct passing choice for that exact situation.
08:33 He reads the game brilliantly from that position and chooses his passes accordingly.
08:38 And when you are a team with the stature of Manchester United, who spent pretty much every
08:41 game having all their creative players targeted by the opposition, they're closed down, they're
08:45 not allowed space, they shut down all their passing angles.
08:48 If you can add another one in the shape of your goalkeeper, then that's, that's a nightmare
08:53 for other teams because all of a sudden they can't neglect him in the press.
08:56 They've got to make sure he's marked at all times.
08:58 It forces them to commit at least one extra player forward to make that happen, which
09:03 frees up loads of room for your creative players in the final third.
09:06 Like he is an extra dimension, not just to a team, but to football itself.
09:11 But now the bad news.
09:13 If you're a Man United fan watching this video, you are going to spend the next few months
09:16 of your life hearing about how this player is an absolute disaster waiting to happen.
09:21 He is a calamity.
09:23 He's got a shocker in his locker and it's not entirely untrue.
09:28 You go on the internet and there are no shortage of compilation clips of Onana just giving
09:32 the ball to the opposition, to doing incredibly stupid things, to his brain apparently just
09:37 falling out.
09:38 But I'm here to tell you, Man United fans, that if you look close at these videos, you
09:41 will find one thing which should reassure you.
09:44 Almost all of them, and almost all of them, by the way, are in a Ajax kit.
09:50 An Ajax kit?
09:51 An Ajax kit.
09:52 The Ajax kit.
09:54 The Ajax kit.
09:55 The problem with him when he first broke through, and indeed the reason he ended up at Inter
09:57 Milan, no disrespect Inter Milan, was that he could do all this good stuff, but he still
10:04 was a bit of a bomb scare.
10:06 However, while at Inter Milan, big respect Inter Milan, he has cut a lot of that out
10:11 of his game.
10:12 He has improved his decision making.
10:13 He has improved his overall technique.
10:15 He plays these risky positions and these risky passes now with a far lower, lower risk of
10:21 disaster.
10:22 He does still have the odd one in him, though, but the guy's 27, he's coming into his prime
10:26 years, he could well cut that out.
10:28 And I would argue, again, as a goalkeeper, if that's how you want to use your goalkeeper,
10:34 you just have to make your peace with the fact you may concede one or two stupid goals
10:39 a season doing it.
10:40 I can guarantee you, you will score more as a result if you just live with it.
10:44 So what I'm saying, Man United fans, if anyone tries to wind you up about him over the next
10:48 few months, just take a back seat.
10:50 Just tell them, we'll see.
10:51 And what I'll add for any neutrals watching is it's a no lose situation.
10:55 Really, either one of the best goalkeepers in the world who will entirely redefine how
10:59 we think about goalkeeping in this country is about to come to the league or Man United
11:02 have just signed the biggest disaster imaginable.
11:05 And that'll be entertaining to watch for the rest of us.
11:07 But yes, Manchester United fans, yours is the opinion I am after.
11:11 Is Andre Onana the man for the job?
11:13 Is he the man you wanted?
11:14 If not, who did you want?
11:15 All of it in the comments below, please.
11:17 Thank you very much.
11:18 While you're here, if you enjoyed the video, and I hope you did, why not subscribe?
11:21 We do them all the time for every club going.
11:25 So it's a good time.
11:26 It's a good time.
11:27 It's a good time.
11:28 In the meantime, grab me on Twitter, Instagram, threads.
11:29 I'm bloody everywhere at AdamTheory, C-L-E-R-Y, and so is 442 at 442.
11:35 Until next time, though, I am sweating absolutely buckets in this studio, so I'm going to wrap
11:39 up right now and open a window.
11:40 Goodbye.
11:41 (upbeat music)
11:44 (upbeat music)