Why Sofyan Amrabat Would Solve Man United's BIGGEST Problem
Why Sofyan Amrabat would solve Manchester United's problem's
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00:00 (ding)
00:02 Okay, so Safian Amrabat.
00:04 You may well remember him from last year's World Cup.
00:08 Now being a Fiorentina player at the time,
00:11 and indeed still now,
00:12 he probably wasn't someone who was on everybody's radar
00:16 prior to this.
00:17 Like genuinely show me someone who said,
00:18 "Ooh, I watched a lot of Morocco last year,"
00:21 and I will show you either A, a liar,
00:23 or B, just like literally a Moroccan.
00:26 But he turned a lot of heads in that tournament
00:28 and was one of the main reasons for Morocco's
00:30 really impressive surge into the semifinals
00:33 because he sat right in front of a back four.
00:36 He was the single pivot in that midfield
00:38 and he did stuff like this.
00:40 That may well be one of my favorite tackles
00:42 any football player has ever done
00:44 right after Scott Parker's one on Joe Cole.
00:46 (laughs)
00:47 That never stops being entertaining to watch
00:49 and I promise you, right now I'll be showing that
00:52 at least two more times in this video.
00:54 So that to me is right,
00:55 he's a big guard, bastard, defensive midfield
00:57 who breaks everything up
00:59 and he stops other teams playing.
01:00 And if we look at his FB ref profile
01:02 purely from the World Cup,
01:04 those numbers do support that.
01:05 Per 90, he was winning the ball back
01:07 in his defensive third,
01:08 more than pretty much anybody else.
01:09 If we look at the middle third and the attacking third,
01:11 that shows that he very rarely ventured
01:13 out of that position.
01:14 He was getting loads and loads of touches,
01:16 both in this sort of area
01:17 and just in his own penalty area,
01:19 but wasn't making any kind of progressive passes
01:21 or long passes.
01:22 So clearly his job was to just sit here, hover,
01:24 protect the back four, win the ball back,
01:26 and then just give it to somebody else.
01:28 He was stopping players dribble around him,
01:30 he was blocking the ball,
01:31 he was recovering the ball.
01:32 It's pretty easy to see what kind of player he is, right?
01:35 Ha ha ha, said the fat controller, wrong.
01:38 These are Amrobat's exact same stats,
01:41 but not from his World Cup performance
01:43 from the last year playing for Fiorentina.
01:46 And even though he plays in largely the same position,
01:48 like he still operates as a single pivot
01:50 in that Fiorentina team,
01:51 the contrast between what he's being asked to do there
01:53 is bananas.
01:55 He very rarely wins the ball back in this area of the pitch.
01:58 Instead, he's far more likely to be recovering it
02:00 in the attacking third instead.
02:02 And if you're not already sitting down for this one,
02:04 I would advise you to take a seat, pal,
02:06 given he wasn't asked to do any passing whatsoever
02:09 for Morocco, what he's doing at Fiorentina
02:11 is simply staggering by contrast.
02:14 That is literally the profile of one of the best
02:16 and most progressive passes of the ball
02:18 across the entirety of European football.
02:22 And again, just for contrast,
02:23 it's the same guy who did this.
02:25 And in fact, as anybody who watched Fiorentina last year,
02:28 like even if you just caught them in the conference final
02:30 against West Ham, we'll be able to tell you,
02:32 he is so vital to everything about their buildup.
02:35 Like Fiorentina are an excellent, excellent team.
02:37 And the reason for that is Amrobat's passing ability,
02:40 his distribution, his positional awareness,
02:43 not his tackling or his ability to disrupt things,
02:45 his ability to create things.
02:47 Like even from this really deep sitting position
02:50 that he has, he gets the ball into the penalty area loads,
02:52 he gets the ball into the final third, he switches it.
02:55 If you look at his completion numbers
02:56 for his medium and long passes, you can see,
02:59 this is one of the most like incisive
03:01 and accurate passes of a ball in the world.
03:04 But you can start to see the picture
03:05 that's getting painted here, can't you?
03:07 Like for his national side, he plays as one
03:09 of the best defensive and destructive midfielders
03:12 in the world.
03:13 And for his club side, he plays as one
03:14 of the best deep playmaking creative players in the world.
03:17 Now, here's the thing, we are only two games
03:20 into the Premier League season.
03:21 By the time you watch this video,
03:22 Man United may well have stuffed Nottingham Forest
03:25 and a lot of these concerns may well just feel like old news.
03:28 But in those first two games,
03:30 these are two really specific problems they've had.
03:33 As we mentioned in the other video
03:34 that went out this week, it'll be here,
03:36 or maybe I'll put it behind me through my shirt,
03:38 which will look really silly.
03:39 Ten Hog wants Man United to be the best team
03:41 in transition in the entire world.
03:44 And half of that job is that when you win the ball back,
03:47 like in your opponent's third or in the middle of the pitch,
03:49 you are then really incisive,
03:51 able to create chances out of that turnover.
03:53 And we saw that in the Spurs game,
03:55 like Man United were able to win the ball back
03:57 in these areas on occasion,
03:59 and they did get a couple of chances out of it,
04:01 but it's difficult to say
04:02 that they were particularly incisive with it.
04:04 They weren't ruthless,
04:05 they weren't hitting that killer ball early.
04:07 By case in point, here's an excellent start
04:09 that Opta have got at the minute.
04:10 Man United currently lead the league
04:12 in terms of the number of high turnovers
04:15 they've been able to create.
04:16 They are pressing teams really well in this area of the pitch
04:19 and they also lead the league
04:20 in terms of the number of shots
04:21 they've been able to create from a high turnover,
04:24 which means that's clearly the plan
04:25 and it's working reasonably well,
04:27 but they haven't yet scored one single goal from doing that,
04:31 which means that either the finishing's not great,
04:33 something that'll fix when Hoyland comes into the side,
04:35 they hope, or the chances they're making
04:37 just aren't that good.
04:39 Like it really is something to be literally top of the league
04:43 in the thing you are trying to do,
04:45 and literally be bottom of the league
04:47 for how effective the thing you're trying to do is.
04:50 That's football, baby.
04:52 Man United's other problem though,
04:53 indeed they're far bigger, more glaring,
04:56 and much funnier to fans of every other club in the world,
04:59 problem is that when they lose the ball,
05:01 they're about as open as Will Smith's marriage.
05:03 We saw time and again against Wolves and Tottenham,
05:05 this policy of pushing for high turnovers
05:08 with both Mount and Fernandes left this huge glaring gap
05:11 between them and Casemiro and all these other teams.
05:14 We've got these players who like to get on the ball
05:16 and run in counter-attack situations,
05:18 was leaving him embarrassingly exposed.
05:21 Now when the defence as a whole pushed up against Wolves,
05:24 'cause they were at home,
05:24 they were far less afraid of them,
05:26 this left all this space in behind
05:28 that they kept getting into,
05:29 and they should have scored repeatedly from it.
05:31 Obviously having learned that lesson against Spurs,
05:33 they sat a little bit deeper,
05:35 trying not to leave as glaring a hole,
05:37 but that just left this gap again,
05:39 and Casemiro kept getting dribbled past by Madison.
05:41 What they tried to do to combat this
05:43 was to stay actually a little bit more compact,
05:45 trying to deny the space in the middle,
05:46 but that's exactly where Spurs' goal came from
05:49 because all of this room on the right-hand side
05:52 was just filled by players who can do things with it.
05:54 And again, as we discussed in the other video,
05:57 the only way to protect against this,
05:58 the only way to stop this being a major problem,
06:01 is to be super, super intense in every single thing you do.
06:06 Because over the course of a game,
06:07 you are gonna press the opposition,
06:08 you're all gonna crowd around it
06:10 and get drawn into one area of the pitch,
06:12 and you're not gonna win the ball,
06:14 and Premier League teams will occasionally
06:16 wriggle out from this and get an attack going
06:18 with the space you have invited them to do so in.
06:20 But the thing is, unless they've got one immediate,
06:23 highly accurate killer pass
06:25 that's gonna take everyone out of the equation,
06:26 players still have to run and have to travel,
06:29 and if you are determined to match them in doing this,
06:32 you'll kinda get away with it.
06:34 But Man United were only doing that
06:35 on and off across the game.
06:36 Like sometimes, they would be really alert to it,
06:38 they would match Tottenham's runs,
06:39 they would match them for intensity,
06:42 but as the game went on,
06:43 they started doing that less and less,
06:45 which meant the space they were being left
06:46 was free to be played in.
06:48 And does that sound to you, my friends,
06:50 like something a player who did this
06:53 would ever allow to happen?
06:55 And one other very important stat from that World Cup
06:57 is that Amrobach covered the most distance on the pitch
07:00 of any single player in that tournament.
07:05 So you can't accuse him of lack of intensity,
07:06 of lack of running.
07:07 He will go anywhere, chase anybody down,
07:10 if that is a job he's being given.
07:11 So if we just really quickly look at Man United's system
07:14 currently so far, that's obviously Casemiro,
07:16 we've got Fernandes and Mount,
07:18 and the three attacking players,
07:19 they're gonna change as people come back to fitness.
07:21 But these three in the middle here,
07:23 on paper, it's a 4-3-3, with Casemiro as the single pivot,
07:26 but obviously, occasionally, over the course of the game,
07:29 Fernandes will move into the middle,
07:30 and it winds up being a 4-2-3-1.
07:32 Now this is a system that works great
07:34 for every single player in it, except Mason Mount.
07:38 Now if you're Man United fan,
07:38 you still don't really get the Mount thing,
07:40 he's been rubbish, like, trust me,
07:42 if you watch him over time,
07:43 you'll start to see why Ten Hag is so big on him.
07:46 Genuinely, if you're watching a Man United game,
07:48 and you can't see what Mount's doing,
07:49 stop watching the ball.
07:50 Just watch him whenever he's on screen,
07:52 and you'll see the movement he makes,
07:54 and how he reads space, and how that's that
07:56 about how good Man United have been at turnovers,
07:59 he's so important to that.
08:01 Whether he's the one winning the ball back or not,
08:02 he closes down the areas, he shuts off passing angles,
08:05 he's a reason that's happening.
08:07 But when they get into this formation,
08:09 this is not really where he wants to be,
08:11 he's not really a deep player,
08:12 he does carry it, but not brilliantly,
08:14 does win the ball back, but not brilliantly,
08:16 he wants to be floating around in these inside channels,
08:19 cutting off passing lanes and getting on the ball here.
08:21 But Amrabat in this scenario does want to do these things,
08:24 he does want to get on the ball in deep areas,
08:26 and as we've seen, hit those long, medium passes
08:28 to the flanks, or the players in behind,
08:30 he does want to progress the ball that way,
08:32 and he can of course cover all the space in that area,
08:35 and win the ball back, if that's what you want him to do.
08:37 But the thing is, you swap him out
08:38 with Casemiro instead, and all of a sudden,
08:40 Mount can sort of float and be in these positions
08:43 he wants to be in, because Amrabat will cover across
08:45 and be around this space a lot better than Casemiro will.
08:49 Not 'cause he's a better defender,
08:50 he's not really, in terms of how he wins the ball back,
08:53 and his technique, and all that,
08:54 but his engine, and his distance covered,
08:56 and his determination will see him across the pitch
08:59 more than Casemiro will.
09:00 And that's why at the start,
09:01 I said that there are two, that's four,
09:03 there are two Amrabats that exist,
09:06 because one is the perfect foil to Casemiro,
09:08 he'll allow that midfield to be more expressive,
09:10 and to be more incisive,
09:11 and the other one's a perfect foil to Mount,
09:13 because he'll allow him to be more expressive
09:15 and play further forward,
09:16 and he'll do all the dirty work behind him instead.
09:19 The way to think about Amrabat, right,
09:20 is that he's kind of like a footballing vape.
09:24 Like, he's still fiery, and dangerous,
09:26 and ultimately quite bad for you,
09:27 but he's also very sleek, and elegant,
09:30 and he looks good doing what he's supposed to be doing,
09:33 so, I mean, don't smoke, obviously,
09:35 but just, it's an image.
09:36 And also, whisper it, Man United fans,
09:38 but if you don't go out and get him,
09:40 if you don't spend the money on getting him,
09:43 Liverpool probably will, and you don't want that.
09:47 You really don't.
09:49 He profiles about as close to Fabinho
09:51 as any player who's ever, ever existed,
09:53 so you don't want them to have that.
09:56 You want to have that.
09:57 Look, so the bottom line here is that Amrabat
10:00 is a very dynamic and very versatile midfielder,
10:02 but all the things that give him that versatility,
10:06 and that dynamism, dynamism?
10:08 Dyna, whatever, are the specific problems,
10:11 the holds that Man United currently have in their game.
10:15 So it's not so much that he's like a Swiss Army knife,
10:18 it's more that he's like...
10:20 - A few moments later.
10:25 - Nope, haven't got one for that.
10:27 Can't think of anything.
10:28 Here's that Mbappe tackle.
10:29 Anyway, so Manchester United fans,
10:31 if you did enjoy that video,
10:32 please do let us know in the comments below.
10:34 Would you like to see Amrabat as another player
10:36 you'd much prefer they got instead,
10:37 or is everything just fine?
10:38 Is it all going to work out in the end?
10:40 All comments appreciated.
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10:49 We just hit 420,000 subs, which is nuts.
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10:57 Thank you ever, ever so much.
10:58 The brand new 442, my favorite one we've ever done
11:02 for obvious reasons, is in stores now.
11:04 But until next time, thank you very much for watching.
11:06 I've of course been Adam Cleary.
11:07 Get me on Twitter, Instagram, threads, or X,
11:09 whatever you're calling it, @adamcleary.
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11:14 And wow, that was a long outro, wasn't it?