Why Matthijs De Ligt Is A Game Changer For Ten Hag's Man United
Manchester United have reportedly completed the double signing of Matthijs De Ligt and Noussair Mazraoui from Bayern Munich. But while the full-back will slot in as a direct replacement for Aaron Wan-Bissaka, his Dutch counterpart is a different proposition entirely. Blessed both physically and mentally, Adam Clery explains why he has the potential to raise both the ceiling and the floor for Man United.
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00:00Hello everybody, Adam Cleary from 442 here. I've just discovered Mokkers, by the way,
00:08so that's nice. And Man United, they've signed Matthias Deligt. Now they have also
00:12signed his pal from Bayern Munich, but in his own right, Deligt is one of those transfers
00:18that represents both a ceiling raise for the ability of a club, and more importantly, the
00:23floor coming up with it. Now obviously you can't say one transfer is going to make everything
00:27all puppies and rainbows and Haribo or whatever it is people like, but if you look at the
00:32kind of player Deligt is, what Man United specifically need from their centre-backs,
00:38and how Ten Hag just likes to play football, it's got a chance of being a very, very good
00:44bit of business.
00:45All right, so first up, this was primarily Manchester United last season. It was their
00:52most common XI throughout that campaign. We did this in the Lenny Yoro video, like the
00:57major issue they had was that the two players who had to play centre-back were constantly
01:02changing and constantly not good. Johnny Evans was signed to basically play three League
01:07Cup matches and run a pub quiz, and ended up being one of their most used players. Last
01:11season, Harry Maguire was in and out. Martinez was in and out. Varane was in and out. They
01:16all did the okie-dokie, and their form did not turn around. Hey! But now of course, Varane
01:22has gone. Lindelof looks like he's going to go. Maguire feels quite unsettled. If Johnny
01:26Evans was a dog, the RSPCA would have come and confiscated him by now. And Lenny Yoro,
01:32he signed, played one game, looked really good, and then immediately needed surgery
01:35and is out for three months. So just to wrap up there, my assessment would be, still probably
01:41need a centre-back.
01:42Hey, would you look at that? Matthias Delicht, who I've just barely mentioned so far in this
01:45video, he's a centre-back, and he's a really bloody good one. And if you think about what
01:49it is that Eric Ten Hag wants in a centre-back, I think he's pretty much said this directly
01:54himself. He needs somebody who is extremely comfortable with the ball at their feet, very
01:59good in possession, can carry it out from defence and move it up the pitch, but can
02:03also hold a high line and work backwards when teams try and get into that space. They need
02:08to be strong in physical duels and aerial duels, and if you look at all those as a list
02:12of criteria, Delicht ticks pretty much every single one of them. Delicht ticks? I can't
02:20believe I said that right first time. Delicht ticks. Delicht ticks.
02:24Anyway, just to give you a quick bit of background on him, he's still only 25 years old. He had
02:28three years at Ajax, where he was their youngest ever captain, which is an incredibly impressive
02:33thing to do. You remember that side they had that got all the way to the Champions League
02:37semi-final before Lucas Moura happened to them? That was them, and that was him. And
02:41then when that squad inevitably got dismantled, his big move was to Juventus, where he had
02:46three years there, and he just never quite really settled, probably because he had a
02:50different manager every single season. He couldn't have done too badly, though, because
02:55after three years at Juventus, they basically got back what they paid for him, and Julian
02:59Nagelsmann brought him to Bayern Munich to sort of build his new defence around. And
03:03he's been good, if not quite great there. But again, Bayern changed their manager not
03:09long after he arrived, and that kind of lack of stability can't really have helped him
03:13to develop into the kind of player or settle into the squad. In fact, that's actually a
03:19recurring thing. I have occasionally seen some people say that De Ligt's never really
03:23delivered on the obvious potential he has. It always feels like his development sort
03:27of starts and then sort of stutters a little bit. But if you just sort of look, every single
03:32season of this guy's professional career, he has started it with a different manager
03:37than he did the year before. And I don't know, maybe this is a slight oversimplification,
03:42but if you're a player with obvious potential and you can never get the consistency, season
03:47on season, between coaching methods, style of play, tactics, what you're being asked
03:50to do, any of that, it's going to sort of make things really difficult for you to hit
03:55exactly the kind of heights you're supposed to. Like, Dan Dogg, sorry, Allegri, Pirlo,
04:02Nagelsmann, Tuchel, in six years. That's like going to the best university in the world,
04:11right? And every time you just pull out a dice and roll it, and that's what your degree's
04:16going to be that year, right? Sorry, I'll stop laughing at my own jokes for a second.
04:20Okay, the point I'm trying to make is that by going back to Eric Ten Hag for like the
04:24first time in his career, this could represent a level of stability in his coaching and his
04:29development that he's never previously had. But the reason this is a very good transfer
04:35is because even without him going and kicking on a number of levels, he still represents
04:39a really good buy for this side. First off, he gives them a level of adaptability. Like
04:44primarily he is a right-sided centre-back because he's right-footed, he's very good
04:48on the ball, so he likes to be on that side. This is his heat map from bye and last season.
04:53You will see that that's the side he likes to play on, but also he gets really far up
04:57the pitch, but also he's very comfortable playing as a left-sided centre-back. And I
05:02feel like I'm talking about this an awful lot this summer, like the major difference
05:05between a right centre-back and a left centre-back, when most normal people will just call them
05:09centre-backs. But it does definitely make a difference playing on the side you're more
05:13comfortable with, both when it comes to passing the ball outwards and getting the right angles
05:17for the type of passer you are, and also for challenging and winning the ball back, making
05:22sure you are on your strong foot when players go round a particular side of you. Now Lenny
05:26Yoro definitely wants to be a right centre-back, that's where he's played pretty much his entire
05:30career and Lissandro Martinez really wants to be a left-sided centre-back, as does Harry
05:36Maguire, so having someone like De Ligt, who is very comfortable on this side but will
05:40quite happily move over if he has to play there, is really useful. And you can see that
05:45actually one of his best seasons at Juventus, he was pretty much swapping between the two,
05:49like the difference in his heat map that season versus that season is quite stark. He's still
05:54able to get up the pitch, he's still able to use his carrying, which we'll get to in
05:58a second, when he's on the opposite side. And it is that ball-carrying, my friends,
06:02that really does mark him out from most other centre-backs at his level. Remember what I
06:07said at the start, ten hogs, big thing, where he gets his big Dutch football boner is centre-backs,
06:13I can't believe I've said that, centre-backs who are comfortable in possession. Should
06:17maybe take that bit out. Oh well, never mind, if we look at his stats on FB Ref for last
06:22season, both in terms of passing and in terms of in possession, that is enormous guttural
06:28wow from anybody with eyes. Compared to all the other central defenders across the top five
06:33leagues in Europe, Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and Serie A, he is just
06:39levels and levels ahead on the ball of virtually all of them. You can see how comfortable he is
06:44on it from the number of touches, he just gets every single game. And the only reason
06:48that defensive third one's in the 50s and all the others are in the 90s, because he plays for
06:52Bayern Munich, their style of play pushes them right the way up the pitch, the ball's never
06:56really there. But it's these numbers in particular that show you this isn't just some kind of vanity
07:00metric you build up just by having the ball a lot, he carries, progressive carries, carries
07:06into the opposition third, carries into really dangerous areas. When he gets the ball, he's not
07:10just looking to have it for the sake of it, he goes at the opposition, tries to hurt them and
07:15tries to move his team up the pitch. I'm never sure how much I should explain about all these
07:19terms, like a carry is just running with the ball, having it in a progressive carry, that's way
07:24better because it's any carry in the middle of a sequence that moves the ball at least 10 yards
07:30closer to the opposition goal. And in terms of his passing as well, that's an area of his game
07:34he's really developed over the last sort of 12 months, because even at Juventus he didn't feel
07:39like a centre-back who had killer balls in him or who could break opposition lines, but at Bayern
07:44he's really stepped that up. It's all well and good being able to carry the ball out from the
07:48back and move the team up the pitch, but if then your instinct is to just put your foot on it, go
07:52sideways or go backwards, you've achieved nothing. De Ligt has really worked at his game in the last
07:57sort of two seasons to make sure that when he does get into these positions, he then does something
08:03with it. And that's sort of borne out in this particular stat here, like he's in the 89th
08:07percentile, which if you flip that round is the top 11% across all the centre-backs in those leagues,
08:12for key passes, that's any pass that creates a chance. He passes it into the final third,
08:18absolutely loads, he passes it into the penalty area, absolutely loads, and this number here, that
08:24pass completion for long passes, that's nuts. Like if you think about Harry Maguire's greatest strength
08:31for Manchester United, it's his ability on the ball to sort of carry it slightly out of the back line
08:36and then open up the opposition with a really good ball, sort of into the channels or over the top.
08:41If we compare De Ligt's passing numbers to Maguire's passing numbers, like he really did outshine him
08:47last season. Now granted those are two different players in two different teams and obviously the
08:50style of play that's around them will impact those numbers, but just looking at the pass completion,
08:56like when they were able to do largely this same thing, De Ligt was so much more accurate with it
09:01than Maguire was. But maybe more importantly than that, even when the situation doesn't demand that
09:06you do something exciting with it, he's so composed on the ball, he so very rarely gets rattled, he
09:11keeps things very neat, he keeps things very tidy, he's very difficult to press, it's just another sort of
09:16quality upgrade. He's just better than everything Man United have got in that regard as well. Now one
09:22of the reasons I may have got slightly too tangential during that whole De Ligt hasn't had
09:26any coaching consistency is because of this number here, right, of all the stats and sort of how he is
09:32in possession, this is the one bit that probably jumps out here as quite bad. Like for a player who
09:37is so comfortable carrying the ball and is so good with it at his feet, why isn't he taking the
09:41opposition on more? Why isn't he able to go past defenders? Well here's the mad thing, right,
09:49he is. If we just wind the FB ref clock back to 2018-2019, you will see that those numbers,
09:55they're not world beating or amazing or anything, but they practically double. And if I can find a
10:01clip of that, otherwise right now you're looking at a blank screen that just says I couldn't find
10:04a clip of that, oops, you'll see that he's really confident and really comfortable taking those
10:09carries and going past a defender or a midfielder or forward when he's got them. But why are you
10:15bringing up stats from 2018-2019, Adam? That was a million, million years ago. Look, this is what I
10:21looked like back then. Well, because who was his coach in 2018-2019? That was the one season he had
10:29under Eric ten Haag, and the fact he was good at it under him and doesn't seem to do it anymore
10:34under anybody else tells you that's probably a coaching thing. So that's good, isn't it,
10:39Man United have bought a really sort of high quality technical centre back who's really good
10:42on the ball, who is positionally adaptable, and I haven't even mentioned this yet, but if they do
10:46want to go back to a 4-3-3, De Ligt is more than capable of playing at the base here. He's done it
10:53a handful of times in his career, and that would of course enable Man United to drop into a back
10:58three in possession and get the full backs all the way up. So he really does add, I'm rambling
11:03now, he really does add quite a lot in terms of the squad. But I see you, I know what you're
11:09thinking, like, oh, Man United have gone and bought someone who came through the Ajax academy,
11:13and would you know it, he's really good with the ball at his feet. Let me just pick my jaw
11:19up off the floor. You're thinking, they've bought a defender, Adam, can he defend or not? And,
11:25yeah, yeah, he can. So I would say, honestly, right, De Ligt is probably one of the
11:31most perfectly formed and built sweeper-style centre-backs in the world. It's very difficult
11:39to bear this out in stats and numbers, but his reading of the game, his sort of ability to know
11:45where to be and how to cover for his other defenders is almost second to none. He's not
11:49the quickest, but he is still quick, and he's not the strongest, but he is still strong,
11:54and he uses those physical attributes brilliantly in covering gaps, spaces, making recovery runs,
12:00everything you need. And if we think, most likely, he's going to be playing right centre-back with
12:04Martinez at left, that is invaluable for Manchester United, because I know how much Man United fans
12:09love Martinez, but he is, and we have got numbers for this, one of the most sort of accident-prone
12:15centre-backs currently in the league. Like, if we look at his defensive numbers, and don't panic,
12:19by the way, if you play for any club in, like, the top half, these numbers are going to be low,
12:22because you spend more time attacking than you do defending. This doesn't mean he's bad at it,
12:26just that you play for a team that doesn't need much of it. You'll see that, obviously,
12:29his blocks and his shots blocked represent just sort of, like, what a fearless sort of
12:33fly-in-and-get-thing central defender he is, but this number here, these are the amount of errors
12:39he makes across the season that lead to chances happening. Now, those stats are across those top
12:45five European leagues as well. He's in the bottom 6%. That is shocking. But the thing you have to
12:52remember is, that's more a reflection of Manchester United defending as a unit than it is Martinez
12:57as a player, because you can rush out and challenge for a ball and not get there, and
13:01that can be a mistake, but if the rest of the defence is set correctly to cover for that,
13:05a shot never happens, and it doesn't become a statistic. Right now, individually, when you
13:10look at the numbers, Martinez looks like an absolute bomb scare, like a disaster waiting
13:15to happen, but that's just because the rest of the defence doesn't function particularly well.
13:19But then you add a delict to that centre-back pair who's going to read the play around it a
13:24lot better and stop things happening, and all of a sudden, those aren't errors or mistakes that
13:29Martinez is making, it's just really aggressive front-foot defending. And if you think about
13:34Manchester United last season, the goals and the number of chances they were giving away
13:40through lack of organisation at the back, either being way too far behind the midfield or
13:45players rushing in when they shouldn't, a lack of communication, a lack of consistency,
13:49all that sort of intangible stuff that goes into making a well-oiled defensive unit,
13:55you bring someone like Delict into this side with his brain and his body, and you give him a really
14:01good run in that team, that almost vanishes overnight. Or it should do, anyway. Like, that's
14:07all the theory side of this. Actually making it work is Eric ten Haag's job. Anyway though, that
14:12being said, I am still very positive on this as a transfer for Manchester United. He feels like a
14:17ceiling raiser in terms of what he does for the defence, but also a floor raiser in terms of what
14:22he does for the rest of the team. He's the kind of player that should just make everyone around him
14:27a little bit better. But as ever, hey, I mean, you're probably the Manchester United fan,
14:30you know more about the side than I do. How do you feel about this transfer? Was another
14:34centre-back really what you needed? Would you not rather have got somebody in central midfield or
14:38maybe another wide attacker or something like that? I don't know, let us know in the comments
14:42below, as well as just how you are, who you are, how you feel, and anything else. And I'm
14:47mentioning this in every single video I'm doing. Your boy here, despite having no knees, a bad
14:53heart, and bad at breathing, is doing the Great North Run in less than four weeks now, which is
14:59obviously a very terrible idea for a man who's a physical wreck as much as I am. But we are doing it
15:04to try and raise some money for MIND, who are a mental health charity here in the UK. I'll put the
15:08link below and in the description and just anywhere. It's a cause that's like really important
15:13to me, very close to my heart, no pun intended. And if we can raise a bit of money for them by
15:19me possibly collapsing on a motorway in Newcastle, then fine, great, can't wait. Any money donated
15:25does go loads further than you think. They do just amazing work. So if you haven't got a spare
15:29fiver or a tenner kicking around and you don't really know what to do with it, please do consider
15:33donating it to that, which is a weird thing to ask for in a video when you're talking about a man
15:38who cost £50 million. But here we are. You can get me on all the socials at Adam Cleary, C-L-E-R-Y.
15:44The new season preview issue of the Mag, which I keep leaving on the floor, is out now. It's the
15:48best thing we do all year. You get the latest issue of 442, which is just obviously brilliant,
15:52but you also get this enormous season preview looking at 140 different teams. It will allow
15:59you to pretend you know so much about football. Best thing we do all year, that, in my opinion,
16:03so please do pick that up if you see it. And until next time, that's Man United,
16:07that's Potato Delict, I'm Adam Cleary. Really do rate mockers, by the way,
16:11where have they been all my life? And I'll see you soon. Bye! Bye.