Carlos Baleba cost Manchester United $88.7m (£65m) plus $6.8m (£5m) in add-ons when they signed him from Brighton in August. He may be worth even more now despite the fact that the Cameroonian has yet to debut for his new club. Many United fans are counting on Baleba to be a one-man solution to their early-season problems.
An ankle injury kept Baleba on the sidelines as Michael Carrick’s side struggled against Everton, Manchester City and Fulham. The 22-year-old joined United just a few days after the opening-weekend defeat to Hull City, so he’d already had a preview of his new team’s troubles to come. The scale of Baleba’s task has grown since then.
United will return to action against Tottenham Hotspur on Saturday and Baleba could feature. What sort of impact can fans expect? Will everything click into place with him finally in the lineup?
Or could Baleba’s introduction confuse things further? United spent the best part of $200m (£150m) revamping their midfield in the summer transfer window. Andrey Santos joined from Chelsea before Youri Tielemans left Aston Villa to make the move north.
Baleba’s capture from Brighton represented the final component of a long-overdue rebuild. Carrick has used Kobbie Mainoo and Tielemans as a double pivot in United’s last four Premier League outings with mixed results. While Mainoo has impressed, proving to Thomas Tuchel why he might have been wrong to deny him an opportunity at the World Cup for England, Tielemans’s performances have been trickier to analyze.
Statistically, the Belgian’s numbers are strong. Only Noussair Mazraoui and Mainoo are averaging more accurate passes per 90 minutes for United this season than Tielemans, who is also covering the most distance per 90 minutes of any United player. And yet the Old Trafford outfit have been far too open in the center of the pitch.
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