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Hello! Ruben Amorim has reached something resembling solid ground. Is signing a £100m midfielder his next move?
🔄 Man Utd and Transfer DealSheet
⏰ The case for tactical timeouts
🌎 Top World Cup team guides
🇺🇸 FIFA’s ‘93 trip to Sin City
Centre of attention: Man Utd eye midfielders for next stage of development
Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos: Crystal Pix/MB Media; Simpson/Sportsphoto/Allstar; Eddie Keogh; Getty Images
Frank Ilett is the Manchester United fan who rashly vowed not to cut his hair until the club won five matches in a row. If you thought his commitment might waver, worry not. I saw him at an awards night recently, and a family of owls are nesting in it.
Five straight wins, as he doesn’t need telling, is asking rather a lot of United. It took the best part of a year for Ruben Amorim to put together two Premier League victories in a row. But for all that the Portuguese head coach has struggled to light a fire at Old Trafford, United have had worse starts to a season. December finds them seventh, with the Champions League qualification slots in their sights.
I won’t pretend it’s been plain sailing. We had fun at their expense after Grimsby Town mugged them in the Carabao Cup in September but in truth, United haven’t figured a great deal in TAFC because middling to half-decent form has kept them off the radar. Dare they think they are turning a corner?
They merit some discussion because theirs is the most interesting slot in today’s DealSheet, The Athletic’s in-depth guide to the January and summer transfer windows in 2026. It reveals that Amorim has eyes on midfielders, and three in particular: Adam Wharton at Crystal Palace, Elliot Anderson at Nottingham Forest and Carlos Baleba at Brighton.
How easy United would find it to buy any of those players next month, or next year, is a moot point because £100m ($132.2m) is the rough cost of a top-drawer centre-midfielder, and the club aren’t flush. But all three would enhance an area of United’s team which is still too easy to play through (see below), and where Amorim lacks players with the combination of outstanding mobility and elite finesse.
Casemiro’s days as that sort of machine are far behind him. Manuel Ugarte hasn’t been worth the £40m-odd United paid for him. Wharton, Anderson or Baleba could be game-changing recruits for a team who have quietly created a bit of a platform to build on. Stay tuned.
Any other business?
It’s fair to say the January window won’t be a spectacular event in Europe. There is, for example, no expectation that Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool or Chelsea will attempt to influence the here and now. All three are largely spent up for 2025-26.
But DealSheet, as ever, did flag up a few situations to follow:
- Arsenal’s future planning will continue in the form of them signing 16-year-old twins from Ecuador, Edwin and Holger Quintero. They should move from Independiente del Valle when they turn 18 in August 2027. Independiente, incidentally, was where Chelsea’s Moises Caicedo started his career.
- Raheem Sterling’s dead end at Chelsea surely has to come to a head soon. There were no takers for him in the last window. Can Chelsea wash their hands of him this time?
- Tottenham asked the question about Bournemouth’s Antoine Semenyo in the summer but didn’t bite at his £70m asking price. Now that Semenyo’s release clause stands at £65m, will they be tempted to have a proper go? It’s not like they don’t need him.
Speaking of Spurs, they’re bottom of Tim Spiers’ Premier League happiness table, our scientific ranking of elation and misery. Perhaps that’s reason enough for them to pile into the market. Nothing perks a fanbase up short-term like a touch of retail therapy.
News round-up
- Adam Crafton reports that Human Rights Watch has written to FIFA to ask how and why the world governing body intends to hand out its inaugural peace prize at the draw for the 2026 World Cup. U.S. President Donald Trump is widely expected to receive it.
- The fractured leg suffered by Barcelona midfielder Aitana Bonmati was bad enough to require surgery. She’s due to have an operation today.
- Barca defender Ronald Araujo, meanwhile, has been granted a leave of absence by the club to deal with unspecified personal issues. His performances have come in for criticism this season. Barca say they want to “support and defend” him.
- West Midlands Police has accepted that its report into the banning of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from last month’s Europa League tie at Aston Villa contained an inaccuracy, but the force is standing by its decision to shut out away supporters for safety reasons.
- A couple of lines from MLS: Christian Benteke is leaving D.C. United. And Michael Bradley is the frontrunner to take over as head coach of New York Red Bulls. Sandro Schwarz was binned after they failed to make the play-offs.
- Players for French club Nice were physically assaulted during a confrontation with hundreds of fans, which followed a 3-1 defeat to Lorient at the weekend.
- It’s all happening with Cameroon ahead of the Africa Cup of Nations. They’ve sacked manager Marc Brys and they’ve left some big names out of their squad, including Manchester United goalkeeper Andre Onana.
It keeps happening: So do we need time-outs to stop players creating their own?
Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
Timeouts in sport are quintessentially American. Introducing them to football would make traditionalists break things (or grumble profusely, at any rate). It is meant to be a free-flowing game, see… until it isn’t.
We’ve had days of debate about breaks in play because a timeout is effectively what Manchester City took during their victory over Leeds United on Saturday: using a supposed injury to Gianluigi Donnarumma (I’m not saying he was faking it, but come on) to gather on the touchline and reset a plan which was going awry.
Leeds got the hump — even though they scored soon after to bring the game back to 2-2 — and, on reflection, Jordan Campbell thinks official tactical timeouts are something football should think about embracing. Why not give coaches a one or two-time opportunity to rearrange their troops?
The problem? Footballers and managers are experts at gaming the system. Referees, for example, are required to halt a match when head injuries occur, and if you’ve never seen play-acting on that front, you haven’t been watching closely. There’s always a loophole to jump through or a rule to bend. File timeouts in the drawer marked ‘doomed to fail’.
Meet the teams: Form for World Cup, African hope, waterfalls and, er, talcum powder
Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb
In anticipation of Friday’s draw, our writers put together a massive guide to every World Cup team: those who have qualified and those who stand to contest the last remaining play-offs in March. It’s fantastic, and I wanted to pick out three nations who intrigue me.
- England. Strange to say because England are invariably in the mix, but they’re motoring under Thomas Tuchel and their qualification group was a cinch: eight wins from eight without conceding a single goal. How will they fare when it’s no longer Albania, Serbia, Latvia and Andorra? Personally, I reckon they’ll step it up.
- Norway. It’s the Erling Haaland factor, isn’t it? If Norway can create (and the likes of Martin Odegaard have a talent for that), they’ll cause some havoc in the knockouts. Look forward to it.
- Morocco. Semi-finalists in 2022, favourites for the forthcoming Africa Cup of Nations and qualified as easily as England. Egypt have Mohamed Salah, but the Moroccans should be Africa’s big shot.
You might also like our list of quirky info about all the contenders, like Suriname having more waterfalls than footballers. This allows me to steal a fact I once read: that World Cup team is an anagram of talcum powder. Useless, but true.
🇺🇸 A notable absentee from the list of host cities for 2026 is the U.S. capital. Washington D.C. was disregarded when the matches were shared out, predominantly because the NFL home of the Washington Commanders wasn’t as spick and span as it could have been. Henry Bushnell explains.
Around TAFC
Catch a match
Selected games (all 3pm/8pm unless stated)
Premier League: Bournemouth vs Everton, 2.45pm/7.45pm — Peacock Premium/Sky Sports; Fulham vs Manchester City, 2.45pm/7.45pm — USA Network/Sky Sports; Newcastle United vs Tottenham Hotspur — NBC, Peacock Premium/Sky Sports.
La Liga: Barcelona vs Atletico Madrid — ESPN+, Fubo/Premier Sports.
Coppa Italia last 16: Juventus vs Udinese — CBS, Paramount+, Fubo/Premier Sports.
And finally…
Mike Powell, Al Bello, Chris Wilkins, Neal Simpson / Getty; design: Kelsea Petersen
Friday’s World Cup draw has serious pantomime potential. The mind boggles, really. But I see no chance of it being as wild or outlandish as the last draw in America, hosted by Las Vegas in 1993.
Henry Bushnell’s potted history of it is an absolute riot, from the FIFA official carrying a brown bag stuffed with dollars through a casino to appearances from James Brown, Robin Williams, Mario Andretti and Evander Holyfield. Indeed, nothing sums it up better than the fact that one man who wasn’t involved was Pele, owing to internal FIFA politics. The more things change, etc.
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