Hello! Welcome to a weekly column from me, Ian Irving, host of the Talk of the Devils podcast. Every Saturday during the season, I will bring you the biggest talking points from the Talk of the Devils team, along with the best of our Manchester United content from across our channels. Let me know your views and be sure to give the podcast a watch or a listen.
Bruno Fernandes should win player of the year. Not just Manchester United’s award, but English football’s one as well.
His status at United is unquestioned. His creativity, leadership and influence are at the heart of everything the club does. That’s long been established. But you can argue no single player in the country has been more important to their team’s season than him.
His goals and assists have been worth 23 points so far this campaign, more than anyone else in the Premier League. His 14 assists are more than any other player by some distance as well — City’s Rayan Cherki comes closest with a total of eight — and he is only eight opportunities away from creating a century of chances in the Premier League. Dominik Szoboszlai is a distant second with 56.
The Portugal international has only grown in importance to United every season since arriving at Old Trafford in January 2020. It’s led many people to herald him as the best post-Ferguson signing. The initial reported fee of £47million pounds certainly looks an absolute bargain by today’s standards.
His off-field work though, has also been crucial to the relative success the side have enjoyed since his signing. While last summer he was publicly setting the record straight on a potential move to Saudi Arabia, behind the scenes he was helping new signings Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo to settle in Manchester. Fernandes helped Cunha, whose wife Gabi was heavily pregnant at the time, to choose an area in the city to live and helped him pick out a house.
I’m not sure United will want the same sort of uncertainty about their skipper’s future this time around. He admitted to speaking to Al Hilal and gave serious consideration to making the move. How different would the season have been without him?
The spend on the attack was designed to ease the burden on Bruno, not necessarily replace him. In fact, the United captain told me at the start of the season in an interview that he’d be happy for someone else to win the club’s player of the year award because it would mean they had scored a lot of goals and he would’ve assisted them.
But while two of those arrivals, Mbeumo and Benjamin Sesko, sit just above the skipper in the goalscoring charts this season, he is far and away the leader in the assists chart. His tally of 14 in all competitions is 11 more than any of his team-mates.
His creative statistics are even more impressive when you consider the fact he has played deeper in midfield for the majority of this season. Seventeen of his 26 appearances came under Ruben Amorim when he started in midfield, with nine games further forward in his favoured No 10 role. Although, since that switch, his numbers have improved even more. Seven assists and two goals have come in nine appearances playing more advanced under Darren Fletcher and Michael Carrick.
That form has taken him to the brink of equalling David Beckham’s club record of 15 Premier League assists in a season set in the 1999-00 campaign. And also offered him the opportunity to challenge for the overall Premier League record of 20 assists set by two greats Thierry Henry and Kevin De Bruyne.
Surely if Fernandes can produce a strong end to the season to equal that feat and help fire United back into the Champions League, there can be no argument about the player of the year award.
@totdevils Could Bruno Fernandes win Premier League Player of The Year? 🏆 #manchesterunited #premierleague #brunofernandes #mufc #manunited ♬ original sound – Talk Of The Devils
I debated on a recent Talk of the Devils with Laurie Whitwell and Mark Critchley about who his competition may be — Erling Haaland is the Premier League top scorer once again and Antoine Semenyo has stood out at Manchester City just as much as he did at Bournemouth, being named the Premier League player of February in his first full month in Manchester. Declan Rice and Gabriel are maybe the prominent picks for Arsenal, key to their resilience and set-piece destruction.
A star of the team who look to be heading towards the title when the player and journalist votes take place in around six weeks time, is usually the winner. But team silverware doesn’t always deliver the personal accolades.
Scott Parker is the true anomaly, named FWA Footballer of the Year in 2011, in a season when his West Ham side were relegated and United won a 12th Premier League title and reached a third Champions League final in four years.
And in the famous treble season of 1998-99, the United players split the vote, leaving Tottenham winger David Ginola to scoop a double of PFA Players’ Player and FWA award.
Would this finally be United’s revenge?
Red all over
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- Numbers, finances. Not perhaps the sexiest of subjects for football fans but Chris Weatherspoon’s article on The Athletic this week sets out a crucial forecast for the club with $425 million dollars of Glazer debt to refinance and ‘transfer factoring’ entering the Old Trafford lexicon. It spells out in great detail why qualification for the Champions League again is so important for the club and how the financial picture is affecting plans for a new stadium one year on from the club’s announcement in London.
- It’s a historic weekend for the women’s side with a first-ever League Cup final on the way against their old nemesis Chelsea. Marc Skinner’s team also have a Champions League quarter-final later this month with Bayern Munich as they play twice at Old Trafford in 4 days in the first leg of that tie and in a Manchester derby in the WSL where a defeat could see City win the league. Megan Feringa joined us on Thursday’s Talk of the Devils to preview it all.
- Did somebody mention Champions League football? It’s unquestionably the target for Michael Carrick and the men’s senior team as they face a showdown at Old Trafford with one of their main rivals, Aston Villa. Sunday’s opponents were actually the only English side to win in Europe this week after a disastrous set of results for the Premier League sides. Conor O’Neill explains why United fans might need to cheer on some of their biggest rivals.
- A pretty graphic of Luis Enrique, Unai Emery, Michael Carrick, Julian Nagelsmann and Roberto de Zerbi. Enough to make you watch Tifo Football by The Athletic’s take on who should be the next Manchester United manager? Maybe not, but the analysis on the show should be.