Shock as Manchester United act swiftly and sensibly in the transfer market

With their back-up goalkeeper getting recalled early and an injury to a key player, Manchester United had their work cut out in the January transfer window.

The contrast between Manchester United’s January transfer activity and previous windows has been striking. Last summer, United spent weeks and weeks in an ultimately fruitless quest to get Frenkie De Jong to Old Trafford. This time last year, they were frantically shovelling players out of the door on loan while bringing in no-one new whatsoever.

This transfer window has been different. The removal of Cristiano Ronaldo from the payroll freed up a substantial amount of money, but with the club up for sale and having spent just over £225m last summer, it is hardly surprising that Manchester United should have thought twice about spending anything in this particular window. Fortunately, the improvement seen throughout the squad over the first half of this season meant that, for once in recent years, major surgery was not required.

But even so, the news that Christian Eriksen will now be absent for most of the rest of this season came late and will have hit hard. Eriksen hasn’t quite hit the levels of praise of his team-mate Casemiro, but he’s been a creative workhorse for them this season, with only Kevin De Bruyne credited with more assists in the Premier League. To lose such a player was an obvious blow.

To old United, this might have felt like a catastrophe. But the Manchester United of 2023 feels very different and this was reflected in the speed with which they managed to secure the services of Marcel Sabitzer from Bayern Munich for the remainder of the season. As a player, Sabitzer cannot really be considered a direct replacement for Eriksen and further shuffling may be needed to accommodate him.

The club only found out about the extent of Eriksen’s injury on the morning of the last day of a frenetic transfer window, so to bring in a reasonably accomplished player at such short notice is something of an achievement. The Manchester United of just a couple of years ago – and arguably less – would likely have run around the boardroom table as though their hair was on fire before offering Juventus £200m to sign Paul Pogba yet again.

If there’s one lesson that Manchester United definitely seem to have learned since the arrival of Erik ten Hag, it’s that building a successful team isn’t all about the signings that will make the club’s commercial partners purr, or which have…