Why Manchester United Still Need Paul Pogba
He's back!
Black lives matter. This document has an exhaustive list of places you can donate. It’s also got an incredible library of black literature and anti-racist texts. Donate, read, call, and email your representatives. We’re all in this together.
As for today’s topic, we’re back to working out way through donation requests. Today’s comes from Micah: “I’d love to read something on Bruno Fernandes and Paul Pogba playing together. How would that work? Would it work? What player(s)/kind of player(s) would be needed to augment those guys? If you don’t want to do a whole thing on Manchester United, I’m happy for it to be part of a more general piece on midfielders/attacking midfielders or building a midfield in the modern era. Whatever you feel is best! Just give me a little of that sweet, sweet Pogba content in these trying times.”
While not much good has come out of the past three-plus months, there was this:
This is one of the few times I will ever implore you to “read the comments”. Please, go read the comments.
Bruno Fernandes played his first game for Manchester United ... on February 1. He’s started five Premier League matches for his new club and produced one non-penalty goal and three assists. Now, that’s a nice rate -- 12th-best in the league among all players, including Norwich’s Dennis Srbeny, who has one goal in 47 minutes of time -- but it’s essentially double his expected rate. We’re gonna need a little more than “Pascal Gross Plus Luck” to immediately crown Bruno as one of the best players in the league.
Of course, he’s on the BBC’s XI because it’s a fan vote and he plays for the biggest club in England. Everything that happens with United becomes a paradigm shift -- supposedly. Each win is a turned corner, each loss is a crisis, every semi-successful new face is a symbol for a new era. Depending on what kind of lenses you try to put it, you can convince yourself all of these things: Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is in over his head, OGS had the team headed in the right direction, Bruno Fernandes is a savior, the team doesn’t need Paul Pogba, or the team is absolutely dying for Paul Pogba.
To some -- or perhaps in a pre-pandemic world: to almost everyone -- Fernades was the Pogba replacement. The French superstar has only played 522 Premier League minutes so far this season due to lingering injuries, and erm, a complicated behind-the-scenes situation. His agent, Minao Raiola, hasn’t, uh, well, yeah, just take a look at this:
Fine, we’ve got Bruno. United have won three and drawn two since Fernandes came aboard. No losses! But here’s where the Fernandes story diverges from reality: United goal differential is 0.88 goals per 90 minutes better when he’s been on the field, compared to their sans-Fernandes performance. Except, their expected goal differential is actually half a goal worse when he’s on the field. Among United players with at least 400 minutes of game time, that’s the worst mark on the team. Now, that’s not to say that the team plays worse because Fernandes is on the field. Ot also doesn’t take into account a rather difficult schedule that included a match against Manchester City. But the point is that they’ve been pretty fortunate to take so many points since their new signing arrived. Per FBref, they’ve created 6.5 expected goals and allowed 7.1 in the five games he’s started. That’s not good.
And Pogba would certainly make them better. For all the consternation surrounding his performances and his status at the club, the guy is just a consistently fantastic player. Per the site Smarterscout, Pogba’s attacking rating -- basically, how much he adds to the team’s likelihood of scoring -- among central midfielders hasn’t been below 89 in any of his first three seasons with the team. David Silva is the only other player at the position to do the same. His rating for defensive activity -- how often he’s completing defensive actions, adjusted for possession -- has also been 80 or above in all of those seasons. Here’s the list of all Premier League CMs, minimum 900 minutes played, who have done both in a season:
Still, Pogba hasn’t been the game changing transfer that I thought he might be. One of the three richest clubs in the world every year, United have finished top four once since he arrived, and that was largely due to David De Gea’s year-long transformation into an octopus. Part of that is because the club’s front-office operations have been a complete mess. But part of it comes along with my growing understanding of midfield and just how hard it is for a single midfielder to significantly affect his team’s ability to win matches. Pogba absolutely can take over a game in a way that I’m not sure any other midfielder in the world can. See: the second half, on the road, against the best team in Premier League history.
It’s just that he can’t do it every game. And maybe that -- in addition to the color of his skin, the way he cuts his hair -- is why commentators can’t handle his performances. He can do everything, so when he doesn’t do everything, it feels like some kind of failure. I don’t know. Anyway, Pogba hasn’t started a league match ... since September. But he’s reportedly healthy now. Plus, the global economy just shrunk and it’s unclear how many, if any teams, will be willing to pay what United will likely want for Pogba. Maybe Real Madrid. Possibly PSG? But I’m skeptical that any club is going to come anywhere near offering triple-digits for a midfielder right now. His current contract expires after next season.
Whatever happens after this season, United still do have this season to play. They’re two points back of fourth-place Chelsea, and if Manchester City’s Champions League ban is still upheld, they’ve still got Wolves and Sheffield United just two points behind them. They have the fourth-best expected goal differential in the league, significantly behind third-best Chelsea. And they have a pretty easy schedule remaining; they’ll likely be favored in every match. But it’d be silly to think that they should just keep doing what they were doing before the break. It wasn’t broken, but it could definitely use fixing.
One easy upgrade: play your best player. Can Pogba and Fernades co-exist? It’s at least worth finding out. Whenever I see a pass-happy attacking midfielder like Fernandes, my instinct is to push him back into the midfield because it allows you to play another goalscorer/receiver in the front line, and it makes his passing and goal-scoring more valuable as you go down the positional spectrum. Think of it like a stretch four in the NBA. My fever-dream midfield for United would be some version of Leicester City's set-up, with Pogba and Fernandes -- in the James Maddison and Youri Tielemans roles -- playing in front of a defensive midfielder. It works for Leicester because they might have the best defensive midfielder in the world in Wilfred Ndidi, who can cover the ground of two men and take the ball back whenever he wants it. Fred definitely isn’t that guy, and while Scott McTominay has been an effective defensive presence this season, it’s a little early to go there with him, too. United could also just try to sign Ndidi. Ndidi-Pogba-Fernandes? Now we’re talking.
However, were United to experiment with this general idea of a three-man midfield within the current roster, I’d probably opt for Fred because McTominay is still a pretty terrible passer for his position, and someone has to keep the ball. Per Smarterscout’s ball retention metric -- how likely a team is to keep possession when a player has the ball -- McTominay rates as a 23, while Fred comes in at 70. Fernandes, meanwhile, is down at an absurdly low 12 in limited minutes. That’s nothing new: he’s frequently turning the ball over in search of the incisive, game-breaking pass. And his effectiveness is predicated on providing more value from completed passes than he destroys with incomplete ones. Pogba’s ball retention has also declined a bit under OGS, down to league-average levels. That’s likely tactical, but I think the guy behind Pogba and Fernandes would have to stabilize possession because otherwise they just really wouldn’t have the ball enough to be as good as they want to be.
But what if you played all four at the same time? Here’s how they compare stylistically, per Smarterscout. Pogba’s numbers are from last year; everyone else is from this season:
Two obvious issues: no one to really stabilize possession. (See: link-up passing). And then there’s the shots. Perhaps that’s necessary given that there’s more of an onus on midfielders to add to the attack when there are four of them rather than three. But they all take AWFUL shots. This season, Pogba’s averaging 0.07 xG per shot. The Premier League average is 0.10, and the other three guys are all taking worse shots than him, with Bruno at 0.06 and Fred and Scott down at 0.05. There’s really no world where having all of these players take a ton of low-quality shots is a good thing; those are wasted possessions ending in attempts that rarely end up in the net. That’s the thing targeted coaching can change, though. But the coach needs to be aware of it and he needs to know that it’s bad.
I do like some of the other simpatico bits of that midfield quartet, though. Pogba and McTominay can dominate balls in the air and also drive forward with it at their feet. And although Fernandes would be the farthest forward of the four, the other three guys could make runs past him and into the penalty area, a la Pogba’s second goal in the Manchester City clip above.
It’s still a little wonky, the pieces don’t totally fit, and I’m not sure I buy it as the core of a team that will fulfill the ambitions of one of the three richest teams in the world. But for now, this is the team they built themselves. Anthony Martial and Marcus Rashford are both good, young strikers, while the likes of Daniel James and Mason Greenwood aren’t really ready to start for a team that wants to be as good as United does. Boy, Jadon Sancho would be one hell of an upgrade, huh? The squad-building still has a long way to go, but for the next nine games, it might be enough to just get all the midfielders out there and see what happens.