When Manchester United announced their fifth big-money summer signing last week, Dan Ashworth was quick to highlight his ‘ball-winning’ qualities.
And rightly so. That is what Manuel Ugarte is known for, after all.
Manchester United’s new number 25 averaged the most tackles per game in France’s Ligue 1 last season since N’Golo Kante’s pre-Leicester City days. And we all know what sort of an impact Kante made after he crossed the channel.
With Manchester United’s paper-thin midfield ripped to pieces by Liverpool at Old Trafford – another nightmare afternoon for Casemiro – Ugarte’s ‘very aggressive’ qualities cannot come soon enough.
And if he can come close to emulating Kante’s influence, Ugarte could yet be the most transformative of the Red Devils’ Ineos-era signings.
Manchester United sign Manuel Ugarte from PSG
The former Paris Saint-Germain and Sporting Lisbon enforcer is not only a ball-winner, however.
While it would be a stretch to suggest that his passing range has a Paul Scholes or Michael Carrick sort of quality about it – Scholes himself would rather have seen United sign a more controlling sort of player – Ugarte himself takes umbrage with the suggestion that his qualities on the ball do not match up to those without it.
Speaking to MUTV, the tough-tackling but still-somewhat-technical Ugarte hit back at those who claim that he lacks the passing range to really thrive at the top level.
“I like to think that I’m pretty much an all-round player,” the 23-year-old says. “In the sense that I feel that I’m decent at winning the ball back but I can also be very good in possession too.
“Of course, there are things I can improve upon, but what better place is there to be doing that than here?”
It’s telling that, when asked to name the midfielders he idolised when growing up, Ugarte did not name any grizzled bone-rattlers. But instead an iconic number ten, and perhaps the finest deep-lying playmaker of the 21st century.
“As a youngster, a player I watched a lot who played further forward was the Argentine (Juan Roman) Riquelme,” Ugarte adds.
“After that, I would hone in on certain aspects of lots of different players.
“But, in my position, a player I liked a lot was Sergio Busquets.”
Ugarte follows Cavani and Forlan
Ugarte might lack the Barcelona icon’s remarkable ability to every beat of the tempo.
But if he can bring his ferocious tackling qualities to Man United while also displaying the kind of underrated ball-progression talents that marked Kante out as perhaps the most complete midfield player of his generation, then Ugarte will be worth every penny of his initial £42 million price-tag.
Included in the team of the tournament for this summer’s Copa America, Ugarte becomes the fifth Uruguayan to represent Man United.
He follows in the footsteps of Guillermo Varela and Facundo Pellistri – the recently-departed winger who has enjoyed a flying start at Panathinaikos – as well as bonafide Uruguayan greats in Diego Forlan and Edinson Cavani.
“It feels great,” Ugarte said when asked about following in the footsteps of the two strikers. “Of course, Diego and Edi were both here and both of them were great players.
“I have been lucky enough to play alongside Cavani, and he is a really top guy. So yeah, they (were) at a club with so much history where I’m going to be playing now.
“And that makes me quite emotional.”
Having arrived too late in the week to be registered for that Liverpool clash, Ugarte could now make his Man United debut away to an as-yet point-less Southampton side on September 14th.
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