Sofyan Amrabat, the Fiorentina midfielder linked with a summer move to Manchester United, has never been the sort of player who leaps of the page.
Rather than fly into crunching slide tackles or engage in any ‘Hollywood’ diagonals, Amrabat tends to keep things simple. A well-timed intervention here. A clever, slide-rule pass there.
But what the Morocco international lacks in flashiness, he more than makes up for in effectiveness. There was arguably not a single defensive midfielder more impressive than him at the Qatar World Cup; ‘world-class’ Amrabat the industrial-strength glue keeping the tournament’s stickiest defence together.
He was the best player on the pitch during the Conference League final too; outshining West Ham’s £100 million captain Declan Rice even as Fiorentina ended up on the losing side.
Erik ten Hag, the Manchester United boss who worked with Amrabat at FC Utrecht between 2015 and 2017, is not the only one who’s early expectations were confounded by a man who, at the age of 26, is finally starting to bask in the limelight’s warm glow after years of ratting about in the shadows.
Erik ten Hag is a big Sofyan Amrabat fan
“I had doubts,” Ten Hag told BD back in 2017 after Amrabat sealed a move from Utrecht to Feyenoord. “Has he chosen the right moment? Is he ready now? You can never really predict that.
“The fact that Amrabat moves to De Kuip can be explained. Souf is composed, unyielding. That is an additional quality. He will and must play, even if he has to go over five walls or through five walls. (He will play) even if he has to fight for it, for weeks or months.
“Now he’s at Feyenoord, you see that the extra resilience he has to give an impulse to his game.”
According to both Amrabat’s agent and his older brother – the former Watford winger Nordin – Man United have expressed an interest in reuniting Fiorentina’s midfield metronome with his former Utrecht boss at Old Trafford.
Valued in the region of £35 million, Amrabat will cost a fraction of the fees demanded by Brighton and West Ham for Moises Caicedo and Declan Rice, and has the added advantage of knowing what it takes to thrive in a Ten Hag team.
There will, of course, be inevitable doubts about the suitability of a player few outside of Florence knew too much about before Morocco stunned Belgium, Spain and Portugal in Qatar. The dangers of the ‘World Cup signing’ are, after all, very well established.
But as Ten Hag himself admitted back in 2017, write off Amrabat at your peril.
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