Manchester United quickly completed their first company this summer when Matheus Cunha van Wolves arrived for £ 62.5 million and club chef Omar Barkrada believes that he has shades of Eric Cantona
Matheus Cunha is compared to Manchester United -legend Eric Cantona in terms of the transforming impact he can have at the club.
Brazil attacker Cunha became United's first signing of the summer after they met his £ 62.5 million release clause to take him from Wolves.
Cantona is credited for unlocking the door to the first Premier League title of United in 1993, making the 26-year waiting time of the club again to be English champions again.
United Chief Executive Omar Bercrada thinks that 26-year-old Cunha has a similar charisma and playing style as Cantona, and can prove a modern version of the enigmatic Frenchman at Old Trafford.
“He is a player I think fans will keep,” said Barkrada. “We can talk about his technical skills and he can play in three different positions.
“He is an attacking midfielder; he can score goals, he can make assists. I think he is going to lift people off their seats. He has a bit of a swagger about him who will really like people. I dare to say, Cantona-like.
“Sometimes, if you are not fast, it is because you negotiate and you try to ensure that you get the right price -quality ratio. So being efficient is not necessarily the best for the club.”
Berrada also doubled his conviction that United can win the title by 2028 – despite the end of last season in 15th place – their worst finish of the Premier League era.
Asked if winning the title was realistic in three years, Berrada said: “Of course. We have just finished the 15th and it seems like an impossible task. But why would you not strive for it? Why not do everything in our power?
“I am firmly convinced that we can do it. We have two or three summer windows to build a team to start competing to win the Premier League and if we can achieve it before that time, we will all be happy – and so nobody says we don't want to win it until then.”
Berrada admitted that it would always make the team even more difficult to appoint Ruben Amorim halfway through the season. He said: “We saw it as an investment for the following seasons, because we would give Ruben the time to get to know the team, the club, the Premier League.
“So by the time we are now, we have had all the discussions about what the team needs, the two to three years of plan to come to a team that is able to win the Premier League.
“We have a very clear route map of how we are going to get there. If Ruben had started on July 1, 2025, we could not have all that knowledge, right? And that is what I feel that this seven or eight months he has had. He suffered in the Premier League, and the team suffered.
Berrada, who worked in Manchester City before he crossed the city to become a member of United, said there were similarities between Amorim's start at the first season of United and Pep Guardiola in City.
“Very bad,” Berrada told United that we are standing. “Pep held on to his principles and seen what he had won, he had a huge amount of credit in the bank. He was allowed to be under the pars that first year. The club supported him that summer, the team started winning and created this winning cycle that lasted until this season.
“We have taken all the pain in the short term this season, but from this summer we will be the worst behind us. We will have arranged the management team; we will have arranged the coaching team with the technical team around them.
“On the football side there is a clear idea of what we want to do, which players we want to get, how we want to see the team play, how we are going to integrate academic players, how we will invest in future talent.
“I am actually very optimistic and quite positive about what awaits us. Of course we need a lot of decisions. And we will make mistakes, there is no doubt. We will try to minimize them. But what we want is to build something sustainable for the long, long term.
“We have placed ourselves in the best possible position by doing everything we have had around cost -saving this year. I am convinced that we will get out of the window with a much stronger team than what we went.”