The £40m transfer disaster Newcastle United must avoid at all costs in January

One thing that’s true of just about every football player that makes a big move and fails to live up to their transfer fee is that there will always be another club who believes they can be fixed – but it will take a club with more faith than most to take on Brazilian winger Antony, whose two years at Manchester United have been particularly putrid. And apparently, that team of optimists can be found at St. James’ Park.

Caught Offside are among a few online outlets reporting that Newcastle United are seriously considering a bid for the £86m flop despite a return of just five Premier League goals across two turgid seasons. Their need for a new long-term right-winger is pretty plain, but is Antony really an upgrade from Miguel Almirón, say? And even if a recently closed police investigation in his home country doesn’t give the Magpies pause for thought, shouldn’t his form?

For the past couple of years, Antony has looked entirely at sea in the Premier League, a player with an endless supply of step-overs but nowhere to go with them. If the ability to perform an elastico equalled end product, he would be considered world class. As it is, it’s been like watching an influence from tekkers TikTok trying to do it for real, and failing.

The debate over whether a top-flight player can be chiselled out of Antony’s career hinges on two questions – firstly, what has caused his Mancunian malaise, and whether a fresh start or the right coaching and team around him can fix it, and secondly, whether he is able to turn things around far enough to reach the level required of a player who cost quite so much money.

The former is the harder of the two to answer without daily access to the dressing room at Old Trafford. Antony is not the first player whose career trajectory has nose-dived there in recent times, and given the personal and professional struggles apparently endured by Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho one has to wonder if some combination of the man management, support structure and internal atmosphere at the club is causing all these issues. Certainly it seems like there has been too much smoke for the fire to be nothing more than bad luck.

But if the psychology of the situation is a major contributing factor, and even if he could regain his best level with an injection of confidence, the second question would then come into play. To answer it, it’s not enough to look at his performances and stats for Manchester United, which are almost universally abysmal, but to look at what he achieved at Ajax, when he was supposedly at his peak and when he played well enough to persuade United to make him one of the most expensive players in Premier League history.

Over the course of two years of games in the Dutch capital after signing from São Paulo, Antony managed 21 goals and 19 assists in 74 matches across all competitions – a very solid return, by any standard, for a winger, and while there is undeniably a gulf between the Eredivise and the Premier League that plenty of players have failed to bridge, it’s a good starting point.

There’s an argument that an Antony at full confidence scores far more goals than he’s managed at United, based on his Eredivisie numbers, but he actually had a near identical total xG in his first season with the Red Devils to that which he got in either of his seasons at Ajax – 8.4 in 2022/23 compared to 8.1 and 9.1 respectively. He was also getting a very similar number of shots and shots on target away. It’s only in 2023/24 that his numbers in front of goal start to look worse, and the same is true with other metrics as well.

His passing accuracy hasn’t gone anywhere, and he’s trying just as many dribbles as before. He isn’t creating as many shooting chances for his team-mates, however, and his success rate with dribbles has shot down, from a little over 50% to below 40%. In other words, while you can attribute the drop-offs across the board to a lack of confidence, when you see a player have a similar volume of opportunity to get the ball down and shoot or pass or beat a man but achieve less with it, it may just be that they couldn’t hack the step up in quality of the league.

The case can be made that he isn’t scoring fewer goals from a similar volume of chances because he’s lost confidence but because he can’t handle the reduce time and space afforded him, or can’t finish with the precision required to get past a better standard of goalkeeper – and that he’s creating fewer chances and beating his man less often because the fancy flicks and step-overs that worked on a Groningen left-back don’t hold up at the very highest level.

There’s only one stat we could find which really provides a solid excuse for Antony – he’s getting considerably fewer touches of the ball in the final third these days, an average of about 30 at United compared to over 40 at Ajax, which could speak to his failure to find space and slip a marker but is likely at least partly down to Manchester United’s inconsistent performance levels, disjointed midfield and reliance on direct passes forward. But he’s still doing much less with the ball than he did at Ajax when he does get it.

The stories circulating about Newcastle’s interest suggest that they’d be expected to pay around £40m to give Antony his second chance. Nothing in the numbers or on the eye test, however, makes him look especially close to a £40m player, and certainly he hasn’t proven that he can produce enough goals and assists or stretch the field effectively enough to pay that back. One can make excuses for Antony but backing them up is harder. It seems likely that he is simply one of the many players who couldn’t make the transition from the Netherlands to the Premier League – the big difference being, of course, that most other players who struggled to bridge the gap didn’t cost £86m. Even at less than half the price, he has not looked worth it.