Agree with the point you made. He has very good first touch and the weight in his passes is very good. He is more of a playmaker with very good close control. His defensive work rate was very good too, not sure how or why, he always end up winning possession easily. Looks very good talent.
Also saying all that, we shouldn't wait for young players to come good. We need first team players too and that's how we can build strong squad. I remember the point you made about the age of all the players and how close they are, but that's a gamble we should take at this point. We need very good wide player who can create and score, we did lot of ground work for this deal starting from the summer he was ready to leave City.
Perhaps times have changed. Demand is greater. And I agree that we shouldn’t wait for our ‘young players’ as a rule, I am viewing Amad as an exception to that, personally. More in a different bracket of ‘our special young players’.
In my time as a United fan, we’ve always, or often had good young players like a Rossi or whoever, but then there have been a few potential superstars who we have absolutely created a clear 3 year plan to harvest. Ronaldo was young on one wing, Giggs was seasoned on the other. We would have never just bought a 25 year old to start ahead of Ronaldo at 19, it was a development spot in our team, shared between him and Fletch because we saw obvious reward in the longer term that needed an investment in time.
I think Rashford’s emergence was similar. He was 18, and there was clearly no chance that we were going to just look for a Luka Jovic level 23 year old to put ahead of him after his flurry of goals when he came through. We went for Zlatan as part of some sort of succession plan to bridge the gap, but I think there was a clear sense of us betting on his talent. I remember talk of Vardy and others at the time, but word was that we didn’t want to put someone in front of Rashford. Similar with Greenwood and Cavani arguably, in terms of succession planning. I put Amad in that sort of bracket as a big money talent we clearly believe in, and it seems a clear change in strategy to then put another one a year or two in front of him. That’s not really how we’ve ever done it I don’t think. I’m not against another right winger, but having bought Amad as a potential superstar young RW, I wouldn’t have thought we needed to buy another potential superstar young RW. To me, we’ve already bet on one of those, and personally, I’d have gone for a different profile to bridge the gap, so to speak. Not necessarily Perisic, but that sort of profile perhaps, who can come in and be relied upon immediately for a couple of seasons. Someone around 30. That seems to me how we have always developed our special young talent with a clear integration plan. It’s been much discussed in the Varane thread that he turned us down due to us just signing Phil Jones at the same age for big money.
I respect that others may disagree, and a fans nature is also to want all the good players and want them now, but it doesn’t all add up to me. I can’t imagine we’d have spent what we spent on Amad last summer if we had completed the Sancho deal back then, for example. Sancho himself is young, and needs plenty of time to develop and adapt.