Manchester United Are Set To Rival Arsenal For This Real Madrid Playmaker: Should Amorim Snap Him Up?
Manchester United Are Set To Rival Arsenal For This Real Madrid Playmaker: Should Amorim Snap Him Up?
In a recent report, Fichajes stated that Manchester United are set to rival Arsenal for Real Madrid playmaker Brahim Diaz this summer. It has been mentioned that the Red Devils are showing interest in bringing the Moroccan attacker to Old Trafford.
Diaz's Decent Season In Spanish Football
Diaz played an important role in Los Blancos' squad in the previous campaign as he put in a handful of impressive displays in La Liga. The 25-year-old found the back of the net six times and secured seven assists in 52 matches for Real Madrid last season across all competitions.
Advertisement
The Moroccan talent proved his worth in the opponent's half and did well to attempt 1.82 shots per 90 minutes in La Liga football. He kept 53.6% of his attempts on target. Diaz was even accurate when distributing possession after completing 86.8% of his attempted passes in the Spanish first division (stats via fbref.com).
His current contract at the Spanish club will expire in the summer of 2027 which could make it difficult for the Red Devils to sign him on the cheap this off-season.
GETAFE, SPAIN – APRIL 23: Brahim Diaz of Real Madrid run with the ball during the LaLiga match between Getafe CF and Real Madrid CF at Coliseum Alfonso Perez on April 23, 2025 in Getafe, Spain. (Photo by)
Should Manchester United Boss Ruben Amorim Snap Diaz Up?
Diaz is a good dribbler with the ball at his feet and can make a few driving runs with it in the final third. He has got the vision to create some inviting chances for his teammates to score and can strike the ball with venom from long range.
Advertisement
The Malaga-born sensation mainly operates as a right-winger but can also fill in as a left-sided wide player or play as an attacking midfielder if told to do so.
Diaz would undoubtedly enhance the quality of Man United boss Ruben Amorim's frontline. He is good enough to earn a regular first-team spot at Old Trafford next season. He is already familiar with the Premier League following his spell at Manchester City and won't take much time to adjust to life in England.
At 25, Diaz has his peak years ahead of him which makes him a worthy target for the Red Devils to consider in this summer transfer window. All in all, Amorim should go all out to snap the Real Madrid wide player up ahead of the new campaign.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Upturn
an hour ago
- Business Upturn
Napoli show interest in Man United's winger; Multiple reports suggest
Multiple reports have suggested that Napoli have shown interest in Manchester United's winger. By Ravi Kumar Jha Published on June 17, 2025, 08:52 IST Multiple reports have suggested that Napoli have shown interest in Manchester United's winger. The player who was back in United after Chelsea send him back following a decent loan spell with the Blues. United and Ruben Amorim also don't have him in their plans and thus they are ready to listen to the offers. Napoli is reportedly planning to launch an attempt to sign him along with few Saudi Pro League clubs. Serie A giants Napoli are eyeing a move for a Manchester United winger who recently returned to Old Trafford following a loan spell at Chelsea. The player had a decent stint with the Blues but was not retained, prompting his return to Manchester. However, it appears that neither Manchester United nor new manager Ruben Amorim have plans to include the winger in their future setup. As a result, the Red Devils are open to listening to offers for the player in the ongoing transfer window. Napoli are reportedly preparing to make an official approach, looking to bolster their attacking options ahead of the new season. The Italian side could face competition from several Saudi Pro League clubs, who are also keeping tabs on the situation and may launch bids of their own. Ahmedabad Plane Crash Ravi kumar jha is an undergraduate student in Bachelor of Arts in Multimedia and Mass Communication. A media enthusiast who has a strong hold on communication and he also has a genuine interest in sports. Ravi is currently working as a journalist at
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
Omar Berrada: Manchester United's CEO on Amorim, transfers, apologies and more
I first met Omar Berrada when he was an executive at Barcelona in the mid-noughties. He was highly rated and helped monetise the huge popularity of the Catalans, who were then a long way behind Manchester United and Real Madrid commercially. Such was his reputation, he was headhunted for a job at Manchester City in 2011. Berrada's last game before moving to England was the 2011 Champions League final at Wembley between Barca and United. Advertisement Berrada continued to excel at City, gaining experience on the commercial and then the football side. Then, in January 2024, Manchester United offered Berrada their chief executive officer job — and he did not hesitate to take it. I had asked Berrada midway through last season if he would do an interview for United We Stand, the fanzine I have edited since it launched in 1989. And on June 2, I went to meet him at the open-plan office where he works at Old Trafford. We spoke for 70 minutes in his first sit-down interview since he took the United job last July. I had a lot of questions. After the Europa League final defeat to Tottenham in Bilbao, I had never felt as low as a United fan but, having done the interview, I came out of the room feeling more optimistic about the club's future. Berrada knows it'll be tough, but he's got a clear idea of what he wants to do, plus serious experience in football to know what success looks like. You can read the full interview in United We Stand, but this is a selection of the topics we covered, and my analysis of what he said. Berrada outlined the thinking behind bringing in Ruben Amorim in November, a decision led by 'the technical people, so that's not my area of expertise'. He acknowledged that making an appointment midway through the season was always likely to make it 'even more difficult for the team to perform. We saw it as an investment for the following seasons, because we were going to give time to Ruben to get to know the squad, the club, the Premier League. 'So by the time that we got to now (June 2025), we'll have had all the discussions about what does the squad need, the two-to-three-year plan to get to a squad that's capable of winning the Premier League. 'We have a very clear roadmap of how we're going to get there. Had Ruben started on July 1, 2025, we wouldn't have been able to have all that knowledge, right? And that's what I feel these seven or eight months that he's had. He's suffered in the Premier League, and the team has suffered. That's why I feel that it's really going to help us in the future.' I asked if there were similarities with Pep Guardiola, who struggled in his first season at Manchester City when he arrived at the club in 2016, five years after Berrada had arrived. 'Very much so,' he replied. 'Pep stuck to his principles and given what he'd won, he had an enormous amount of credit in the bank. He was allowed that first year to be below-par by his standards. The club backed him that summer, the team started winning and created this winning cycle that lasted until this season.' Advertisement There was a succession of negative stories coming out of Old Trafford last season. With staff losing their jobs and the team losing matches (18 in the Premier League alone), the mood was and remains bleak. Berrada, who described his first 11 months as a 'whirlwind', admitted that he could not have predicted the team having such a fire season in the Premier League but maintains that things will start to improve. 'We've taken all the short-term pain in this season, but as of this summer, the worst bit is going to be behind us,' he said. 'We will have settled the management team; we will have settled the coaching team with the technical team around them. 'And on the football side, there's a clear idea of what we want to do, what players we want to get, how we want to see the team playing, how we're going to integrate academy players, how we're going to go and invest in future talent. 'I sit here today and I'm actually very optimistic and quite positive about what's ahead. Of course we need to get a lot of decisions right. And we will make mistakes, there's no doubt. We'll try to minimise those. But what we want is to build something that's sustainable for the long, long term, right?' One of the most notable targets Berrada has set since he arrived at United is 'Project 150' — the name given to a set of milestones he wants the club to have achieved by the time it celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2028. These include off-field targets — being 'cash positive' is one example — but others are on-field. Berrada wants United's women's team to win its first Women's Super League title in the next three years and for the men to follow suit in the Premier League. But is that realistic? 'Of course,' Berrada replied. We've just finished 15th and it seems like an impossible task. But why not aim for it? Why not do everything in our power?' Advertisement He speaks with some experience. When Berrada arrived at Barcelona in 2004, the club was on the floor. They finished second to Valencia in La Liga, lost in the quarter-finals of the Copa del Rey and didn't even play in that season's Champions League. They were instead cast into the UEFA Cup, where they lost in the fourth round to Celtic. Things seemed similarly hopeless at the Camp Nou, but within two years they were European and Spanish champions. It is the kind of revival that gives Berrada hope for United. 'I firmly believe that we can do it,' he said. '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 then, we'll all be happy — and so nobody's saying that we don't want to win it until then.' Berrada said that United would be 'active' in the rest of the summer window. Although, predictably, there were few promises over exactly how much could or would be spent, and on who. He insists there is alignment between Amorim and Jason Wilcox, the technical director, and that the 'vision' for the squad is clear. But he admitted that there would need to be 'some player exits' in order to 'balance the books'. 'We've put ourselves in the best position possible by doing everything that we've had this year around cost-cutting,' Berrada added. 'I'm confident that we will come out of the window with a much stronger team than what we've gone into.' Berrada was also effusive in praising United's sole addition to the squad so far, Matheus Cunha, who has joined for £62.5million ($83.7m) from Wolverhampton Wanderers and — according to the CEO — has traits reminiscent of one of the club's greatest signings. 'He's a player that I think fans are going to love,' Berrada said. 'We can talk about his technical abilities and he can play in three different positions. He's a playmaking attacking midfielder; he can score goals, he can make assists. I think he's going to lift people off their seats. He's got a bit of a swagger about him that people are going to really like. Dare I say, (Eric) Cantona-esque. Advertisement 'He was an important one to get done. We're going to do our best to do more signings quickly. Sometimes when you're not quick, it's because you're negotiating and you're trying to make sure you get the right value for money. So being efficient or quick isn't necessarily the best thing for the club.' If last season was grim on the field, it was hardly much better off it. United announced two rounds of redundancies — one in September, when around 250 staff were sacked, and then another just after the end of the season. Berrada had told staff in that September meeting that there was only going to be one wave of cuts, and he acknowledged that there had been a backtrack, for which he had apologised to staff. 'We didn't foresee at the time that the finances of the club were in such a bad state and there are many things that you need to manage,' he explained. 'It's not just financial fair play, but it's also cash and the ability to operate with your own means, which is what we're being asked to do. 'We're a massive club; we should be able to operate on a profitable basis, as the club has done for a long time and still won (trophies). You can be very successful on and off the pitch consistently.' Redundancies were just one of the negative headlines United generated. Another was the decision to scrap concession prices midway through last season, meaning younger fans and OAPs faced paying £66 for tickets, and moving long-term season ticket holders from seats in Old Trafford's South Stand so they could be resold as high-end corporate seats. When I put it to Berrada that the £66 policy was a failure and did more harm than good, Berrada replied: 'What I accept is that the way it was rolled out was not good. I raise my hand, I'm responsible for that decision. 'If we go back to the actual decision itself and the percentage of people that it was going to impact, it's low. Really low. But we didn't communicate it well. And we did it too quickly, mid-season. So that was a lesson and something that we will try to avoid in the future. Advertisement 'What we've done since is engage heavily with the fan advisory board and they've all been good. We've had some robust conversations and they pushed back on a lot of the ideas that we had and the initiatives that we wanted to implement.' As for the South Stand protests, Berrada said that it was important for the club to 'understand their frustration' but insisted the decisions were for 'the good of the club', regardless of how unpopular they were. Berrada is smart. His father was an economics professor and his mother worked for UNICEF with the United Nations; he speaks five languages and has lived in as many different countries. His ability to see through football's 'bulls***ters' — as he puts it — will be put to the test in the coming years but he understands the need to stay calm and retain perspective. He says he has a 'very good relationship' with Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the INEOS founder and United's co-owner, and speaks to him 'quite often. With him, you know exactly what you're getting.' Born in Paris, Berrada spent much of his childhood in the Moroccan city of Rabat. He loved football, chiefly the Moroccan national team and Barcelona. His first football memories were of the 1986 World Cup finals, and he clearly knows his stuff. 'Morocco played England and drew (0-0), then beat Portugal 3-1 to become the first African team to qualify from the group stage,' he recalled. 'That was a proud moment for the country and I was completely hooked on football.' From the age of nine, his family lived in the United States (he later returned as a student to start an engineering degree) and he also lived in Brussels and Barcelona. He read a lot before he took the United job and continued reading, including books on the club's football history; he seems just as at ease talking tactics as he does accounts. Advertisement It is one of the reasons he has faith in Amorim and dismisses the idea that the Portuguese is too wedded to one way of playing. 'We want an attractive attacking style of football, but Johan Cruyff played with 3-4-3 and nobody said it was defensive,' he said. 'So I wouldn't spend too much time thinking about the formation and thinking more about the identity and the style of play that Ruben is trying to put in place.'
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
Why have Real Madrid partnered with Louis Vuitton?
Last week, French fashion house Louis Vuitton announced a partnership with Real Madrid, establishing a formal association between arguably the world's most recognisable luxury clothing brand and European football's most storied club. Louis Vuitton is not the first luxury label to make the crossover into the sport. Advertisement Manchester City announced an agreement with Italy's C.P. Company in 2024, which became their official fashionwear partner. That followed the club's long-term deal with Dsquared², which started in 2016 before ending in their treble-winning 2023 season, where City players and manager Pep Guardiola would arrive at away matches in the Champions League wearing outfits made by that designer brand. It is not just City, though — there are countless examples of similar deals in the Premier League. Tottenham Hotspur's victorious Europa League squad arrived at the stadium for that final last month wearing suits designed by Kiton, the Italian company that has been the club's official formalwear partner since 2023. Their north London neighbours Arsenal have recently looked more locally for style inspiration, collaborating with Labrum London, whose founder Foday Dumbuya is an Arsenal supporter, on last season's away kit and an accompanying lifestyle collection. It is increasingly common around wider Europe, too. In Italy's Serie A, Juventus have partnered with Loro Piana since 2021, and Milan collaborated with Off-White for last season's fourth kit. Madrid themselves previously had an association with Zegna, so they are not breaking new ground in collaborating with an esteemed designer brand. This new deal is reportedly worth up to €7million (£5.9m; $8.1m at current rates), although a Real Madrid source — who did not wish to be named as they did not have permission to discuss its terms — described that figure as 'optimistic'. Either way, the prestige of Louis Vuitton, one of the world's most recognisable symbols of luxury in fashion, is singular. 'These have been happening for years now, it shows a shift on both sides,' says sports business consultant and journalist Daniel-Yaw Miller. 'Not just in the way clubs see themselves, but in how brands see themselves. 'There's so much synergy between iconic fashion brands and football clubs. They're huge cultural entities with so much history and heritage — like how fashion houses have their heritage tied to collections, football clubs have so much history tied to their kits, aesthetic and badges over time. It's the same as how fashion houses look at patterns and designs over time.' Advertisement Louis Vuitton is no stranger to the world of football either. It created a commemorative ball for the 1998 World Cup in its homeland of France and has designed the tournament trophy's travelling case since 2010. American music artist Pharrell Williams has served as its men's creative director since 2023, and football stars including Jude Bellingham, Marcus Thuram, Jadon Sancho, Jules Kounde and Madrid's marquee summer 2025 signing Trent Alexander-Arnold were in attendance at his first runway show. Williams even included a pair of 'football trainers' in their spring/summer collection this year, retailing at an eyewatering £885 ($1,200). Five years before their current owners at Qatar Sports Investment bought Paris Saint-Germain in 2011, the Ligue 1 club released an away kit inspired by Louis Vuitton's colours and design — albeit without an official link to the brand. Given their shared home city and emphasis on fashion, PSG may also have been a prime candidate for the company's first official club partnership. Still, Miller says Madrid's prestige and the large personal brands of their star players make it an obvious match. 'Louis Vuitton has always had small relationships in sport,' says Miller. 'Whether that's creating trophy cases or limited releases around prestigious occasions. But a few years ago, LVMH, Louis Vuitton's parent company, decided that sport would be its one major cultural push. 'You saw that with their strategy around the Olympics (held in Paris and across France last August), where they were a premium sponsor and paid big amounts to have their brand visible. They paid (a reported) $1billion to sponsor Formula One for 10 years. But if you want to show up on a global stage, you want to be associated with football. 'They started working similarly to how they did with Formula One, informally dressing Jude Bellingham for certain events before making him an official ambassador, like they did with Lewis Hamilton (who became an ambassador for Dior, another brand under the LVMH banner, in 2024). Then, if you want to be in football, there's no bigger entity than Real Madrid.' Advertisement Bellingham partnered with Louis Vuitton last summer, following his England team-mate Jack Grealish signing a seven-figure deal to become a Gucci ambassador in 2022. Bellingham — who is also linked to Skims, a clothing brand founded by Kim Kardashian — was the third major athlete to sign as a 'friend of the house' after current Wimbledon and French Open tennis champion (and known madridista) Carlos Alcaraz and NBA basketball star Victor Wembanyama, who was raised in a suburb of Paris. Last year, fellow Real Madrid fan Rafael Nadal combined with long-time rival Roger Federer for a photoshoot organised by Louis Vuitton in the Italian Dolomites. Jude Bellingham for Louis Vuitton. The Maison and @Pharrell are pleased to welcome English footballer @BellinghamJude as the newest Friend of the House — embarking on a collaborative adventure in Menswear.#JudeBellingham #PharrellWilliams #LouisVuitton — Louis Vuitton (@LouisVuitton) August 16, 2024 Bellingham is one of several superstar players at Madrid whose celebrity has transcended football. Kylian Mbappe is one of the world's most famous athletes. Fellow forward Vinicius Junior is one of the faces of the Brazil national team with more than 50million Instagram followers, and newcomer Alexander-Arnold, who is frequently spotted at major fashion and sporting events, also represent much more from a branding perspective. 'Madrid have a lot of players who are loved by Gen Z audiences,' says Jordan Clarke, founder of Footballer Fits, an Instagram page with more than 800,000 followers which celebrates the relationship between football and fashion. 'Louis Vuitton is such a prestigious brand, and they've historically not targeted these audiences. But I think with the likes of Vinicius, Bellingham, Mbappe, (their team-mate Eduardo) Camavinga, they're reaching new audiences with the love people have for these athletes. It's a valid seal of approval for these brands for the youth. 'The athletes of today, especially those high-profile Madrid players, are almost creatives themselves. They're going to be posting content onto their socials wearing Louis Vuitton, taken from the players themselves on their iPhones. That makes it a player-backed brand.' This summer's Club World Cup in the United States will be the first opportunity for the record 15-time European champions to show off this new collaboration. According to the blurb in the accompanying press release, 'the collection will be worn by the teams and includes tailored garments, shoes, accessories and luggage,' and the items will be worn at major travel opportunities and events. Advertisement LVMH has reported first-quarter revenues of €20.3billion (£17.3bn/$23.5bn at current rates) last month, down two per cent on the same period in 2024. Part of that is due to a five per cent sales decrease in the company's fashion and leather goods division, with Europe being the only market that posted growth (two per cent). According to Miller, pushing the brand in front of new demographics is how LVMH is trying to drive a new wave of enthusiasm around its flagship brand. 'For a long time, luxury fashion houses have operated on the belief that the exclusivity of their brand will drive enough business to generate profit, despite the high price point,' says Miller. 'But in the last three or four years, luxury brands have struggled to keep up. Sales and profits have been declining, so LVMH is looking for new cultural avenues to drive excitement.' In front of a new audience in America, perhaps there's no better time for Louis Vuitton to announce the partnership as Madrid aim to become the first winners of FIFA's revamped, greatly expanded and rescheduled Club World Cup.
