Antony’s arrival signals audacious upheaval of Manchester United

We probably need to talk about the money first. It’s the 13th most expensive transfer of all time, slotting in between Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid. It brings Manchester United’s spending this window to about £200m plus potential add‑ons, and together with the signings of Tyrell Malacia and Lisandro Martínez means United are responsible for about 48% of the Eredivisie’s entire summer transfer income.

“God decides my future,” Antony said in an interview last week, when he was still an Ajax player. But, you know, an £86m bid from one of the world’s richest clubs doesn’t hurt either.

Simple intuition warns us to be wary. All the red flags are present and correct, given what we know about United, and particularly United in the transfer market, and particularly United in the transfer market in the final week of the window after a bad start to the season. The sense of urgency and panic. The vastly inflated fee for a 22-year-old forward who has never scored more than nine league goals in a season. The fact he was identified not through an exhaustive empirical analysis and scouting process but because the new manager knows him from Ajax.

The mechanics of Antony’s transfer are emblematic of United’s many dysfunctions. The player himself, however: well, this makes a weird kind of sense. Antony may well go straight into the United team for Sunday’s game against Arsenal, and the irony is that he is joining a quite different club to the one that rekindled its efforts to sign him a fortnight ago. Three successive wins have cast the Erik ten Hag project in a subtle new light, and their 1-0 win at Leicester on Thursday night was perhaps the most revealing indication yet that something extremely interesting is