Manchester United will pay more than €50m for goalkeeper Andre Onan.

Cameroonian Andre Onana will become one of the top three most expensive goalkeepers in football history thanks to a breakthrough season at Inter and a subsequent move to Manchester United in need of a strong goalkeeper. Manchester City will pay more than €50 million for Onan.

The fact that Andre Onana will move from Inter to Manchester United in the coming days, informed a range of sources, including the BBC. According to him, he will sign a five-year contract with the English club with the option of a season extension. Onana should join him at the end of this week and have time to go with the team on a commercial tour of the United States.

This is a very visible deal, primarily because of its value. For the 27-year-old Cameroonian, the BBC claims Manchester United will pay Inter “nearly £50m”. That’s only slightly less than what he recently paid Chelsea for attacking midfielder Mason Mount, who cost Manchester United £55m. The BBC version is actually the same as the version Transfermarkt. According to him, the cost of Onana’s transfer is €50 million, while another €4 million is included in the form of future bonuses.

Thus, Andre Onana, thanks to the interest from Manchester United, can enter the top three most expensive goalkeepers in history.

Players of this role are on average much cheaper than other players. At the moment, the rating is headed by Spaniard Kepa Arrizabalaga, whom Chelsea bought from Atlético for €80 million in 2018. Brazilian Alisson follows him. In the same year, he moved from Roma to Liverpool for €62.5 million. Finally, the legendary Italian Gianluigi Buffon occupies the third position. The cost of his long-standing, 2002, transfer from Parma to Juventus, taking into account changes in the exchange rate, is, according to Transfermarkt, € 52.88 million.

Andre Onan’s long-term acquaintance with his coach Eric Ten Hag undoubtedly helped Andre Onan to end up at Manchester United. Onana is a graduate of the Barcelona academy. But he matured to the elite level at Ajax, which he trained for a long time before receiving an invitation from the Manchester team, Ten Hag, a year ago. The Cameroonian found himself in the Dutch club in the middle of the last decade, and played six seasons at its core.

However, most likely, in this case, acquaintance with a mentor is still a secondary factor. This summer, Manchester United parted ways with their main goalkeeper David de Gea, who has recently been criticized for a large number of errors. And among those goalkeepers that were in the public eye last season, Andre Onana certainly stood out. That season was a breakthrough for him.

In the summer of 2022, the Cameroonian moved to Inter as a free agent. It was assumed that in the Italian club he would get the role of an understudy for the experienced Samir Handanovich, the captain of the Milanese, who did not give good reason to think that he could be put on the bench.

However, very quickly Andre Onana won the competition against Handanovic, and in the most important tournaments he proved that the coach Simone Inzaghi had not taken the risk of trusting him in vain.

Of the 24 meetings of the national championship, exactly one third of the Cameroonian played “to zero”. In the Champions League, in which Inter reached the final sensationally, his performance is even more impressive. In it, he had the same number – eight – “dry” matches with 13 games played. At the same time, he surpassed all the goalkeepers of the Italian clubs in the number of attacking – those that resulted in shots on goal – passes. Meanwhile, just bad kicking was one of the factors leading to David de Gea’s blunders. In this component, which is of great importance in modern football, Onana is definitely significantly superior to the Spaniard.

The only serious breakdown of Andre Onana is associated with the Qatari World Cup. On it, he was considered almost the main hope of the Cameroon national team, but he played for it only in the opening match in the group with the Swiss. Before the second, with the Serbs, it suddenly turned out that Onana’s name was no longer in the Cameroonian application. It turned out that he was expelled from the national team after a conflict with coach Rigobert Song over her tactics. Later, Andre Onana announced that he would no longer play for the national team. True, this circumstance, apparently, was an extra plus for the Manchester management when considering his candidacy.

Alexey Dospekhov