📅 August 9, 2026

Santos Ran It and Tielemans Needed One Pass. The Midfield Rebuild Looks Real.

By Mav Jones · Manchester United fan writer

Saturday in Gothenburg was supposed to be about what United have lost. Casemiro gone, Ugarte out until spring, and then Mason Mount limping off after twenty minutes of a friendly.

Instead the two men signed to fix it spent the afternoon quietly answering the question.

Santos was the best midfielder on the pitch

Andrey Santos played 64 minutes and touched the ball 44 times, more than any other United player before he came off. He completed 35 of 37 passes. That’s 95 percent, against the European champions, in his first real test in a red shirt.

The number that matters more is the one that doesn’t show up in a passing chart. When Ayden Heaven made a mess of things and Ibrahim Mbaye looked certain to double PSG’s lead, it was Santos who got back and blocked it. Mbaye had already scored the opener minutes earlier, and Santos simply refused to let him have a second.

Round that out with two tackles won, an interception, a clearance and five defensive actions in total, and you have a midfielder who covered ground for an hour and barely gave the ball away. Nothing flashy. No killer through balls, no long diagonals. Just a player who took the ball, moved it, and got back to win it again.

That is exactly what United have been missing since Casemiro’s legs went. We wrote on Saturday that the midfield looked one injury from being threadbare. Santos spent the following hour making that argument look a little less bleak.

Tielemans took about ninety seconds

Youri Tielemans came on in the 65th minute, replacing Santos, alongside Bruno Fernandes making his first appearance of pre-season.

He barely needed the rest of the game to make his point. Within minutes he’d slid a pass through the PSG defence to put Fernandes clean through on goal, the kind of ball United have not had from a central midfielder in years. Later he picked out Harry Maguire on the edge of the box, and Maguire’s left-footed effort was good enough that Matvey Safonov had to tip it over.

Two moments in half an hour, both of them the sort of thing that turns a tidy attack into a chance. Tielemans has always been able to do this. The question was never whether he could pass, it was whether he could raise the level of a midfield that had been drifting. On this evidence he can, and he doesn’t need long on the ball to do it.

The awkward bit nobody’s mentioning

Here’s the thing that should temper the optimism a little. Santos and Tielemans have not played together.

Tielemans didn’t come on alongside Santos. He came on for him. The two most expensive midfield signings of the summer, brought in for a combined figure around £85 million, have so far spent precisely zero minutes on the pitch at the same time.

That’s normal for a pre-season friendly in early August, and Carrick has an obvious reason to manage their minutes carefully. But it means the thing we actually need to know about this midfield, whether these two complement each other or duplicate each other, is still completely untested. Santos sits and covers. Tielemans wants the ball in space and picks the pass. On paper that reads like a pairing. On grass it’s still a theory.

There are two more chances to find out before it matters. Leeds United at Croke Park on Wednesday, then AC Milan on Saturday. If Carrick wants to see Santos and Tielemans in the same team before a Premier League ball is kicked, those are the games.

If he doesn’t, then with Mount’s foot an unknown, Ugarte gone until spring and Kobbie Mainoo still being eased back in, there’s a decent chance the theory gets tested for real at the MKM Stadium on 22 August rather than in a friendly.

What else stood out

Maguire had one of those games where he looks like the most comfortable footballer on the pitch, spraying passes and reading everything. Shea Lacey kept impressing in the number 10 role, which is becoming a genuine story of this pre-season. And Carrick gave a glimpse of something tactical, letting Luke Shaw overlap while Patrick Dorgu tucked inside as an inverted winger.

Carrick’s own read on it, given to MUTV afterwards, suits the midfield story better than the scoreline does.

“The things that we were trying to get out of the game, a lot of it was there. It’s good sometimes that the boys have to problem solve and find their way a little bit. We don’t want to always give them the answers, when we don’t have to.”

Problem solving is a fair description of what Santos did for an hour. Nobody drew him a diagram for the recovery block on Mbaye. And it is a fair description of what a rebuilt midfield actually needs in August, which is not a rehearsed pattern but two new players working out where the other one is going to be.

“There are a lot of things people don’t always see that we were quite happy with,” he added. “There were some good signs there.” On the tour as a whole, he felt United had “built and taken steps” through the games so far.

A rebuilt midfield holding the European champions to a draw, with a debutant creating two clear chances in half an hour, is a reasonable afternoon’s work.

Two weeks out

Bryan Mbeumo’s equaliser cancelled out Mbaye’s second-minute opener and the game finished 1-1. Nobody will remember the scoreline.

What they might remember is that United spent £85 million on two midfielders this summer, and the first time anyone got a proper look at them against serious opposition, one completed 95 percent of his passes and saved a goal, and the other created two chances in half an hour.

Hull City away, 22 August. On this showing, Santos starts.

Full 2026/27 fixture list, with kick-off times in ET, on our Fixtures page.

The full picture: Manchester United transfers 2026: every signing, exit and target

Source: Sky Sports — PSG 1-1 Man Utd: Mbeumo equalises but Mount goes off injured