Victor Lindelöf joins Manchester United for £31 million

Manchester United have completed their first signing of the summer. Swedish defender Victor Lindelöf has moved to Old Trafford from Benfica for an estimated £31 million. He has signed a four-year contract with the club.

Lindelöf played 47 games for Benfica last season, helping the club to the Portuguese title, the Taça de Portugal, and the last 16 of the Champions League. He made his debut for the Swedish national team in 2016, and has picked up 12 caps so far.

Most reports on Lindelöf agree on two things: he’s extremely calm under pressure, and he’s pretty good at passing a football.

The former has earned him the nickname “The Ice Man,” which is a marked improvement on “Wazza.” And the latter is something that United’s defense has been crying out for. To their fans’ vexation, United spent quite a lot of last season playing long from the back, which was occasionally effective but always tedious. Hopefully, Lindelöf’s arrival both reinforces the defense and improves the spectacle.

He is also young, and consequently inexperienced. Though he made his debut for Benfica’s first team in the 2013-14 season, he’s played most of his football for Benfica B, and only established himself in the first team this season. However, that season included a fairly decent run in the Champions League, along with a domestic double. Not too shabby.

The passing is nice, but Lindelöf has mostly been bought to defend. Fortunately for him, United’s central defensive options are a curious bunch. With the exception of Eric Bailly, who was generally excellent in his first Premier League season, nobody has really advanced a firm claim on a first-team place.

Chris Smalling has looked shaky at times, and can’t really pass a football. Phil Jones oscillates wildly between competence, calamity, and crookedness. Marcos Rojo improved hugely under Mourinho, but has a worrying addiction to two-footed lunges. And judging by Mourinho’s selections over the season, Daley Blind is very much a reserve.

So there’s a space there. More than that, there’s the tantalizing prospect of a proper partnership. If United stick with a back four, then the 22-year-old Lindelöf and the 23-year-old Bailly could, all being well, be at the heart of it for years to come. And he can also do a job at right-back, should the need arise.

We’re making a few assumptions here about the quality of a player who has only really had one season of first-team football, but if this move turns out to be a good one, it will also end up being a cheap one. Relatively. By the nonsensical standards governing the top end of the transfer market.

Obviously £31 million is a lot of money to pay for anything. But given that John Stones moved last summer for considerably more, and Virgil van Dijk is being touted around for almost double, we can safely assume that the market for young, top-class central defenders is ridiculous. And when things get ridiculous, expensive starts to look reasonable.

Lindelöf-to-United has been a thing for well over six months now, and it’s even been suggested that the move was supposed to happen in January until some mysterious snag arrived. That means that this wasn’t really a transfer race, and United’s move here won’t inconvenience too many other teams. (Except Benfica, obviously.)

There might be some knock-on effects within United’s squad, however. If we include the young Axel Tuanzebe, then United now have seven players capable of playing in the middle of defense, which seems like a lot. So if you’ve ever looked at your football club and thought “You know, we could really do with a Phil Jones, lightly raced, one careless owner,” then this could be your lucky summer.