How does Ruben Amorim fix Man Utd's Rasmus Højlund problem?

The Danish striker has struggled to score goals and is at the crux of Man Utd's attacking problems in the Premier League this season.

Things aren’t working out for Rasmus Højlund this season. With just two goals in 19 league games for Manchester United, the Danish striker is not only struggling to find the back of the net for the Old Trafford club, but has more or less lost his spot in Ruben Amorim’s starting XI.

To the surprise of many fans, the Portuguese head coach opted to drop Højlund entirely from his team in their recent clash with Crystal Palace, instead electing to play Kobbie Mainoo as a false No.9. That didn’t really work out either, but fans of the Red Devils perhaps understood their new manager’s desperate attempts to fix the team’s attacking woes with audacious tactical moves. Whether or not Amorim was right to play Mainoo up front, one thing is for certain: Højlund just isn’t working in this Man Utd team this season.

What’s gone wrong with Højlund this season?

Alongside the very obvious problem of Højlund not scoring enough goals, the main issue for the 22-year-old striker is his apparent disconnect from the rest of his team. So far this season the Danish talent has averaged just 24.3 touches of the ball per game in the Premier League. That’s down from 25.5 last season but a whopping 29 percent drop from his average at Atalanta, when he was touching the ball around 32 times per match.

Unsurprisingly, when we dive even deeper into those numbers we can see that the biggest drop off is in Højlund getting the ball in attacking areas. At Atalanta, he was touching the ball 21.5 times per game in the final third, but this season, that number has dropped to just 11.1. And when we focus in on his touches in the penalty box, we find his average per game fall from a high of 6.52 at Atalanta to a worrying low of just 2.68 for Man Utd this season.

Interestingly, Højlund’s shot accuracy has largely stayed the same over the course of his last three seasons. At Atalanta his shot accuracy stood at 52 percent, which then rose to 52 percent last season and then dropped slightly to 46 percent this season. Equally, his xG per shot (i.e. the quality of his chances when he takes a shot) has stayed more or less identical, as it stood at 0.18 at Atalanta and now remains steady at 0.19 for Man Utd this season. However, to no great surprise, he’s hitting far fewer shots in total, with a high of 2.65 per game in his single season at Atalanta, which then dropped to 1.58 last season and now stands at just 1.06 in this current campaign.

Essentially, Højlund’s ability to get his shots on target hasn’t really changed at all and in many ways he’s managed to rise to the level expected of him at Man Utd. In fact, last season saw the player outperform his xG in the Premier League by bagging ten goals from a non-penalty xG of 7.6. But the fundamental problem this time around is simply that he isn’t getting enough service into the box and is now entirely overlooked by a Man Utd team that doesn’t really know how to create goal-scoring chances.

Man Utd’s playmaking problems

To no great surprise for anyone who’s watched Man Utd this season, the Old Trafford club are utterly useless at getting the ball into the opposing box to create goal scoring chances. According to Opta, Amorim’s side sit eight places from bottom of the Premier League when it comes down to total shots on target this season, just slightly above Wolves. And with just 28 goals from 24 league games, they sit level with Crystal Palace and West Ham in terms of attacking output in the league campaign. Only four English top-flight clubs have scored fewer goals than the Red Devils.

There are a few reasons behind that, but one of the most glaring ones is the sheer lack of playmakers in this Man Utd team. When we consider the top 50 players in the league this season for key passes (i.e a pass that leads to a shot), the Old Trafford club have just two representatives (Bruno Fernandes and Amad Diallo), while Liverpool have seven, Nottingham Forest and Manchester City have four each and even an Arsenal side that are heavily reliant on Bukayo Saka and Martin Ødegaard have three.

Fernandes is, of course, the club’s main playmaker but even his numbers are far from impressive this season, with just six assists in total for the league campaign. That puts him level with Man City midfielder Kevin de Bruyne, even though the Belgian midfielder has played around half the minutes of his Old Trafford counterpart this season. But the problem isn’t so much that Fernandes isn’t doing a good enough job in the middle of the park but rather that he seems to be the only one capable of threading a pass into the opposing box.

When we take a look at Man Utd’s top creators for key passes this season Fernandes sits top with 43, then Diallo sits second with a respectable 29. The problem for Amorim is that the player in third place is none other than central defender Lisandro Martinez, followed by Marcus Rashford. One of those players certainly shouldn’t be among any team’s most creative playmakers, while the other has just departed for Aston Villa.

The other big issue with Man Utd’s faltering attack is that they seem incapable of crossing the ball into the box. So far this season the Old Trafford club have managed just 361 crosses in 24 games, which is the third-worst return in the entire Premier League. And, again, when we look at the main culprits in Amorim’s side we find a squad completely devoid of genuine options for the young manager to pick from. While Liverpool have three players in double figures for crosses into the penalty area this season, Man Utd’s top crosser is still Rashford with just eight for the league campaign.

This, unquestionably, is due to Amorim’s preference or indeed necessity to make huge compromises in the wing-back areas. With Diogo Dalot and Noussair Mazraoui as his only real options for both positions, it means Man Utd have spent much of this season playing with a left-sided wing-back that has little interest in running down the wing and swinging crosses in with his left foot. Nor, it’s fair to say, do the club have any traditional wingers aside from Diallo in their squad, with Alejandro Garnacho, Joshua Zirkzee and the recently departed Rashford more likely to drift into the middle of the pitch in search of goals, rather than staying out wide to provide service for other players.

How do Man Utd fix their attacking problems?

To be fair to Amorim and his backroom staff, it does seem as though he’s already begun to address these blatant issues in the broken team he inherited from Erik Ten Hag. Perhaps the most obvious improvement has come from Diallo, who is unquestionably blossoming under the new Man Utd manager and has already become the club’s joint-highest assist creator in the Premier League this season. Unlike the other forwards in the squad, the young Ivorian talent seems to value creating goals just as much as scoring them and could prove to be the perfect partner alongside Højlund in attack.

The club also did well to prioritise signing a bona fide left-back in the January window with the capture of Patrick Dorgu from Lecce. Although the 20-year-old talent can play on either wing, he is unquestionably an ideal left wing-back, with the capacity to bomb down the wing to provide some much-needed width to Amorim’s team and an additional route to the opposing box. Here, again, Man Utd fans should be hopeful of their team providing more attacking intent in the weeks and months to come.

But perhaps the most intriguing step Amorim made to fixing Man Utd’s long-standing woes in attack was indeed the decision to move Mainoo up front. While there’s little fear of the Portuguese manager retraining the England international into some makeshift striker, his theory that the 19-year-old’s future lies further up the pitch is well founded. Mainoo isn’t likely to permanently take Højlund’s spot up front but he could be Amorim’s long-term solution to the faltering 30-year-old No.10 that continues to amaze and frustrate Man Utd fans in equal measure.

So can Amorim get Højlund back to scoring ways? Well, it’s a complicated, multi-faceted problem with no easy solutions. But while results certainly aren’t going Man Utd’s way right now, fans of the club can at least take some solace from the fact that their new manager is trying everything and anything to fix this broken squad that he’s inherited. And if he can get them all working and in the right positions on the pitch, it may just get the club back on track and have the Danish striker back amongst the goals before too long.