For the first time since the end of the 2013/14 Premier League season, Manchester United’s famous No.9 shirt is free. Passed between impressed strikers and some less memorable names (even Roy Keane and Nicky Butt at one stage), the pressure still weighs heavy.
With Anthony Martial leaving the club, the jersey is free once more. Since arriving in 2015 and taking on the honour – but also expectation – it has been given away to Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Romelu Lukaku in the meantime. Now, United can offer their No.9 top to the variety of new forwards being courted.
Joshua Zirkzee is certainly one of those names who will be in the mix to wear the shirt. Should his transfer from Bologna be completed as it seems well on the way to being, then he will surely have a chance. The Dutchman doesn’t have much senior football history to go off, but after moving to Italy in 2022 he soon took up the No.9 shirt and performed well with it.
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The other option is reportedly Ivan Toney. He is a player said to have been discussed by the club as they monitor options heading into the new season. Despite feeling like a main character during plenty of points of his career, and therefore suiting the No.9 shirt, Toney has rarely worn it.
Only after returning to Scunthorpe on loan in 2017/18, and during a period at Shrewsbury, has he actually taken it on. Instead, in the last five years of his career the Englishman wears No.17 for club and also for recently for country as well.
Both players, Toney and Zirkzee, seem natural fits for the shirt at Old Trafford. For Toney, his No.17 top is currently taken by Alejandro Garnacho, and he doesn’t seem likely to be going anywhere soon, or to be giving it away. If that does leave the No.9 then it would surely play into Toney’s ambitions as a top-level player, to take on the privilege of wearing it for United were he to join.
Given the competition in the market for Zirkzee and Toney among clubs across Europe, having this extra factor may well hand United a slight advantage as well. Either way, United have been looking for someone to wear the No.9 shirt with pride on a regular basis, pretty much since Dimitar Berbatov, who was the last to do so and leave gracefully having donned the number for more than one season.
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