One day, if he’s lucky, Angel Di Maria might lose his ‘Manchester United flop’ label and be appreciated by an English football audience.
Few modern day footballers are so tainted by one season of underachievement as the Argentine winger. His year of struggle under Louis van Gaal at Old Trafford seems to cloud so many perceptions.
The absolute masterclass Di Maria produced on Tuesday night, setting up four goals as Paris Saint-Germain obliterated Club Bruges 5-0 in the Champions League, was yet another reminder of how he has been criminally misrepresented.
Angel Di Maria produced assists for four of PSG’s five goals against Club Bruges on Tuesday
The Argentine winger ran the show as the Parisians ran out 5-0 winners in Belgium
Di Maria has enjoyed such a post-United renaissance that the 2014-15 season has now come to look like a genuine blip – and one with plenty of mitigating circumstances – in an otherwise excellent career.
And while £60million Di Maria is likely to top many more countdowns of United’s worst-ever signings, his record and achievements for PSG since means he really couldn’t care less.
Those four assists in Belgium – three of which were to Kylian Mbappe and two from classy outside-of-the-foot passes – took Di Maria’s returns to seven goals and six assists so far this season in all competitions.
And before everyone cries that it was ‘only’ Bruges, then do remember he did score twice in PSG’s 3-0 win over Real Madrid that opened the group phase.
Di Maria fires past Thibaut Courtois at his near post to open the scoring against Real Madrid
It was an unerring finish by the Argentine against his old club on day one of the group stage
Di Maria then curled home a perfectly-placed second as PSG went on to beat Real 3-0
Last season, he scored 19 times and created a further 17 goals, including assists for Presnel Kimpembe and Mbappe at Old Trafford in the last-16 that, until injury time in the second leg at least, had appeared to brought satisfactory closure on his sorry time there.
Indeed, his overall record for the Parisians since United took a £15m hit on him just 12 months after his much-vaunted arrival reads 76 goals and 75 assists in 194 appearances.
That’s not to mention the three Ligue 1 titles, three French Cups and three French League Cups in that time.
In the same amount of time at Real Madrid between 2010 and 2014, Di Maria scored 36 goals and contributed 85 assists in 190 matches, winning the Champions League in 2014 after a man of the match performance in the final.
So all the evidence begins to suggest that Di Maria’s year of failure at United was more the fault of the club than the player himself.
There are arguments for both sides. His move to United in the summer of 2014 came about because Di Maria was a victim of circumstance at Real, a club where players fall in and out of favour faster than the tide coming in.
He had been the player Jose Mourinho had lobbied hard to sign from Benfica upon his appointment in 2010 and he became synonymous with the Mourinho regime because he worked so well within it.
Di Maria excelled under Jose Mourinho at Real Madrid, where he scored 36 goals
The Argentine became a victim of the shifting sands at Real and was turfed out in 2014
But by 2014, a year after Mourinho’s departure, Di Maria was seen as so closely aligned with the former manager that he had to be moved on.
During that summer’s World Cup, a tournament curtailed by injury as Argentina lost in the final, Di Maria was informed Real would be selling him against his will to make room for their new shiny tinsel – James Rodriguez.
So Di Maria never wanted to move to Manchester and so never felt compelled to try and settle. A positive start that saw him score three goals – including a sublime lob against Leicester – and contribute six assists quickly faded.
Not only were United not even in the Champions League – a competition he’d just won – he didn’t see eye-to-eye with notorious taskmaster Van Gaal, who shunted him from position to position as he tried to work out his best system.
The 4-3-3 system employed by Real played to his strengths as a hard runner with tricky feet who used the width of the pitch to his advantage.
He ended up signing for Louis van Gaal’s Man United but the pair never saw eye-to-eye
The odd bright points aside, Di Maria’s season with United was a major disappointment
And when Carlo Ancelotti replaced Mourinho, Di Maria had successfully adapted to a more central attacking midfield role.
But he looked ineffective in Van Gaal’s midfield diamond, which offered insufficient width and left him running endlessly into traffic. Van Gaal, so obsessed with keeping the ball, didn’t allow Di Maria to express himself.
Already struggling for form, Di Maria was the victim of a terrifying burglary at his home in January 2015, which left him desperate to leave United at any cost.
In the end, an aloofness in the United dressing room that stemmed from bemusement at what he was doing there escalated into a full-blown slanging match with Wayne Rooney and others after one under-powered performance.
But far from sending his career into a nosedive, the bad year with United only made Di Maria more determined to succeed and he has found Paris much more to his liking.
Di Maria delighted in PSG’s 2-0 Champions League win over United at Old Trafford in February
The winger pretends to swig from a beer bottle thrown at him from the United fans
Funnily enough, the goals and assists started to flow almost immediately and during 2019 Di Maria, now 31, has been producing some of the best form of his career.
Against Real, he deceived Thibaut Courtois with an inch-perfect near post finish to open the scoring then placed his second into the opposite side from 20 yards out.
And his outrageous through pass for Mbappe to round off PSG’s Bruges cruise on Tuesday night soon went viral on social media.
Mbappe must find it a dream working with Di Maria, just as Cristiano Ronaldo at Real, Lionel Messi for Argentina and Neymar at PSG have done before him.
Mbappe, who scored a hat-trick in the win over Club Bruges, loves playing with Di Maria
He has that capacity to make the best look even better and by the looks of it, will continue to do so for sometime to come.
But as the comments beneath a Twitter post listing his goal and assists returns for Real and PSG suggested, Man United fans aren’t prepared to let him forget about his miserable 2014-15 season just yet.
They should, because Di Maria is emphatic proof that careers don’t necessarily only go downwards after Manchester United.