MANCHESTER — Carlos Baleba has signed a five-year contract with Manchester United in a £70m move from Brighton, but the 22-year-old Cameroon midfielder may have to wait until after the international break to make his debut as he recovers from an ankle injury United knew about when they completed the deal on 25 August. The pressure is building at Old Trafford, where United is 12th in the Premier League with just one win and five points from its opening five games after Brighton came from 2-0 down at Old Trafford to knock United out of the EFL Cup, ahead of a visit from rock-bottom Tottenham this weekend.
Baleba was earmarked for the holding midfield role Michael Carrick has struggled to fill since Casemiro's exit in May, and early impressions inside Carrington have centered on his athleticism. "Very quick," is the assessment from one United insider of their first impressions of Baleba. "He covers the ground really well." That comes from a small sample — a handful of training sessions before he was named on the bench for the 1-1 draw at Fulham on 20 September and a closed-doors game against Swiss League outfit Lausanne-Sports on 2 October when United's international contingent was absent. Carrick has paired Kobbie Mainoo and Youri Tielemans in the last four league games for their technical quality, while Andrey Santos offers similar speed to Baleba, but United has been too easy to play through. Carrick's side is one of only four in the top flight yet to keep a clean sheet and has conceded twice in four of its seven games in all competitions.
Sources say an understandable initial shyness is being overcome as Baleba settles. He is not the most confident English speaker but has improved significantly since his £23.2m move to Brighton from Lille in 2023, where he made 112 appearances and scored four goals in three seasons and was a teammate of Leny Yoro in 2022-23. At Carrington he has struck up a friendship with Amad Diallo while the two Africans completed recovery work together, highlighted by a video Amad uploaded to social media of Baleba poking fun at him after Cameroon beat Ivory Coast in a friendly on 3 October. Baleba, also a former teammate of Bryan Mbeumo at international level, was seen joking with Patrick Dorgu after the final game of last season at the Amex Stadium.
United is counting on a return to the form that lit up Baleba's 2024-25 campaign and earned suggestions of a potential move to Real Madrid, rather than the below-par displays of last term. Suggestions his head was turned by late interest from United in the summer of 2025 have been dismissed by Brighton sources, though no alternative reason for the dip has been offered. United's data and recruitment teams had done background work 12 months ago, and after missing out on Elliot Anderson and Mateus Fernandes and deeming other options unsuitable, the club moved for Baleba just before the opening-day defeat at Hull and completed the deal just afterwards. Quoted significantly more than £100m for the midfielder in August 2025, United regards £70m as good business, though as Fernandes has shown in disappointing early performances for Tottenham, any judgment must wait until Baleba steps on the pitch.
Baleba's natural jocular personality and back-flip goal celebration should help, but his drive comes from his father, who put him through punishing training sessions as a youngster that Baleba has said were integral to turning professional. He fulfilled a promise to build his mother a house in Douala, though she died a few months before he left Lille and never saw it, a motivation he recounted in an interview with the Guardian in April 2025. If selected at Old Trafford, a matchup with Fernandes will be fascinating, with defeat for either side capable of turning early disappointment into a near crisis before United faces three straight away trips — Champions League games at Atletico Madrid and Como either side of a journey across the Pennines to face Leeds.