IAN LADYMAN: Man United must look at how Man City snapped up deadly Jeremy Doku and weep... in a market where the Red Devils have got nearly everything wrong, their rivals have the cheat code

A third of the way in to the Premier League season and the player I can’t stop thinking about is Jeremy Doku. Not necessarily because of who he is but because of what he represents.

His was not a particularly cheap transfer. The winger cost more than £55m when Manchester City bought him from Rennes in the summer. Nor, however, was he particularly expensive by modern standards. Manchester United paid £82m for the Dutch forward Anthony, for example. Chelsea paid more than £100m for Enzo Fernandes and more than £80m for Mykhailo Mudryk.

But as Doku has fed regular terror into the minds of Premier League defenders and has limited the appearances of last season’s poster boy Jack Grealish, it’s not what City paid for the 21-year-old that interests me but how they did it.

It was a quiet transfer. Doku had been on City’s list of possibles for two years, I am told, and when football director Txiki Begiristain and manager Pep Guardiola felt there was a need following Riyad Mahrez’s departure for Saudi, Cole Palmer’s decision to leave for Chelsea and, then in the season’s opening game, injury to Kevin de Bruyne, they simply pressed the button.

In an instant, City gave themselves the ability and capacity to withstand the changes of the summer and roll on. The previous year they had done exactly the same thing when signing the central defender Manuel Akanji. While the world was jumping up and down about the arrival of Erling Haaland from Borussia Dortmund, City paid the very same club £18m for their Swiss defender without anybody really noticing.

Few in England had ever heard of Akanji yet nine months later he had won a treble.

It is hard to write anything about City these days without someone shouting ‘115 charges’ at you. That noise has only intensified after Everton were docked 10 league points after being found guilty of just a single infringement last month.

If the Premier League’s lawyers ever do disentangle themselves from the undoubted complexities of City’s defence and manage to prove some or all of their case, it is quite unsettling to think what could follow.

However, even if City were to find themselves playing their football in League One (they won’t) the internal processes and structures put in place during the years of Guardiola and Begiristain will continue to serve them.

United, in particular, must look across town and weep. As they have got so much wrong in the market in recent years, City have found the code, one that has allowed them to get just about everything right. And United are not the only ones to feel the depth of that envy. Chelsea continue to flap wildly about like a sparrow trapped in a conservatory while two weeks ago in Paris I sat and watched PSG struggle to score against Newcastle and appreciated not for the first time how so much money had been spent in such an ordinary fashion in the French capital.

You see it’s easy to get it wrong in football. Agents are on the make. Desperation to improve clouds judgement. Data is useful but can mask human frailties and emotional imperfections. Footballers are human, after all.

Yet City are the club who have taken getting it wrong out of the equation.

When did they last buy a duff player? The acquisition of Kalvin Phillips has not worked out, yet at some stage soon he will be sold on. The midfielder is still in Gareth Southgate’s England team and is well under contract so the hit City can expect to take on the £42m they paid for the 27-year-old will be insignificant.

That apart, City have not blundered in the market for more than five years. During that time Guardiola has managed to turn one great team in to another and it’s not enough just to say that it’s easy to spend well when you are rich because if that were true, United and Chelsea would not be in such a mess and PSG would not still be looking for their first Champions League triumph deep now in to the 13th year of Qatari ownership.

In the Premier League, only Liverpool have threatened to match City for efficiency in the market and even they have wobbled a little since that remarkable period when Mo Salah, Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mane, Fabinho, Andrew Robertson, Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker turned up on the doorstep of Anfield Road.

Across the English football landscape, the pretenders to City’s crown wait for Guardiola to move on. That, they hope, will be their opportunity to take a foothold. They are right to be hopeful too. Guardiola is uniquely gifted. Irreplaceable in many ways.

But City’s seam of quality and excellence runs much deeper than that these days. When Sir Alex Ferguson left United in 2013, he pretty much took the secrets of the club’s success with him. It was all in his head.

It will not be that way at the Etihad. Football has moved on, at least in some places if not necessarily in others.

In Malta last June as England meandered through a one-sided Euro 2024 qualifier, Harry Maguire was booed by a section of the crowd.

It was a puzzle because the jeers weren’t coming from the England end of the Ta’ Qali Stadium but from the locals. Later it transpired they had been the work of Maltese Manchester United supporters.

Poison travels, it seems. And it travelled to Hampden Park back in October when Maguire was lampooned so fiercely by the Scotland fans that he actually scored an own goal.

So life has not been easy for Maguire. Out of form for his club for a long time, Erik ten Hag tried to move him on in the summer. But the 30-year-decided to give it one more season and as those around him have floundered at Old Trafford, Maguire has found both the form and the confidence to emerge as one flickering light source in the gloom.

On Tuesday against Bayern Munich, he pulled his groin and had to leave the field. As he did so, the stadium rose to him. They have seen a lot of bad football at Old Trafford this season but United fans know hard work, commitment and courage when they see it.

Maguire deserved his ovation and will be missed when United play at Liverpool on Sunday. If there has been a story of greater determination and will in the Premier League this season, then I am not aware of it.

IT took VAR exactly 66 seconds from the moment the ball found the Borussia Dortmund net on Wednesday night to determine and inform the match referee that Kylian Mbappe had actually been offside when running on to a through pass from a PSG team mate.

No endless drawing and positioning and moving of lines. No ‘yes mate…spot on pal…well done chief’ patter between the VAR studio and the chap with the whistle. Just a computer programme and some pretty impressive cameras doing the work for all of us. It was quick, it was painless and it was accurate. Everything that it should be, in fact.

This is called the semi-automated offside system and last summer our Premier League clubs voted not to use it.

I know, I know…

Graham Potter was sacked at Chelsea having won seven and drawn seven of 22 Premier League games in charge. His team were in 11th position with a points per game of average of 1.27.

Mauricio Pochettino has won five and drawn four of 16 league games and, with a points average of 1.19, his team sit 12th. This stuff shouldn’t matter. But at Chelsea you just never know.