Cunha Nailed to the No.9: Nicky Butt Is Right About the Position, Wrong About the Cause

A Champions League night. Manchester United push the ball down the left, and Matheus Cunha drops deep, almost to the centre circle, to receive it. He turns, shields, and gets squeezed between two centre-backs. Three seconds later the ball spills loose and the whole attack has to start over.

Somewhere else on the planet, a man who once wore that same shirt watches the moment and names it on a podcast. Nicky Butt says Cunha should be playing left wing. He says deploying Cunha as a centre-forward is killing the potential of a 27-year-old Brazilian who rose as a wide-dribbling runner rather than a box-waiting machine.

It sounds reasonable. Too reasonable. And that is exactly when I start to distrust it.

A club big enough for the Champions League, thin enough that one injury rewires the whole system

Manchester United this season live in a state of suspension. They have Champions League football, they have an identity, and they have a head coach in transition in Michael Carrick. But at centre-forward they have exactly one genuinely trusted name: Benjamin Sesko. And Sesko is not fully recovered.

Joshua Zirkzee, by Butt's own words, is not good enough to be United's No.9. Marcus Rashford returns from a Barcelona loan — a comeback that thickens the left flank without solving the central problem. And Cunha, signed to create chaos from wide areas, is being pushed into the gap.

The English press call this a squad-depth crisis. The label matters less than the causal chain beneath it. Sesko injured. Zirkzee distrusted. Rashford occupying the left. Cunha shoved centrally. And a club legend going on a podcast to say Carrick is using the wrong man. Every link in that chain is true in its own way, and that is precisely why the chain is so hard to break.

Cunha isn't wrong. He's holding a map that has been drawn upside down.

Start with the physical grammar of the position. A modern No.9 — the Sesko type — lives on three things: back to goal, aerial contact, and holding the ball long enough for the supporting lines to climb. They accept 25 to 30 touches a match, provided a third of them happen inside the box.

Cunha was built for something else. His strengths sit in facing goal, receiving in the half-space between full-back and centre-back, beating a man inside the first two metres and then opening a passing lane nobody saw. Put him central with his back to goal and you remove the exact quality that makes him expensive.

Butt says the No.9 role kills Cunha. On that narrow point, he is right. Here is the problem: a correct observation about a position can turn into a wrong instruction about the solution.

Something I learned across years of watching matches and writing about players who get judged unfairly: when a man is criticised for playing the wrong role, the public usually concludes he isn't good enough. Most of the time, he is simply standing where the tactical map was never drawn for him. We look at a heat map, see a player clustered centrally, and nod — he's playing as a No.9. But a heat map never tells you where he received the ball, which way he was facing, how much space lay ahead of him. The heat map has become a new astrology: it hands you an image instead of an explanation.

Meanwhile possession, the number television still wears like a medal, remains the most deceptive metric in the analytical trade. A side with 62% of the ball, moving it sideways between two centre-backs and a deep midfielder, creates less danger than a side with 38% that transitions in four passes. United in the games where Cunha plays centrally tend to control the ball in exactly the zone where nobody scores.

Based on my experience tracking matches, there is a clear tell when a forward is being misused: he starts appearing in places where the ball is not. Cunha drops into midfield not because he enjoys it, but because it is the only place he can receive under no pressure. A genuine No.9 does not do that. A starved No.9 does.

So who deserves the interrogation? Not Cunha. The squad architecture.

The ball does not roll according to a coach's intent. It rolls according to each player's fear of being left behind. On the left wing, Cunha's deepest fear is being pinned by a full-back and losing the ball on the touchline. As a centre-forward, his deepest fear is going an entire match without a single comfortable touch. Two different fears produce two different footballers, even in the same shirt.

If I had to name the moment I understood this, it would be the 2026 World Cup, France against Argentina on 30 June. I was 18, sitting in a pub in Liverpool, and the whole room talked only about Mbappé's speed. What made me write my first piece for a tactics group was a small man in midfield who touched the ball 58 times and barely lost it under pressure. The lesson has stayed: what you are searching for is not the goalscorer but the man who makes the system run. In the Cunha story, the man who makes the system run is being made to do someone else's job.

What matters is that Carrick may not truly have a choice. Sesko is not ready. Zirkzee is not trusted. Putting Rashford centrally makes little sense either, because Rashford lives on space ahead of him and runs into the channel behind the full-back. So who else? Nobody. Carrick is not implementing a tactical idea; he is patching a hole with whoever is available. That is the difference between coaching and emergency response.

And this is where the chain closes into a loop with no exit. Rashford returns from Barcelona. The stadium empties, the noise dies, and something presumed dead starts to grow again: competition on the left flank. It sounds positive — another attacking option. In reality it pushes Cunha further inside and makes Butt's argument truer by the week. A good comeback reinforcing a positional mistake. That is the kind of paradox a stats sheet will never display.

Where I could be wrong

I have to be honest here, because a hot take without a self-interrogation section is just an actor reading lines.

First, I am assuming Cunha is genuinely suffering centrally. If he sees it as a chance to broaden his profile — the 2020s hybrid Brazilian forward — then my entire argument and Butt's collapse. Some players grow strongest when pushed out of their comfort zone.

Second, Carrick may be using Cunha centrally for an entirely different reason: pressing. A winger playing as a centre-forward often leads the press, cutting the opposition centre-backs' switch of play and letting midfielders win the ball higher. If that is the logic, Cunha central is a trap, not an accident.

Third, the assumption that signing a No.9 sends Cunha back to the left ignores an obvious variable: Rashford. If Rashford performs on the left — and returning from Barcelona means he has enormous motivation — Cunha has no road back. A new No.9 would then not free Cunha; it would park him on the bench or into a positional fight he does not control.

And finally, podcast comments are not transfer-market information. They are opinion. They can be technically correct and predictive of nothing. A former player speaking on a podcast opens no doors at Old Trafford. He only opens a microphone.

What to watch, and a falsifiable call

Transfers are not about buying players. They are about buying a story nobody has written yet. If United sign a new No.9 in the next window, that is the moment they buy back control of the tactical map. If they do not, they are buying a different story: the story of a club big enough for the Champions League but not deep enough to absorb one injury.

My call, and it can be tested: across the first three matches after Sesko returns to the starting XI, if Carrick still plays Cunha centrally, then the problem was never the injury. It was an unspoken tactical belief. If Cunha is returned to the left and Rashford is shifted right or benched, then Butt has won this argument with a microphone rather than with data.

The most hated man is simply the one willing to stand before the mirror everyone else avoids. Cunha does not deserve the hate. He is only the first name on a list paying the price for a map the coaching staff has not finished drawing.