Casemiro has only been at Manchester United for a little over six months, but the impact he has already had at the club simply cannot be understated.
United have lacked a quality defensive midfielder for years. And whilst Casemiro has helped to instil the authority that has been lacking in plenty of the Manchester United teams in years gone by, the Brazilian has also quickly demonstrated that he has far too much class to be labelled as just an enforcer.
Prior to his blockbuster £70million switch to the Premier League, Casemiro enjoyed a trophy-laden odyssey with Real Madrid, where he became a multi-time Champions League winner.
During his nine-year stay at the Bernabeu, Casemiro starred in some famous European night; partly due to the work he puts in with his meticulous approach away from the pitch.
A new report in The Times has shed some light on the lengths Casemiro goes to in order to make marginal gains. The 31-year-old watches football matches on a daily basis and often does his own scouting and analysis on opposition players using Wyscout - a platform which helped him devise a plan to exploit a weakness in the game of Kylian Mbappe during a Champions League match against Real Madrid.
Although Casemiro's obsession with football has helped him land some of the game's richest prizes, it's also landed him in hot water with his wife. He admitted in a previous Spanish interview: “I watch everything — from China or anywhere. My wife gets annoyed, but it’s my work, my life is football.”
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Many people believe that Casemiro has been the catalyst for Manchester United's return to form following their calamitous 2021/22 campaign. And United icon Paul Scholes tried to sum up the midfielder's importance last week.
"You can see the big difference when he’s not in the team. You think of the Arsenal game when he wasn’t there, I always talk about having a coach on the football pitch, and for Ten Hag, he’s that man.
"He knows where he wants everyone to be. I’ve said this before, a lot of us have been surprised by the quality of his play because at Madrid it was about [Toni] Kroos and [Luka] Modric, but his passes forward, his awareness of people around him, he’s been fantastic.
"People say he's a holding midfield player - I don't see that. I think he does everything. He's as close to Roy Keane as I have ever seen. As a Man United midfield player, you should be involved with everything. You should be able to go forward, you should be able to play a pass and help defend. I think he's been fantastic."
