How Man Utd Nightmare Left Angel Di Maria ‘Grateful’ for Life-Changing Robbery

Di María lifted the lid on his time at Manchester United in an exclusive interview with Sports Illustrated.

Ángel Di María picked through the bones of his unhappy Manchester United spell. | Sports Illustrated

“It all started off well,” Ángel Di María says of his time at Manchester United, a whisper of wistfulness in his softly spoken tone. The scariest stories often do.

Di María arrived at Old Trafford in the summer of 2014 as the most expensive signing in Premier League history. He had made up his mind on a swift exit barely five months later after a chilling home invasion compounded the ill-will festering between himself and United’s manager at the time, Louis van Gaal.

The pair have spent the subsequent decade blaming each other for that Mancunian misadventure. Di María’s bitterness is still evident all these years later while digging through that setback in an exclusive interview with Sports Illustrated. Yet, as the World Cup winner rightly pointed out, it all started so well.

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How a Fast Start Fizzled Out

Ángel Di María ended his debut Premier League season with an impressive 10 assists. | John Peters/Manchester United/Getty Images

“I scored goals and set up others in several matches,” Di María says, thinking back to the way he was able to rapidly take the Premier League by storm. During his introduction to England’s famously physical top flight, the winger so skinny he is nicknamed El Fideo—the Noodle—repeatedly wriggled his way to goal. Across his first five games, Di María directly contributed to six Premier League goals, scoring three and creating as many for his teammates.

The wiry forward enjoyed arguably his best moment in the sun at Leicester City’s King Power Stadium that September, scooping a delicious lob over Kasper Schmeichel before setting up Ander Herrera’s goal to give United a 3–1 lead. However, the Red Devils imploded over the final half-hour, shipping four unanswered goals to ultimately lose 5–3 to their newly promoted hosts.

This sowed the seeds of doubts in Van Gaal’s mind about the definicies of a his narrow 4-4-2 system. While it got the best out of Di María, whose unique blend of grace and gusto allowed him to cover an immense amount of ground while offering a subtle layer of craft, his teammates did not thrive in the system. In an attempt to address the imbalance, Van Gaal flicked through his thick playbook, regularly changing the team’s shape at the expense of his most expensive acquisition.

“All of a sudden, Van Gaal started moving me to different positions—positions I’d never played before and didn’t feel comfortable in,” Di María says. The invariably negative feedback which the infamously blunt Dutch coach delivered did not help the forcibly versatile forward settle. “He’d point out everything I did wrong during the game but never the good things.

“I’m the type to take risks all the time, but he didn’t see it that way; he never understood that I was a forward. And that’s where the whole conflict with him began. Then I froze up, and he started benching me.”

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Di María in the Premier League

Stat	2014–15 Value	Team Rank
Appearances	27	T-5th
Starts	20	T-10th
Minutes	1,639	13th
Goals	3	8th
Assists	10	1st

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The Tipping Point

Ángel Di María’s first transfer fee was the grand sum of 35 soccer balls. | Sports Illustrated

“My family wasn’t comfortable either,” Di María adds, “I wasn’t happy in the city. The weather didn’t help much either. And with the fight with him, things just snowballed.”

While muscular injuries and a needless red card against Arsenal did not help Di María’s adaptation, the final straw came when three men tried to break into his Cheshire mansion while he, his wife and young daughter were eating dinner. The house alarm sent the intruders scuttling away but it had a lasting impact on Di María.

“You don’t want that to happen, but I’m grateful they tried to rob me because that’s when I told my agent I wanted to leave no matter what,” he admits.

Di María started just one of United’s last 10 matches of the season, a final day trip to Hull City which ended in injury after only 23 minutes. It proved to be a fitting conclusion to a spell which had promised so much and ultimately under-delivered.

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