Man Utd want to buy a Harry Kane level striker - this is the £100m superstar they must sign

Manchester United evidently want Harry Kane. Except they can't have Harry Kane, for obvious reasons, and so, they have set their little hearts on signing a striker 'like' Harry Kane. Whatever that means.

According to the Evening Standard, the Red Devils - or more specifically, their new 25% stakeholder Sir Jim Ratcliffe - are cooking up plans to revitalise an ailing squad. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Reinforcements are wanted/desperately needed [delete as applicable] at centre-back, in the midfield engine room, and on the right side of defence.

Perhaps Ratcliffe's most headline-worthy desire, however, is to bring in a goalscorer who can ease the burden on £72 million summer signing Rasmus Hojlund. The Standard are fairly coy on who this mystery acquisition could be - probably because United themselves haven't got the foggiest idea either - but the only specified criteria is that he must be of a similar level to the aforementioned Kane.

Naturally, this narrows the breadth of Ratcliffe's search somewhat. Very few centre forwards in world football who can claim to match the Bayern Munich striker's output, and fewer still who boast a style of play that is as holistically stellar as the 30-year-old's. There are those who fit the bill but are almost laughably unrealistic: Erling Haaland, Robert Lewandowski, Kylian Mbappe, for instance. Then there are the few who are much more attainable but who sit some way beneath Kane's exalted pedestal: Ivan Toney and Serhou Guirassy are perhaps the most noteworthy of this plucky bunch.

In fact, once you start to work your way through the probable candidates, knocking them down in your mind's eye like a big game of Guess Who?, you are left with one standout name who is both genuinely world class and likely to be on the move in the relatively near future.

Victor Osimhen has been linked with Manchester United before. Then again, the Napoli talisman has been linked with just about every major club in Europe at some point or other over the past few months. The masked man has been simply electric in recent seasons, so much so that a discussion of his merits seems elementary to the point of futile. If you follow football, even in a casual manner, you will be aware of Osimhen and his powers.

Last term, he scored 31 times in 39 outings across all competitions. Since the beginning of this campaign, he has averaged one goal every 143 minutes in Serie A, and he also has 20 strikes in just 27 caps for Nigeria, including one in their AFCON opener against Equatorial Guinea on Sunday. He is, in other words, inevitable, irresistible.

That is, of course, the kind of striker that Manchester United want because it is the kind of striker that everybody wants. The difference is that, as of this week, where the Red Devils might once have been lacking in the readiness with which they could cough up the £100 million or so it will take to prise Osimhen away from Napoli, they now have Ratcliffe in their corner promising them both the world and the funds needed to purchase it.

It goes without saying that competition for the Nigerian sensation will be stiff, and if United are to sign him they will likely have to fend off all kinds of rival interest from the Premier League and beyond. But equally, if Ratcliffe is serious about injecting some fresh impetus into the club, then this is exactly the sort of signing that he needs to make early in his tenure to show that he means business. And what a statement of intent bringing Victor Osimhen through the door would be.