Marouane Fellaini: Beneath the mess, the hip-haired Belgian’s arrival will boost the Red Devils

The huge frame of Marouane Fellaini will give United some steel in midfield (Getty Images)

Possessing a powerful, rangy 6 foot 4 inch frame, his strength will bolster a midfield that requires protection for Tom Cleverley and Michael Carrick, as well as offering a source of goals. He has just come off his most prolific year at Everton in which he chipped in with 11 league goals, as he indicated his ability to play as an attacking midfielder as well as lying deeper.

Moyes will also get the services of a player who he knows in detail, having worked with the Belgian for 5 years and scouted him meticulously, to the extent he made him Everton’s record signing for £15 million from Standard Liege back in 2008.

After disciplinary issues that saw him pick up 10 bookings in his first 17 games in England, he has mellowed down to the extent he has attracted 21 cautions and 1 red in four subsequent years. Vitally for Moyes, Fellaini still harbours the rugged, brute style that makes him so difficult to play against and is likely to prove its full worth to United as the dynamic, physical box-to-box force Ferguson failed to attract in his latter years at the club.

It would require disillusion to perceive Fellaini as Moyes’s first choice in this window; the refusal to meet his £23 million release clause would put paid to that argument, as would the lunacy of the £28 million dual bid together with Leighton Baines which Everton classed as insulting. They were just two more instances of a transfer window that has been trawled in humiliation for the Manchester United hierarchy, but the acquisition of Fellaini represents a positive.

The fall-out into the failure of Moyes and Woodward over the summer is likely to be long and rigorous, ensuring that no such transfer market ineptitude will befall a club of such stature again, but Fellaini will be held in regard as a successful consolation.

The priority of the summer was a player able to bolster the midfield and they got one, regardless of the disaster they got themselves into in the process.