If you spend enough time watching sports, thinking about sports, talking about sports and reading about sports, you will develop favorite players that are more nuanced than strictly the greatest players.

If you play on a team that has Cristiano Ronaldo on its roster, you’re never going to be the best player, but Ángel di María became my favorite player on Real Madrid since joining the club from Benfica in 2010. Di María brought top-level abilities with one of the best work rates in the world for a player of his caliber and gave the club an element that was missing during its Galaticos era and will be challenging to replace now that he’s been sold to Manchester United for approximately $100 million.

Nobody on the Real roster performed as many different functions as di María, whether it was as a dribbler, passer or in winning the ball back in the midfield on defense; everything he did for José Mourinho and then Carlo Ancelotti was with great pace and grit.

United had other targets in mind this summer but it is difficult even for one of the richest clubs in the world to attract talent worthy of their pedigree and financial resources when you’re not playing in the Champions League and appear utterly ill-equipped to return in 2015 considering how difficult it is to achieve a top-4 finish in the Premier League in this era.

Severely old last season and not very talented this season, the United back line is clearly the foremost issue for this club and as netw3rk Tweeted, “Di Maria is obviously a high, high quality player, but it’s a little like buying a speedboat when your car is in the shop.”

An annual transfer budget for clubs like United, however, is somewhat similar to an NBA with cap space in that you either use it or lose it. United had cash and a need to upgrade its roster everywhere and di María became available after his preferred destination of Paris Saint-Germain, offered at less than United’s eventual price, was no longer an option due to Financial Fair Play. No other club was in a position to afford di María this late in the window, likely because no other club was simultaneously as rich and desperate as United.

The issue from a price perspective is that United has paid the fifth highest transfer fee in football history for Di María and that puts him in a class of player -- Bale, Cristiano, Suárez and James ahead of him and Zidane, Zlatan, Kaka, Cavani and Falcao behind him that isn’t warranted. Those are either all-time talents, all-time scorers or both. Those are players that you build an entire XI around. Di María may have been the world’s best finishing piece for Real Madrid over the past years, but still a finishing piece and United is nowhere near the point of simply needing a finishing piece.

Mesut Özil was bought by Arsenal from Real Madrid exactly a year ago for £21 million pounds less than di María and would be a far more appropriate price point.

Moving beyond economics, di María can certainly help United begin to achieve positive results that have been very difficult to come by since Alex Ferguson retired. United losing to MK Dons, on the same day di María is introduced, somehow felt more like an inevitability we should have seen coming more than an utter shock.

The potential strength of the United attack is in how Robin van Persie, Wayne Rooney and Juan Mata play centrally, but they have been underserved due to the issues in midfield. Van Persie is well into his thirties and Rooney has looked slow, so the amount of ground they can cover and the pace in which it is covered is more limited than ever.

Louis van Gaal expects di María to supplement that trio with width though he’s absolutely not a traditional winger in the Arjen Robben sense of the position. Di María will cover ground and create opportunities on the counter for that aforementioned trio, whether it is from the left where he played last season behind Bale, or on the right where he can cut toward his left foot. Di María had 17 assists last season in La Liga and his creativity as a passer after commanding attention as a dribbler will be his most immediate contribution to United.

Over the long-term, his most important value and why the move should pay dividends despite the exorbitant price is his versatility. Van Gaal needs so many more pieces before United can challenge for an EPL title again and di María’s ability and willingness to play in a variety of roles gives the club significantly more options in to target.

Grade for United: B-