Bryan Mbeumo has decided he wants to join Manchester United, and the Old Trafford club is set to open talks with Brentford as they pursue an agreement to sign the forward this summer.
Mbeumo, 25, has a year left on his contract at the Gtech Community Stadium and it includes an option for Brentford to extend by 12 months.
Last season was the Cameroon international’s most productive since joining from French side Troyes in 2019, contributing 20 goals and eight assists.
It has attracted interest from the likes of Arsenal, Newcastle United, and Tottenham Hotspur — but Mbeumo favours a switch to Manchester United, if they can strike a deal with Brentford.
Brentford head coach Thomas Frank admitted in May that the club would be “open” to selling this summer if an appropriate offer arrived.
“If the right price — and that’s going to be expensive — is coming, then I’m sure the club will be open to it,” Frank told Sky Sports.
A versatile forward capable of playing out wide or through the middle, Mbeumo is the latest in a long line of recruitment success stories for Brentford.
He helped the club to promotion via the Championship playoffs in his second season before comfortably making the step up to the top flight.
He scored eight, nine and nine goals respectively in Brentford’s first three Premier League seasons before his breakout 2024/25 campaign.
Mbeumo has 18 caps at international level for Cameroon, scoring four goals.
By Jay Harris and Tom Burrows
Brentford always knew Bryan Mbeumo was a special talent.
Their former defender Pontus Jansson remembers having a conversation with Rasmus Ankersen, Brentford’s co-director of football at the time, when Mbeumo joined the west London club — then in the Championship — as a teenager in August 2019 for what was their record fee of £5.4million ($7.3m at the current exchange rate).
“He said, ‘We are going to buy a young player from France, and if he is not a world-class player in a couple of years, I’m going to be very disappointed’,” Jansson told The Athletic. “He wasn’t wrong.”
After six years of steady progress — a period during which he has often lived in the shadows of other forwards at the club who grabbed the headlines — Mbeumo is unquestionably now the main man at Brentford.
A largely underrated player since their step up to the Premier League in summer 2021, Mbeumo’s performances last season were impossible to ignore and have put the now 25-year-old, whose current contract expires in summer 2026, firmly on the radar of Europe’s top clubs.
After a stellar year where he ended up with 20 goals for the first time and as the fourth-highest scorer in the division it is fair to say Ankersen’s hunch about Mbeumo’s signing five and a half years ago has been proven right.
(Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
