Carlos Baleba\u2019s move to Manchester United has brought a fresh chapter, but his farewell to Brighton revealed as much about his character as it did about his new club. On Tuesday, Baleba described United as \u201cthe club of my dreams\u201d and said it would be a \u201creal honor\u201d to wear the red shirt at Old Trafford.<\/p>\n
Before turning to his new start, the midfielder chose to reflect on the club that shaped him. Brighton signed him as a teenager in 2023 for $31.5 million (\u00a323.2 million), after Mois\u00e9s Caicedo had left for Chelsea in a deal that was then a Premier League record. Baleba was asked to step into that role, and the demands that came with it never appeared to shake him.<\/p>\n
Rather than simply posting a brief message online, Baleba used his first words after the United announcement to write, in effect, an open letter to Brighton supporters. He made clear that the club\u2019s influence on him would last well beyond his departure.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never said very much while I was here. I am not going to pretend that changes today. So, Brighton took a 19-year-old, who could not speak the language, gave him a shirt and gave him the time to grow up,\u201d Baleba reflected. \u201cNobody had to do that. I will be looking for your result every week for the rest of my life. Thank you, Brighton fans.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also explained how he responded to the expectation of replacing Caicedo: \u201cNobody tells you what you are supposed to do with that, so I did the only thing I know how to do. I trained, I went home. I came back the next day and trained again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baleba said he spent a lot of his first season waiting for opportunities, but the breakthrough arrived in 2024\u201325 when he scored against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. \u201cWe lost 4\u20132, so nobody outside [Brighton] remembers that goal. I remember that was the day I stopped feeling like I was wearing somebody else\u2019s shirt,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He also recalled a 92nd-minute winner against West Ham United and, later, a painful 22-minute outing against Aston Villa, when he was substituted early in a difficult 2025\u201326 campaign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Baleba\u2019s United move came with a heartfelt Brighton farewell and clear signs of his character.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18778,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[773,179],"tags":[59],"class_list":["post-18779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brighton-hove-albion","category-manchester-united","tag-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}