I’m yet to be convinced tbh. There’s a tendency towards hyperbole on this site and when people were calling him total rubbish/championship quality etc that was nonsense. Even during his poor start it was obvious he was mid table premier league quality at least. Now that he’s doing better I still think he looks mid table quality. He’d stand out playing at Leicester or Everton, but that’s not the same as being Man United quality.
I think his problem is a basic lack of athleticism. As we saw with Daley Blind, being a good reader of the game and a good passer can take you a long way, but not the whole way. He’s faster and stronger than Blind, but still not at the level we want.
If united are going to be playing with an emphasis on risk, pushing high and trusting the centre backs to handle counter attacks on their own, we need centre backs with more pace and more body strength than Lindelof has shown so far. He’s going to be expected to handle balls over the top to strikers and win those one on one battles through pace or strength. I haven’t seen anything from him yet that makes me think he has what it takes to do that against the best teams.
He also gets beaten at set pieces more than he should, but tbf that’s exacerbated by the whole team being poor at handling them, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for now.
He’s the best we have at the moment imo so I’m happy to keep him even as we look for new CBs next summer, but long term he’ll have to improve significantly to have a future with us.