Varane is on 340K a week and played 22 and 24 Prem league games from 38 in the last 2 seasons. This is 60.5% of Prem Games and Pro Rata he gets paid over 550K per week whilst leaving Ten Hag to play an emergency replacement for 39.5% of games.
Man City central defenders are: 1.Stones (21 prem games) - 2. Ake (22 prem games) - 3. Akanji (24 prem games) - 4. Dias (22 prem games) - 5. Laporte (11 prem games). At times some of these started as left or right backs but of the actual left and right backs Walker played 22, Cancelo 16 and Lewis 10. You can see that Pep on the whole tries to keep his players fresh and plays them aeound 22 - 24 games a season through rotation and injuries and had close to everyone fit for the business end of the season which resulted in a treble.
United rotated the right quite well Dalot 24 games and AWB 16, on the left Shaw 30 and Malcia 14. (Note Dalot sometimes played left back and Shaw centre back and is why the dont all add up nicely to 38 games). However, at centre back we played Martinez 24 games until he broke, and Varane every game until he broke. Linderloff played 14 games and Maguire 8.
Clearly at centre back we have a problem. City have 5 players who can do that role and Man United also have 5 with Shaw, but we struggle to rotate and manage the squad as wel as city. Varanes injuries means we really have 4.5. How selling Maguire to make it 3.5 helps is beyond me. If we get a replacement in and then sell Maguire thats fine, but we need someone in first. Jonny Evans played 14 prem games last year and conceeded 29 goals.(over 2 a game) He was injured for 22 of the 38 games last year and made Varane look as fit as a butchers dog on his 550K a week pro rata wage.
Personally, i would keep Maguire who is earing a third of Varanes Pro rata wage. He is fit 99% of the time, and decent all round defender. We finished 2nd 3 years ago with Maguire, Then we had the Joke Ronaldo return where every single player except Ronaldo had a bad season and then Maguire hardly played last year, despite getting hammered 7-0 by Liverpool and 6-3 by City with Varane, Martinez and Shaw. Or we will bring in Linderloff who has been bullied throughout his premier league career to lose a header against the giant collossal Kevin Debrune on the edge of our box to go 1 nil down in the FA cup final after 12 seconds. All of of our defenders make mistakes, but its only ever Maguires fault even when hes on the bench. Maybe we should give him a chance with Onana? AWB get out of my club was rife 6 months ago and he has turned it round and prooved ten hag wrong. If you use and rotate the whole squad like Pep, your best 11 is fresh for the big games and the end of season run in. We need our whole squad