Oh so anyone over 30.. they lose all their energy do they?
Did we sell anyone? Big summer fire sale (supposedly)
- Thread starter Andycoleno9
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Oh so anyone over 30.. they lose all their energy do they?
Fulham paid £12m for Pereria, they can fork out £20m for Fred or they can find £50m for another PL ready midfielder instead.
Agree we should push hard for best price for Fred, but he needs to leave, if we get 10M or more for him I would be delighted. Can’t watch his sloppiness and apologising any more. I would also like to see us being a bit more aggressive in getting others out the door.
No they don't but he's still in his last year and on 120k pw. Significantly more Pereira and much older than Pereira. Bad example.
How many players have Fulham spent around 20m on and what is the average age of those players?
Edit: sorry, regarding Pereira, I have mixed you up with another poster.
Pereira was on much lower wages than Fred and is much younger. Bad example.
Also, there is reason why mid-low prep clubs don't buy 'PL ready' midfielders; because of ridiculous valuations. If we don't sell our players cheap, we will be stuck with them as has been proven in the past.
Whoever we get to be 3/4 th choice in midfield will cost more than £10m and 120k wages.
Fred will go for around £20m, he's a good player in the right team, he's just not good enough for United.
We've got to be smarter with our contracts. Yes, we need to entice top players with higher wages but if they don't end up performing as they should then a clause should kick in to reduce their wages. Not just the club failing to qualify from the CL, but individual stuff like number of goals, starts, clean sheets etc. Carrot and stick, basically. That's the only way we can shift underperforming players for a decent fee.
Also, the current way of classifying these deadwood as assets on the balance sheet is outdated and ridiculous financial engineering. They are liabilities. One we do this, Investment Banking idiots like Woodward etc. will no longer be incentivised and rewarded.
Also, the current way of classifying these deadwood as assets on the balance sheet is outdated and ridiculous financial engineering. They are liabilities. One we do this, Investment Banking idiots like Woodward etc. will no longer be incentivised and rewarded.
I think Mount has been brought in to take Fred's place in the squad meaning Eriksen (freebie) will be the squad option.
I agree about Fred being a good player. I like him more than most people seem to on here but history has shown that we overvalue our players (Romero, Rojo, Bailly, Lingard, Darmian) we end up getting next to nothing.
I think we agreed to sell Romero to Everton but we backed out of the deal last minute because Henderson was being a twat and demanding to leave. I remember Romero's wife saying he was a prisoner or something and we wouldn't let him go.
The other guys we've tried to sell for low valuations, we even sent them away on loan with favourable fees and an affordable buyout clause. Bailly has a £5m buyout clause that will never get triggered because he almost killed a man in a competitive game of football over in France, and the same for the rest of the names you mentioned. We did alright for Darmian considering he was woeful, Rojo wanted to go back to Argentina and they're not exactly rich teams. There's only really Lingard and he wanted the money more than anything.
Whilst we need to press for sales we would be stupid to take 10M for Fred. As mentioned by another poster, that really does not move the needle for our budget and we are down a player who is at worst a decent rotational option from the bench and can come in for cup games etc. We won't be stuck with deadwood because his contract is expiring but I would rather have the benefit of his services for another 12 months than give him away to help another team.
Yes we make mistakes holding onto players too long but we also get mugged letting players go for far less than they are truly worth and this is a case where we should stick to our guns. If teams think they can do better than Fred for 20M then have at it.
Yes we make mistakes holding onto players too long but we also get mugged letting players go for far less than they are truly worth and this is a case where we should stick to our guns. If teams think they can do better than Fred for 20M then have at it.
I remember things differently but my sources would be (probably unreliable) paper talk: Bailly was renewed specifically to be sold; he's still on the books. We denied Rojo a move to both Wolves and Everton, Woodward wanted 25m (for fecking Rojo). Darmian was given an 18m price tag ( we bought him for 12) and ended up going for 1.5m with 6 months left. There was interest in him from Italy at a more reasonable fee.
You're wrong about Romero. He was made 3rd choice and threw his toys out of the pram because Henderson replaced him as second choice. The club blocked his move because they saw Everton as a rival at the time. We ended up paying him to sit at home for a year.
Woodward also reportedly slapped a 30m price tag on Lingard in the last year of his contract.
So referring to my original point: we need to stop overvaluing our players if we wish to actually sell them.
Depends if we can shift McTominay instead. They had 39 starts between them in all competitions, but the addition of Mount next season will soak up a lot of those, and that also relied on Casemiro missing quite a lot of games due to a late start & two red cards, plus Eriksen getting taken out for 2 months with a
Wouldn't be writing off the bolded as I would sell at that price but I do think 10M is taking the piss for a current Brazilian international who for all of our moaning would start every game for most teams outside the top 6. We have a reputation for letting players go cheap and we need to change that perception, as the Athletic article yesterday pointed out we are sailing very close to the wind with FFP and yet whenever we negotiate other teams treat us like we have a bottomless pit of money. We can negotiate but to just roll over and take an offer that is half of the asking price just makes us look like a pushover to anyone else we might be dealing with.
Like who?
Just last season we sold Garner for essentially 10M after he had two excellent seasons in the Championship whilst City are selling players right out of their academy for double that. Going back a little further we took a lot less than we should have for Smalling, allowing Roma to plead poverty to get us to take a whole lot less than our valuation, something that happens a lot with Italian deals as also evidenced by Darmian. The only good deal we have made in years was selling Dan James for a profit to Leeds and that was only thanks to Victor Orta loving him in an even more unnatural way than I do.
It's part of the problem right? 2 seasons in the championship gave the scouts across the country for all prospective buyers enough data to rate him correctly as a £10m prospect.
Anyways, there's another reason for that. We have cashflow problems as a club which City and Chelsea don't. I imagine they accept transfer fees over a long payment periods, because they don't have to balance immediate books. While we're probably accepting lower fees with shorter payment periods.
I feel like 15-20m is a fair price for Fred, and I like him more than most on here. But if the message the club gets is that £10m is the max anyone's out there willing to pay, take it.
Turning over the squad is more important than the extra 5m. Once we start buying better and negotiating more sensible contracts - the selling side of things will naturally become much smoother.
Turning over the squad is more important than the extra 5m. Once we start buying better and negotiating more sensible contracts - the selling side of things will naturally become much smoother.
We Sold Blind for a profit, Di Maria for a good price, Lukaku for a good price, Schneiderlin for a good price, Garner and James were good sells, as was Welbeck, as was Periera,
I think the reputation you talk about exists only in your mind.
Blind was sold for a loss, we took a significant loss on Di Maria after just 1 season, a significant loss on Schneiderlin after 1 season and a 10M Euro loss on Lukaku.
I think the good prices you talk about exist only in your mind.
I would hardly call James Garner and Chris Smalling the kind of players who set your reputation. Indeed people leaving for free is a way bigger issue for us. De Gea, Pogba, Lingard and Herrera are all notable figures who left on a free in recent years. Cavani, Mata, Matic, Rojo and Valencia also left on a free, and while none would have earned a transfer fee for various reasons, we still chucked money down the toilet by paying their wages for their final year when they hardly played. We rarely act decisively.
You are right in a certain way - we don't earn enough money from player sales. But that isn't down to selling players cheap. That's partly down to buying poor players in the first place, giving them high wages and then putting them in underperforming teams, which means they're not sought after players. But its also this self-defeating tendency to cling on to players for too long in the hope of getting more for them, which ironically means we get less.
In the case of Fred, yes we should get as much as possible for him. But benching him for a season only to see him go on a free down the line would be even more money frittered away.
We made a profit in Blind,
Di Maria wanted out, we got a good deal there, the total fee for Morgan was 24million, a fairly decent deal again for a poor player.
Lukaku wanted out, we wanted him gone, we got a very good deal there too.
Context is key in those deals. All good deals, none of them cheap,
Yup, in the context in which those deals happened (players who were no longer needed and/or wanted out), we did very well on all of them.
We made a profit in Blind,
Di Maria wanted out, we got a good deal there, the total fee for Morgan was 24million, a fairly decent deal again for a poor player.
Lukaku wanted out, we wanted him gone, we got a very good deal there too.
Context is key in those deals. All good deals, none of them cheap,
We made a profit in Blind,
Di Maria wanted out, we got a good deal there, the total fee for Morgan was 24million, a fairly decent deal again for a poor player.
Lukaku wanted out, we wanted him gone, we got a very good deal there too.
Context is key in those deals. All good deals, none of them cheap,
Blind purchased for 17.5M Euros
Blind sold for 16M Euros
When you say profit I do not think it means what you think it means.
All of the others sold at a loss of over 10M on their original purchase price despite being in their prime and in the case of 2 of them only 1 year after we signed them. I am not going to continue to split hairs on this one, fair to say that we each have a different interpretation of what represents a good deal.
Purchase price should not be a consideration when selling an unwanted player. It's a sunk cost at that point.
We're undisputedly poor at selling players, mainly driven by poor contract/wage management.
Brought Blind for around 16mill euros, sold for 16.4 mill euros plus add ons, believe that's a profit, but I've never been great at maths.
Point is, none of them are cheap, low cost deals, all have near enough recouped the money we spent on transfers that didn't work out. All good deals on players we didn't want, and teams knew we didn't want.
Exactly this,
A player not needed by their parent club is automatically at a reduced rate, yet we managed to recover a lot of the expenditure on these deals, hence they were all actually in context good deals.
So do we really think PSG couldn't afford to give us back what we paid for Di Maria? No reason his value should have fallen during the year he spent with us and at a time when transfer fees were rising year over year. My main point with these deals is just to say that we seem to be too charitable when it comes to selling players who actually have value.
This is different than deadwood that needs to be cleared out. Bailly for example has no worth to the side and if we gave him a free transfer to get his wages off the books then fair enough, his value has been destroyed by his inability to stay fit alongside his propensity for rash decisions on the rare occasions he is able to play.
Fred on the other hand appeared in over 50 games for us last season, is a current Brazilian international and would undoubtedly be useful as a squad option for Erik again this year. Why on earth should we sell him at a discount? If we act like we are desperate to sell then of course we will get ripped off with lowball offers.
I'd be interested to know what you deem Fred's value to be?
A thirty year old squad player in a mostly underachieving team.
Personally I'd say £18/20m should be the asking price, which isn't too far off some of the figures I've been seeing.
United should bite the hand off of anybody willing to pay £10m for Fred given his age and level. You are absolutely right that getting players out the door should be the priority, rather than holding out for unrealistic prices.
The reason other clubs are selling players for higher prices is that they are selling younger players who have more recently been in positions of success. You can't wait until a player has irrevocably proven themselves not good enough and stuck around for five years until he is 30, then expect to get big fees. At that point you just have to push people out the door any way you can. The same is basically true of Maguire. If United wanted substantial fees for these players, then the time to sell was 2-3 years ago when they were playing a lot, still in their mid-late 20s, but were also clearly not good enough for United.
Even clubs known for being good sellers do not get big fees for 30+ players who aren't superstars, unless its Saudi Arabia to the rescue. Chelsea sold Jorginho for £8m and gave away players like Giroud and Zappacosta for a couple million each. The best offer Liverpool could find for Shaqiri was £5m from Lyon and they just let Ox, Firmino, and Keita leave for free, which they wouldn't have done if there were substantial offers on the table last summer.
Transfermarkt has him down as bought for 17.5M and sold for 16M, not sure what source you are using. I don't see how getting 63M back for a player that cost 75M 12 months prior can be described as recouping our money, especially when that player is in his prime and going to a club backed with oil money. Regardless, what we are arguing about is a matter of perspective and we clearly see this issue very differently and another 10 posts won't change that fact so lets agree to differ.
That is a fair price and what I would say we should sell for. Fulham seem to value him at10M however and people are advocating taking an offer at that price which would be very charitable of us to say the least.
I'd rather Fred's minutes went to Mainoo or Hannibal this season, get what we can for him.
Is it? Given his age they might only get 2-3 seasons out of him. They'd be paying 6-10m a year plus wages for a player that wouldn't be a huge improvement.
I keep seeing this and seriously you would think he was close to death. He turned 30 just under 4 months ago and has not shown any signs of decline and in fact he has been an incredibly durable player throughout his career. I see no reason why they won't get a good 4 seasons out of him, with players older than Fred going for bigger sums and guys playing into their late 30's I don't think 20M is unreasonable nor does it represent much of a gamble as he unquestionably improves their team. Sure we can negotiate a little but if 10M is their final offer they can keep it as he is not deadwood and will end up playing plenty if he stays.
Every fecking window... Fred, DVB, Williams, Mct, Bailly, Telles, Henderson, Tony, Harry, Pellistri (loan)... At least 10 players that haven't been moved on yet, who are not needed for one reason or another, but will take minutes away from other youngsters in preseason.
On Caf, 30 means that you are done.
Sure, agreed.
As it happens I was thinking the other day about how far the market has moved away from players in their late 20's / early 30's, towards the wonderkid types.
With prices so comparatively low for these older players nowadays, I wonder if there's a moneyball model out there that could capitalise.
Eh, just a thought.