For 100m yes I would.
Hypothetical - Would you sell Kobbie Mainoo for £100m?
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No, we can find a way to be successful without selling our top academy talents who have the potential to be key players here. Manchester United has to develop and keep players like that. It doesn't always work out, but the spirit of the club has to remain in the search to becoming a top club again.
No way, get that money by selling Rashford , Zirksee and Antony
Yes
No.
You don't sell your best young players.
You don't sell your best young players.
I know it's hypothetical but I find the question offensive. If he wasn't ours, we would be wondering how to put together the 100m to get him.
Please go watch the highlights from the FA cup final where he displayed so much composure for a young player, not just for the goal but in his overall game.
Please go watch the highlights from the FA cup final where he displayed so much composure for a young player, not just for the goal but in his overall game.
Agreed
I don’t think Mainoo is the guaranteed success that many seem to think. Don’t get
me wrong, I hope he is. I’m just not completely sold yet. And 100M should be reserved from guaranteed players, although again I appreciate we’ve spunked similar money on trash.
It’s all hypothetical really and if we start receiving 100M offers for him I guess there’s managers/DoFs out there who think he’s worth that kind of money. If we don’t then my opinion will clearly be shared
He’d be one of the last players I’d sell, unfortunate with injuries which I hope he gets past that have stop started each season.
If you could guarantee him being replaced with someone like Wirtz and we were desperate for cash, then potentially.
If you could guarantee him being replaced with someone like Wirtz and we were desperate for cash, then potentially.
No, we need English players, we are fielding one English player a game lately.
Would City have sold Palmer for 100 million knowing what they know now ?
Flip the question around and ask yourself if you’d pay 100m for Mainoo? I bet most would say no.
I do wonder if there is some 20/20 hindsight going on with the idea of Januzaj and Garnacho being clearly inferior talents. Expectations were very high after their breakthrough seasons.The state of this fecking forum
All of you saying yes are either trying too hard to have some distinct opinion on this or just incapable of guessing a players ceiling (the ones comparing him to Januzaj and Garnacho, two clearly inferior talents)
No, I wouldn't sell him for 100m and I don't think any well-run club would even contemplate the idea.
I'm not saying Mainoo has a ceiling as high as them (because I think his peak potential is just a level below most of the examples I'm gonna list, although not all of them, and he's still an absolutely elite level talent), but ask yourself if their clubs would sell the likes of Camavinga, Pedri, Gavi, Caicedo, Saliba, Gvardiol, Olise, J. Neves, Zaire-Emery etc. for 100 million.
The absolute best U23 talents in the world are the most expensive players to attain and even if you beat out other clubs for their signatures, which is very difficult even for the biggest clubs in the world, you still take on the responsibility of their development for those 3-5 years before they enter their peak years. So many things can go wrong even if you have the money.
We have one of these guys in our team already, with a seemingly excellent mental profile and character, a very unique profile that most clubs could do with but they're hard to find: Arsenal and City for example don't have an LCM like Mainoo despite both having spent the majority of the last 24 months in the top 5 club sides in the world, and both clubs have been looking for a player of a similar profile to him.
And I haven't even mentioned that he's from our own academy. Only classless clubs like Chelsea, Villa, Newcastle or City abuse the selling of their homegrown talents for PSR reasons.
I said the exact same thing almost 1 year ago when the same question was asked, but if I recall correctly the hypothetical figure was 80m.
Mainoo's level and talent was clear before he even made his debut against Everton, and a whole year later people are still entertaining this idea of well he could fall off like xyz in the past before...yes, but that will mean the club failed the player, not vice versa. We need to get better at making sure our best talents fulfill their potentials, not sell them for PSR reasons and because we're afraid we might ruin them.
No, not because its not an outrageously good offer at this point in time but i just wouldn't want to sell players like him.
What? He's not just frustrating, he doesn't even get the basics right. We overhyped him after one good season but he simply doesn't seem to be good enough to be a starter here.
Interesting question because there is a genuine debate right now as to whether he makes the starting lineup regularly in the new managers system. I would say the biggest concern with Kobbie is his pace/mobility and RA seems to value players that can get around the pitch. I do think the right physical conditioning can fix that concern though and the potential of a Kobbie/Ugarte axis in the middle is huge, not sure we would get the right replacement for 100M but it sure would be tempting.
Januzaj maybe, but Garnacho was never the same level of talent. He could still end up being a better player if he reaches his upper potential while Mainoo doesn't, but Mainoo 'should' go on to be better.
I’d take that easily. He’s good but I do t think he will become the huge talent we all hope. I can actually see him regressing in this formation and been frozen out - I don’t feel is is mobile enough.
I hope I’m proved wrong but I’d not be worried if he’s sold for a good price.
I hope I’m proved wrong but I’d not be worried if he’s sold for a good price.
You don’t get anywhere selling your best players. This is only a question because of a recent mini slump in form (following comeback from injury). People are fickle as feck. Academy players are the lifeblood of this club, and when you produce one who has the right attitude and ability to become one of the best players in the world in his position, then you give him every platform to realise that potential at United. Not at a rival.
It won’t always work, and there comes a time to cut losses or get a fresh start. See Rashford now, or Gomes before (different reasons). And in those cases you do what is best for the club AND the player. What makes our youth academy and pathway special is that we treat these players as people, rather than tradable commodities. It’s why we have the youth record we do. Cynically speaking it has its flaws, meaning we often hold on to young players too long, killing their sale value if they don’t realise their full potential, but I wouldn’t change that for anything.
Selling Mainoo at 19 for 100m would undoubtedly help with PSR and aid investment in the squad, but it would be a betrayal of what this club stands for. It may turn out to be great business if we bring in 3-4 really good players off the back of it (no I’m not saying at 25m each, because 100m for an academy player can be parlayed into about 300-400m worth of signings with amortisation), but it may also turn out to be horrible business. It’s just trading one risk for another. Now we have the risk of keeping a player, turning down a huge fee in the process, on the expectation he’ll turn into a top class or world class performer; and on the other hand we are signing a few players with the expectation they’ll adapt to the team, league (where appropriate), and demands, culture, and scrutiny of the club. If they are young players we bring in, then you also have to add in the risk of how they’ll develop. Which was the only original risk factor in keeping Mainoo in the first place.
That’s before you even let it sink in that we have become the sort of club that sells its brightest homegrown talents for profit. A very UnManchester Unitedy thing to do. And one I couldn’t support. It’s always worth remembering that every decision is easy to praise or scrutinise with the benefit of hindsight, the difficult part comes in making the right decision, and in some cases the brave decision, when you don’t have the benefit of foresight. The same people who will say “it was obvious at the time”, are the same people who will throw around hypothetical decisions, without ever having to bear the consequences or scrutiny of those decisions. Everything looks different when you are the one holding the actual accountability, and in my experience the most opinionated, critical people tend to lose their voice when you put them in the position to actually make big decisions, knowing they will hold the accountability for the success or failure of said decision.
I don’t see a problem with us selling some academy products, early in their professional career. This makes sense if they have a lot between them and regular minutes, and/or the feeling is that they’ll never be a top performer. But you don’t sell your top academy players when they are getting regular minutes, and/or already starters in the team. In Mainoo’s case we are talking about a player who has been one of our top three performers over the last 12 months at 18/19 years old. As an organisational ethos, it just makes the most sense to take some things off the table. E.g. We do not sell our best young players for profit. We develop them and we give them opportunities. The consequences of this aren’t just in the P&L bottom line, but has repercussions across the organisation, not least in youth recruitment. In the case of those players we do sell young, we do so primarily for the benefit of the player’s career, see Elanga and Garner for example, and in the process turn a tidy profit. The human approach is essential to the identity of the club.
Of course, like all players he will have dips caused by injury, natural progression of his game, familiarity from opposition players, but that’s been the case with almost every single young player ever, in the history of football. You can probably count on one hand the amount of players in history that didn’t have a few ups and downs in their first 2-4 years as a pro. But, of course, fans are reactionary. If he isn’t dominating games, every game, now….then he’s suddenly shit, or he’s stagnated. It’s no longer acceptable for him to have an “okay” game or a “fine” performance. He has to be outstanding every single match because that’s the standard he set for himself through his first season, and then that was the hype and expectation piled upon him.
Mainoo needed a break this summer, after his first season as a pro. A season he missed a big chunk of through injury. Instead he went to the Euros and forced his way into the national side, playing all the way to the final. Unsurprisingly he started this season looking tired and then getting injured. The good news is that Amorim seems to be a big fan of regular rotation, which is vital for Kobbie in managing his minutes. What would be great is if we, as fans, could manage our expectations. Mainoo will probably go on to become top or world class. Probably. But not definitely. There is a lot that can go wrong. Perhaps he will develop to just be a good player, rather than a great one. It’s just incredibly hard to ever be sure. But one thing we can know for sure, is that we will find out how good or great he can become, while wearing a Manchester United shirt.
TL;DR: No.
It won’t always work, and there comes a time to cut losses or get a fresh start. See Rashford now, or Gomes before (different reasons). And in those cases you do what is best for the club AND the player. What makes our youth academy and pathway special is that we treat these players as people, rather than tradable commodities. It’s why we have the youth record we do. Cynically speaking it has its flaws, meaning we often hold on to young players too long, killing their sale value if they don’t realise their full potential, but I wouldn’t change that for anything.
Selling Mainoo at 19 for 100m would undoubtedly help with PSR and aid investment in the squad, but it would be a betrayal of what this club stands for. It may turn out to be great business if we bring in 3-4 really good players off the back of it (no I’m not saying at 25m each, because 100m for an academy player can be parlayed into about 300-400m worth of signings with amortisation), but it may also turn out to be horrible business. It’s just trading one risk for another. Now we have the risk of keeping a player, turning down a huge fee in the process, on the expectation he’ll turn into a top class or world class performer; and on the other hand we are signing a few players with the expectation they’ll adapt to the team, league (where appropriate), and demands, culture, and scrutiny of the club. If they are young players we bring in, then you also have to add in the risk of how they’ll develop. Which was the only original risk factor in keeping Mainoo in the first place.
That’s before you even let it sink in that we have become the sort of club that sells its brightest homegrown talents for profit. A very UnManchester Unitedy thing to do. And one I couldn’t support. It’s always worth remembering that every decision is easy to praise or scrutinise with the benefit of hindsight, the difficult part comes in making the right decision, and in some cases the brave decision, when you don’t have the benefit of foresight. The same people who will say “it was obvious at the time”, are the same people who will throw around hypothetical decisions, without ever having to bear the consequences or scrutiny of those decisions. Everything looks different when you are the one holding the actual accountability, and in my experience the most opinionated, critical people tend to lose their voice when you put them in the position to actually make big decisions, knowing they will hold the accountability for the success or failure of said decision.
I don’t see a problem with us selling some academy products, early in their professional career. This makes sense if they have a lot between them and regular minutes, and/or the feeling is that they’ll never be a top performer. But you don’t sell your top academy players when they are getting regular minutes, and/or already starters in the team. In Mainoo’s case we are talking about a player who has been one of our top three performers over the last 12 months at 18/19 years old. As an organisational ethos, it just makes the most sense to take some things off the table. E.g. We do not sell our best young players for profit. We develop them and we give them opportunities. The consequences of this aren’t just in the P&L bottom line, but has repercussions across the organisation, not least in youth recruitment. In the case of those players we do sell young, we do so primarily for the benefit of the player’s career, see Elanga and Garner for example, and in the process turn a tidy profit. The human approach is essential to the identity of the club.
Of course, like all players he will have dips caused by injury, natural progression of his game, familiarity from opposition players, but that’s been the case with almost every single young player ever, in the history of football. You can probably count on one hand the amount of players in history that didn’t have a few ups and downs in their first 2-4 years as a pro. But, of course, fans are reactionary. If he isn’t dominating games, every game, now….then he’s suddenly shit, or he’s stagnated. It’s no longer acceptable for him to have an “okay” game or a “fine” performance. He has to be outstanding every single match because that’s the standard he set for himself through his first season, and then that was the hype and expectation piled upon him.
Mainoo needed a break this summer, after his first season as a pro. A season he missed a big chunk of through injury. Instead he went to the Euros and forced his way into the national side, playing all the way to the final. Unsurprisingly he started this season looking tired and then getting injured. The good news is that Amorim seems to be a big fan of regular rotation, which is vital for Kobbie in managing his minutes. What would be great is if we, as fans, could manage our expectations. Mainoo will probably go on to become top or world class. Probably. But not definitely. There is a lot that can go wrong. Perhaps he will develop to just be a good player, rather than a great one. It’s just incredibly hard to ever be sure. But one thing we can know for sure, is that we will find out how good or great he can become, while wearing a Manchester United shirt.
TL;DR: No.
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Absolutely I would, we’ve been down this road many times and not sold at daft prices when we should have.
No one would offer it though.
No one would offer it though.
The first sentence plus the green emoji is there because I didn't expect the overwhelming majority to be answering yes to this question.
Also, there's no way you believe those players would all be sold for a 100 million offer.
One of the keys of becoming, and then staying the best, or one of the best teams in the world is recruitment, no matter how good your manager or structure is. It's how City managed to do what they did in the last 8 years. It wasn't just down to Pep. And now they're struggling, partly because their recruitment has been a little bit suspect for these last 1-2 years, and despite having players like Haaland, De Bruyne, Rodri, Gvardiol, etc. in their squad, I suspect they'd still be much better off right now, had they managed to acquire at least one of Rice or Bellingham in the summer of 2023. Missing out on both of those players clearly hurt even City, who have widely been regarded as the best team in the world at that time, coming off of a treble. They also failed to replace Gündogan adequately, and that's been hurting them too.
If you sell an elite level or generational talent you cannot replace, just because the offer is very attractive, at that point you're sacrificing your sporting ambitions and just become a selling club. Now Mainoo might not be "generational", but he definitely has the tools to be one of the best players in his position for many years, and he's someone that would be incredibly difficult to replace even this early into his United career.
Many of those examples I listed are also irreplaceable, or would be incredibly hard and expensive to replace for their respective clubs.
Who do we have internally to replace him?
we'd end up re-investing it in Lewandowski, or someone of an equivalent level of ridiculousness and wonder why they are getting slower
Well, you can make a case for Januzaj, because I think he was very talented as well and although I probably overrated him a bit at the time, I think you still could've expected him to become a really good player who could improve any top 6 side, if his development didn't go so wrong at United. Someone like Kulusevski today, or an inferior and left-footed version of Villa Grealish.
However, I wouldn't put him in the Rashford, Martial, Greenwood, Shaw, Yoro or Mainoo bracket. These are the most talented teenagers we've had in the last 10 years in my eyes, and the first four should've achieved much more than they eventually did...although in Greenwood's case I can't really see how the club is at fault. Fingers crossed for Yoro and Mainoo for the future, and hopefully Hojlund as well.
With Garnacho, it's not 20/20 hindsight as I've stated several times in the last ~12 months that I think he can become a solid PL level winger with respectable numbers and a good long-term servant to the club, but I just don't see him becoming a world beater, or one of the world's / league's best wingers. He doesn't have the tools for it IMO, although I obviously wouldn't mind if I was proven wrong on this. I've also maintained that he wasn't as talented as Mainoo or Hojlund from our young trio of last season, even when Hojlund was struggling and Garnacho was doing relatively well.
Yes
I don't think he's going to fit this system that well and he's also pretty slow.
I don't think he's going to fit this system that well and he's also pretty slow.
No way.
I think Kobbie is one of the best young players in the world. I don't think I'm in the minority when it comes to this.
Yet here we are, Manchester United in 13th, with over half saying they'd sell him.
Yet here we are, Manchester United in 13th, with over half saying they'd sell him.
I think this too. He moves ok with the ball but he really lacks pace and the ability to cover ground quickly.
Why not a 20m Thuram like Juve bought from Nice though?
Thuram is a good player but I'm not sure DMs of his level are generally hard to come by. He would raise the floor of this United team, but I don't think he would raise the ceiling of this squad to the extent that Mainoo does.
You can build towards being a solid team with players like Thuram, but for me, it's more important to have at least 3-4 more valuable, rarer profiles in your team like Mainoo, if you want your team to have a high ceiling too. Of course, you need both solid players and then special players, but why would you sell your special players to replace them with 3 good players?
I think the answer is still a resounding no to the OP's question, although it does admittedly depend on the replacement. If there are guarantees that we can replace Mainoo with let's say Camavinga or Wharton as two examples, you can contemplate the idea of selling him...although well-run clubs with high ambitions would look to make money by selling other players and try to have both Mainoo and Camavinga/Wharton in their squad...so still no IMO.
I also wouldn't sell him to any rival club in England, and it's difficult to see who can pay 100 million for a player outside of the Premier League, other than maybe 2-3 clubs. The three big Spanish teams, plus Bayern and PSG do it every now and then, but not on a regular basis.
In a heartbeat if we have someone better in mind that would be willing to join a club known to be the graveyard for promising player careers
We don't know if Mainoo is going to be that good though do we. On the other hand like I already said I would keep him because he is English.
Not a chance. It's players like him who will form the cornerstone of the rebuild.
I think we do?
Surely that would give you a sense that many think differently to you then?
Every single one of those players would be sold in my opinion if they wanted to leave and someone was silly enough to pay £100m straight up. Even if one of them is irreplaceable, which is highly debateable, let's say you sell a 9/10 player, not that Mainoo is that yet, but then address a few problem positions with the £100m (which allows you spend huge amounts given how profit is calculated) is it not worth it?
We could sell Mainoo and literally go out and spend like crazy, Frimpong/Davies (wing backs sorted) + someone like Cunha.
We don't know if Mainoo will be good enough to start for us if we can become a top 4 team, let alone a 'generational' talent. I really like him, he's got a unique skillset but there's every chance he is a player who gets fecked over by a tactical system or gets too many injuries. I don't think he's good enough to be a classic CM and he should be in the 10's, but really he should be the advanced midfielder in a midfield 3 which we don't play. You would be mad to not sell him for £100m in my opinion.
If we believe in the lad's potential, we should keep him - of course.
The moment we turn into some kind of Dortmund-ish operation, is the moment we accept that we're basically an also-ran (yes, in the context of generally "big" clubs - but still, that should not be our level).
The moment we turn into some kind of Dortmund-ish operation, is the moment we accept that we're basically an also-ran (yes, in the context of generally "big" clubs - but still, that should not be our level).
Fair
No. Why would you?
An alternate way to frame this question, if Mainoo was at, say, Brighton and has performed exactly the same there as he had with us (same highs and same lows), would you want us to go out and bid £100m for him?
My answer to that is no.
My answer to that is no.
Also agreed. I want to watch him for the next 10 years.
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