Is there a need to spend massive transfer fees?

Silverman

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We have been a disaster with how we've spent our transfer kitty since Ferguson left.
We'vs spent:
€105m on Pogba
€95m on Antony
€87m on Maguire
€85m on Sancho
€85m on Lukaku
€75m on Di Maria
€64m on Mount
€42m on Mkhitaryan
€39m on Van De Beek
€38m on Bailly

Is there really a need to spend massive fees on players. We could of had Caicedo for just over €5m two years ago.
Kobie Mainoo looks very promising for the DM position.
We've got Garnacho and Pellistri for €8.5m in total and they look far more promising than Antony and Sancho who we spent €180m on.
We sold Smalling for chips who would have been a better option for us than €87m Maguire.
Eriksen on a free is very good business.

I get spending big is required sometimes. We needed a top quality GK and I think Onana will be worth the money. Casemiro steadied the ship last season.

Surely signings like Amrabat for just over €30m are the type we need to pursuing more often. Would take the pressure off the players involved too.
 
In this day and age, pretty much yeah, you won't find a big club that hasn't done it these past few years, case in point Madrid with Bellingham and bayern with kane, pl teams are self explanatory .

We just need to get better at and identifying those that will end up improving us.
 
Your examples are one player who went for a few million and then solf for big Dosh, needle in a haystack, and youth players that have proved nothing
 
Jesus that list is depressing :(. Figures do look a bit off though. Antony and Maguire were less than the listed price.
 
We should be much more reluctant. Most >100m transfers don't even work out.

Griezeman and Dembele to Barca failed
Neymar and Mbappe to PSG didn't give them the CL
Countinho did nothing at Barca except score for Bayern
Lukaku to Chelsea has failed
Joao Felix to Atletico failed
Pogba to United failed
Ronaldo to Juve failed
Hazard to Real failed

Most of the others happened in the last 2 years so we can't really judge them but the record of the top 20 transfers or so are mostly failures or the jury's out.

Gareth Bale is the most expensive transfer I can see that isn't recent or a definite failure and look how badly that turned out. The top transfer that definitely succeeded was Ronaldo to Real 14 years ago.
 
I think fans place too much expectations on transfers who have high fees placed on them. The high fee is most strongly correlated to the desperation of the buying club and the ability of the selling club to hold out for a fee. The player's ability is a distant second in the equation. If you spend 100m on Caicedo and he is not the best midfielder in the league over the length of his contract for Chelsea, it doesn't mean he was a failure.
 
The way the market is you have to spend big money as even decent players cost over £50m these days if they're a somewhat established name.

What you have to say though, is we need to take a mixed approach to the market with some big money signings, complemented by trying to unearth some gems on the cheaper side. We tend to wait until a player is worth 80 million before we buy them, we need to start identifying players at a slightly earlier stage and allow them to have their breakout seasons with us. For example, Hojlund could have been picked up a year ago for 17 million euros, Kim Min-jae could have been picked up for 18 million euros, and we all know about missing out on Caicedo for 5 million... Maybe you can argue we have made a few of these punts over the years and they haven't worked out, but that really speaks to how bad our scouting and recruitment team must be.
 
There are definitely instances where it's beneficial to do it but our transfers are warped by the fact that a) our recruitment hasn't been very good over the last decade and b) there's an additional premium attached to almost every signing we make anyway.

If there was a more co-ordinated plan when it came to our squad building, the big money signings would probably make a lot more sense. The problem is the big money signings should usually be the cherry on top kind of signing to push us towards a title challenge or being able to compete with the best in Europe, but ours are usually made to put out fires because the previous crop weren't good enough. I do agree with the general premise though, I'd like to see us trust in our scouting network a lot more and make those lower risk moves in positions that don't require a huge outlay.
 
No.

Stop buying big name stars.

At the time, I loved the signings of Casemiro, Varane, Cavani, Zlatan, Schweinsteiger, Falcao, Eriksen, Ronaldo, etc. But those purchases were all plastering over the cracks for a year or two at most, all the while introducing limitations to the way we could play because of their dodgy athleticism.

Buy young, buy cheap, buy scattergun. Hope that 25% make it and then sell off the other 75% before they depreciate too much in value. Those left will be the most committed and hungry young stars desperate to make a name for themselves and willing to run through brick walls to do it.

Eventually, we'll get to a point where we have a hipster XI that can outwork the best in Europe, but who lack a tiny bit of quality to go toe-to-toe with them at the sharp end of the CL. That's when we should finally flex our muscles and buy big. It's the way City did it. It's the way Arsenal and Newcastle are doing it now. For some reason, United have decided we can skip the foundation stage, rush the scaffolding stage and move straight to the building the spire at the top of the tower. From that point onwards, we have to spend over the odds just to keep it all from toppling over, without ever quite achieving the stability to match the heights of our rivals.

I want to make 2 or 3 Amad/Pellestri type signings every summer. Big money on occasion, but not massive transfer fees compared to some of the dross we've bought for record amounts over the years.
 
Most of the above would get a CEO or Manager sacked unceremoniously in any other lines of business.

Breaking record signing and not knowing his best position : Pogba, Sancho, Di Maria, Antony

Breaking record Signing and not knowing the player has a very big flaw : Maguire, AWB

Expensive players bought for 50M and not knowing what to do with him : Donny Van De Beek

Every manager post Fergie seems to be reduced to a fraud or an inept past it manager. Jose Mourinho love him or hate him, LVG, Rangnick, Ole, and now looks like ETH is next on line...

Something is very wrong with us. The Glazer might not give too much feck about everything else but they provided money and never interfere with the manager decision.

How on earth can we get so many signings monumentally wrong is beyond me. I'm not even talking a great player dont fit the system like Veron, it's totally big purchase with no plan to use them at all : DVB.

Madness
 
Not reading the OP, going by the title. Unless it’s misleading I should be on track.

Where we as a club we should not be spending big on transfer because we are not a very successful/winning club in recent years.
City/Chelsea/Madrid/Bayern etc can because they have success these big signing know they have to replicate and their fee is not a measure of their ability but it’s about what they’ll have deliver to match or exceed recent successes.

Whilst we bring in big signing to recapture glories that are out of memory. So you end up with ill motivated player that believe their price tag earns them some fantasy status as footballers. These saviour signings hardly ever rejuvenated any club because the load gets too big for one player to carry.

The time will return for us to make the big money signings but not before we do some winning of significant trophies.
 
Silverman said:
We have been a disaster with how we've spent our transfer kitty since Ferguson left.
We'vs spent:
€105m on Pogba
€95m on Antony
€87m on Maguire
€85m on Sancho
€85m on Lukaku
€75m on Di Maria
€64m on Mount
€42m on Mkhitaryan
€39m on Van De Beek
€38m on Bailly
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A big part of the problem is just overpaying.

The value of these players on Transfermarkt before their purchase adds up to 517m. Manchester United spent 715m on them. That's almost 200m on excess fees.

By comparison, Real Madrid have spent 510m on recent signings (Hazard, Jovic, Militao, Mendy, Camavinga, Tchouameni, Bellingham, Guler). The Transfermarkt value of those players at the time of purchase was 540m.
 
We need to sign the Brighton scouts for £100m
 
Tyrion said:
We should be much more reluctant. Most >100m transfers don't even work out.
Ronaldo to Juve failed
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I don`t call that a failure by scoring 81 goals in 98 matches.
 
Sky1981 said:
Most of the above would get a CEO or Manager sacked unceremoniously in any other lines of business.

Breaking record signing and not knowing his best position : Pogba, Sancho, Di Maria, Antony

Breaking record Signing and not knowing the player has a very big flaw : Maguire, AWB

Expensive players bought for 50M and not knowing what to do with him : Donny Van De Beek

Every manager post Fergie seems to be reduced to a fraud or an inept past it manager. Jose Mourinho love him or hate him, LVG, Rangnick, Ole, and now looks like ETH is next on line...

Something is very wrong with us. The Glazer might not give too much feck about everything else but they provided money and never interfere with the manager decision.

How on earth can we get so many signings monumentally wrong is beyond me. I'm not even talking a great player dont fit the system like Veron, it's totally big purchase with no plan to use them at all : DVB.

Madness
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Because we always think we're buying the final pieces of the puzzle, the elusive talents that will glue everything together, the magic keys that will unlock the imagined unfulfilled potential of the team with their overblown (in our minds) abilities. That's also the reason why, when we ultimately fail, we're turning them into scapegoats with a snap of the fingers. You can even see it in the midfield discussion: "If only we had that press-resistant midfielder who would control games for us, Frenkie, Caicedo, Mac Allister... anyone for any price. As if De Jong would make up for 65 fewer sprints and 5 fewer kilometres covered on his own. Perhaps, we should take a better look at the puzzle we're trying to assemble before we start putting the pieces together. Just saying.
 
I think it's extremely tough to find hidden gems these days — there are just too many other clubs and scouts hunting for them. You can point to the odd successful left-field signing smaller clubs have made and say, "Why couldn't we have bought them for £5m back then?" But that's needle-in-a-haystack stuff. Most signings flop; that's just the way it is.

Also, most of the top young players have clear career paths built on stepping-stone clubs now. Bellingham was probably right to go to Dortmund and then Madrid. Same with Haaland.

That's not to say United's spending is justified. It's been ridiculous. We've targetted the wrong players and paid way over the odds for them.
 
The only "acceptable" transfers on that list (well how I would deem them anyway are Pogba, Lukaku and Mkhl

Pogba - was genuinely seen as one of the best midfielders in the world when we bought him. I think if you're going to spend huge, it should be on one of the best players in the world (or one of the best young talents in the world)

Lukaku - Proven PL goalscorer... considering his age and goal record, spending that much on him made sense. We needed a striker and he was meant to be one of the best around

Mhki - Decent stats at Dortmund and 40m Euros isn't a lot really.

And yet all those 3 turned out to be varying degrees of crap... so maybe you don't need to spend big at all.
 
I’m just asking for us to sign three high quality, mature (not the same as old), intelligent central midfielders in the next 5 years. How hard can it be? We finally got Casemiro and it transformed us last year - he’s warming up to a long season right now but he’ll be brilliant again. Eriksen immediately started controlling games. So go and find the 22 year old equivalents and bloody sign them!!

You go through that list of expensive transfers and it’s a horror show. I agree that the scattergun approach could be the one - look how many high quality young players Chelsea signed, even if they let a couple like De Bruyne go when they never should have.
 
Annihilate Now! said:
The only "acceptable" transfers on that list (well how I would deem them anyway are Pogba, Lukaku and Mkhl

Pogba - was genuinely seen as one of the best midfielders in the world when we bought him. I think if you're going to spend huge, it should be on one of the best players in the world (or one of the best young talents in the world)

Lukaku - Proven PL goalscorer... considering his age and goal record, spending that much on him made sense. We needed a striker and he was meant to be one of the best around

Mhki - Decent stats at Dortmund and 40m Euros isn't a lot really.

And yet all those 3 turned out to be varying degrees of crap... so maybe you don't need to spend big at all.
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Pogba wasn't crap. It's fecking mental to try and re-paint his time as crap. He was our best player until Bruno Fernandes came along - even after that he was our second best player. Even at the end of his 6 years, we were happy to offer him a deal to stay.

Even Lukaku wasn't crap for us, had a good first season - lost his way in the second, but we still recouped his free.

And Mkhitaryan we recouped his free as well, because we managed to swap him for Sanchez without paying any additional money.

The logic behind each of those signings was sound, that's why at their points of exit they were still in demand either at the club or elsewhere.

The logic behind signing Maguire and Antony was fecking bonkers in the first place, and everyone with an ounce of sense should've been able to see they were going to cause us a mess.
 
Not as often as we do, we do seem to become fixated on players and end up paying too much in terms of fees and wages.

It is difficult to find hidden gems but if you aren’t trying regularly then you definitely aren’t going to find them. Everyone makes mistakes buying players, not as many as us but we should be casting a wider net.

In a way you can’t lose on someone like Pellistri, we don’t have to try and replicate what Brighton or Chelsea do but there is some middle ground.
 
Enzo was talked about before joining Benfica as well for little money. We should be trying out such players and making money or keeping them.

We used to have a mixture of bigger signings and ones we made stars. Now it seems we're a Wenger club, "we were looking at him, was just about to buy him as well" while we throw huge sums of money down the drain and collect too many older players.

Hopefully Saudi will have us looking for more gems and players that aren't knackered after a year of playing for us. The more things change at United the more they stay the same.
 
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Roboc7 said:
Not as often as we do, we do seem to become fixated on players and end up paying too much in terms of fees and wages.

It is difficult to find hidden gems but if you aren’t trying regularly then you definitely aren’t going to find them. Everyone makes mistakes buying players, not as many as us but we should be casting a wider net.

In a way you can’t lose on someone like Pellistri, we don’t have to try and replicate what Brighton or Chelsea do but there is some middle ground.
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Exactly. We paid £9m for Pellistri and £80m for Antony - even if you argue the latter is better, there isn't a £71m gap between them.

And our fans are also massive hypocrites. Antony has a season with 4 goals and 4 assists and that's decent. However if one of our cheap finds has a season like that, it would be - not good enough, and need to find a replacement for him so we could play off the bench.

Clearly we can afford to invest game time into a Pellistri, if we can put up with Antony's terrible returns.
 
Skills said:
Pogba wasn't crap. It's fecking mental to try and re-paint his time as crap. He was our best player until Bruno Fernandes came along - even after that he was our second best player. Even at the end of his 6 years, we were happy to offer him a deal to stay.

Even Lukaku wasn't crap for us, had a good first season - lost his way in the second, but we still recouped his free.

And Mkhitaryan we recouped his free as well, because we managed to swap him for Sanchez without paying any additional money.

The logic behind each of those signings was sound, that's why at their points of exit they were still in demand either at the club or elsewhere.

The logic behind signing Maguire and Antony was fecking bonkers in the first place, and everyone with an ounce of sense should've been able to see they were going to cause us a mess.
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Hence "varying degrees" - Pogba wasn't crap but it was a pretty crap transfer for us overall, we spent 100m on a player and got 0m back and didn't achieve anywhere near what we'd hope to achieve with him.

Lukaku was pretty dire for around half his stay with us... again, pretty crap.

Mkhitaryan I never liked, thought he was absolutely rubbish.

But yeh, all totally acceptable transfers at the time - which was the point of my post.
 
Annihilate Now! said:
The only "acceptable" transfers on that list (well how I would deem them anyway are Pogba, Lukaku and Mkhl

Pogba - was genuinely seen as one of the best midfielders in the world when we bought him. I think if you're going to spend huge, it should be on one of the best players in the world (or one of the best young talents in the world)

Lukaku - Proven PL goalscorer... considering his age and goal record, spending that much on him made sense. We needed a striker and he was meant to be one of the best around

Mhki - Decent stats at Dortmund and 40m Euros isn't a lot really.

And yet all those 3 turned out to be varying degrees of crap... so maybe you don't need to spend big at all.
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I disagree with the term acceptable. I couldn't give a rat's arse if Pogba is the amalgam of Deschamps, Tigana and Platini. When you spend £89.3 million on a player only to have discussions, from day one, what is his best position on the pitch, which players we should sign to "unlock" him and how to utilize him, you're doing something wrong. When you decide to spend so much cash on a single player, you have to know what you want to get from him and how he fits into your plans. You don't buy a Ferrari, if you don't have a driving licence.

Lukaku made little sense, too. I wouldn't put this entirely on the scouting department because the guy (or his agent) has convinced a number of clubs that he is the target man that can play alone up front. But you also have Martial and Rashford in the attack, who are miles away from the profile of the provider who will work their arses off to support the lone striker. Probably a case of indulging Mou's big-man forward fetish without reading between the lines that he was actively forcing Martial out of the club and trying to convert Rashford into a more traditional winger. Which, of course, the club would never be OK with (Martial was still considered a top talent and the club shivers at the mere thought of Rash feeling "unhappy"). At least we got some money from Lukaku.

Mkhitaryan at 40 million is OK, i guess. Just another case of buying a decent player and expecting of him, when things fall apart, to be Robson, Keane and Scholes, all wrapped up into one.
 
Need ? No. Inflation is a reality for all clubs of any ambition but most of football still operates one or two orders of magnitude below financially.

However changing your recruitment strategy in such a way means accepting United is declassed, is not looking to compete every year (and I'd say it's been a reality for a few seasons now), is not signing big hot names supposedly befitting the "biggest club". This may have knock on effects on the level of sponsorship & revenue and you will probably see a lot of fair weather fans evaporate. It will still be a big club, but maybe not a "top club".

And of course that means having the adequate infrastructure, scouting and capacity for player development in place

I think MU would be wise to move towards this sooner than later. United in its current form cannot keep up with the financial arms race.
 
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We've seen a creep in transfer fees as teams lower down the league have been able to afford higher fees.

A £30 million player in say, 2006, would be £60-70 million in today's market.

As it was back then, you get diminishing returns with higher fees, and as was pointed out earlier, the £80 million + fees are basically marks of desperation, rather than being reflective of a player's ability.
 
KikiDaKats said:
Not reading the OP, going by the title. Unless it’s misleading I should be on track.
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That’s really not how the world works.

Or, more specifically, it’s increasingly how the world works, which is why it’s going to shit so quickly.
 
It's absolutely fine if you are buying a young(ish) player who is highly rated. They retain some resale value and if they don't work out, you can usually not have the issue we have faced time and time again with shifting players.

In the rare cases we have bought a player like Lukaku (24 years old) or ADM (26 years old), there was no issue with selling them and not taking a ridiculous hit. Even someone like Schneiderlin retained decent value because he was a good age. Even Depay whose reputation was destroyed at United we barely lost money on from a transfer fee perspective.

The problem United have had is players like Varane, Casemiro, Matic, Ronaldo, Cavani, Telles etc really have no great value compared to their fee now - they are either too old or have been kept on too long. Maguire isn't in that list because he joined at a decent age but then we hung onto him so long that he became a meme.
 
No. Each season I wonder more and more if we shouldn't just sell every damn player and just fill the team with young talents. Like how much worse could it get? There just seem to be a bad attitude within the lockeroom or something. With young players there should atleast be some zip in their step and some energy. I would love to see Pellestri and Garnacho get a run of games and see what happens. Yeah they suck sometimes, but so do our expensive players. It's crazy to me that a team like Real Madrid has been developing their young guys like Vinicius, Valverde and Camavinga into stars while being one of the best teams in the world. We won't play our young guys because we are scared of losing our position as a non-challenging team.
 
It just feels like Ashley Young all over again across the whole squad... Everyone knows when they get here they've made it, they're no longer playing for a big move with a bigger pay packet...

I wonder how many players are like Ronaldo or Beckham these days and go and continue training on their own after the main sessions have finished.
 
Skills said:
Exactly. We paid £9m for Pellistri and £80m for Antony - even if you argue the latter is better, there isn't a £71m gap between them.

And our fans are also massive hypocrites. Antony has a season with 4 goals and 4 assists and that's decent. However if one of our cheap finds has a season like that, it would be - not good enough, and need to find a replacement for him so we could play off the bench.

Clearly we can afford to invest game time into a Pellistri, if we can put up with Antony's terrible returns.
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It makes no sense especially given that we should have learnt from our mistakes, we’re now struggling with FFP and have to sell to buy.

We could give opportunities to players given how weak our squad is, we could also loan players out. Some players want a direct pathway to first team but others are happy to join Chelsea and Brighton knowing they are going on loan.

Last week we were linked with Barco who is available for reportedly 8m and now might going to Brighton. We should be regularly snapping up players like that even if it is just to create a new revenue stream.
 
Liverpool signing Mac Allister for £35 m is a bargain in this day and age. They keep doing it though, £37m for Diaz and £40m for Jota. Amazing considering what we’ve wasted on Sancho, Antony and Mount
 
Paul778 said:
It just feels like Ashley Young all over again across the whole squad... Everyone knows when they get here they've made it, they're no longer playing for a big move with a bigger pay packet...

I wonder how many players are like Ronaldo or Beckham these days and go and continue training on their own after the main sessions have finished.
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That's ridiculously harsh on Ashley Young - a man who, whilst he may not have been the level required, never phoned it in in a United shirt.

Also Ashley Young cost £17m and played for us for 9 years - so his cost was around £1.8m per season (less then £1.5m we actually made for him when selling) ... so not really sure where he belongs in a massive transfer fees thread.
 
Joosep_K said:
I don`t call that a failure by scoring 81 goals in 98 matches.
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C.Ronaldo didn’t fail at Juventus but their targets with him weren’t met. Not all down to him obviously but it didn’t help either party
 
No there isn’t a need too but our problem, which has been our problem for a decade now, is that we’re a massively reactive club rather than a proactive club and that starts at the very top and works it way down so we overspend due to constant dithering or waiting until we have to spend by which time the selling club put the price up.

This summer alone we could have completely fixed our midfirkdgone all in for Rabiot, Le Fee and Amrabat for a combined amount of what we paid for Mount and because we’ve been conditioned by how bad we are in the market post Sir Alex/Gill we’ve been told to believe we did a brilliant job of getting Mount in for £55 million instead of the £75 million Chelsea originally wanted.

Last summer we could have had Antony for £50 million, which is still overspending by a good £15-£20 million, but dithered and spent the summer chasing the ego fulfilling deal for De Jong then because of the first two horrendous results dropped £150 million on Antony and Casemiro when if we’d gone in for them a month before could have probably been got for £50 million less.

Our recruitment team are a shambles as there’s no agreement between the scouting team and the manager as ETH clearly doesn’t trust the scouting network which makes them redundant then we chase ETH’s desired players, Mourtough is apparently our Director Of Football but yet has no idea how we’re meant to play and seems to be working for ETH rather than ETH coaching for Mourtough.

Until we become a proactive team with a Director Of Football who decides how we’re meant to play and signs players in agreement with the scouting network and ETH instead of the clusterfeck it currently is we’ll continue paying ridiculous fees and ridiculous wages.

I’d love for Luis Campos or Paul Mitchell to come in and say “right, we’re fecking Man United and this is how we’re meant to play. We need to sign players to play this way and ETH your job is to coach them, the scouts will identify the players and myself and Matt Hargreaves will work on the deal” and maybe then we’ll find gems or sign players BEFORE they’ve become £100 million players.
 
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