I think we'd be stupid to sell, and find this talk a bit mental tbh.
We'd get what, maybe 30m? Your not going to get someone coming off the bench and scoring winners like he can for that price.
I certainly dont think "We should sell at £30 million" but I also don't think that if we were going to sell it would be that much more. Maybe £40 million at a push for a club that really wants him
Is coming off the bench and scoring because you are worse than the starting players actually better than starting matches and scoring lots of goals?
For example Chris Wood has 7 goals in 10 games starting. Meanwhile he's played plenty from the bench - 11 games with 1 goal. Well if you want a goalscorer start him and you have it. He's played almost half the minutes of McTominay and has the same amount of goals. Despite him scoring goals as your starting striker is he worth £30 million or more? Even if he was 27 like McTominay I dont think so.
Adebayo has 9 league goals in 14 starts as a striker and 3 goals in 1 start behind the striker and then 2 off the bench in 11 games. All in all he has 9 goals in less minutes than McTom and he has 2 of the 4 goals McTom has off the bench. So again more goals if you start him than McTom but less off the bench. Is he worth £30 million or more? He's a year younger this time. I dont think so.
There are your options from the premier league alone. McTom is more likely than they are to score off the bench and they are better at scoring if they start the match but because of their better records you'd want to start them more. Both have spent less minutes on the pitch equaling or scoring more than McTominay
Chris Wood was picked up for £14.5 million last summer from Newcastle
Adebayo was signed for an undisclosed small fee after joining Walsall for free the year before.
£30 million is significant money especially for someone who doesn't play enough to start and has never been a high profile player. Again I don't think £30 million is a bite your hand off offer for him. I just dont think its an unreasonable amount to offer Manchester United last summer when we're signing new midfielders and looking to improve on him. And I dont think the value has risen astronomically because that was already a large amount for what he was producing before his goals this season.
What I do believe is that we have young players coming through who are going to be better than him and especially attacking ones, so if he did leave it wouldnt be long before we had a few more new McTominays developing and some of them might be able to translate their goalscoring from previous levels whilst being a lot better playing between the goals. We'll be fine, we've lost much better players and done fine and I think development now is better than it was in nearly all those circumstances. Rashford for example came in because of injuries and not having strikers, so he got his chance against Arsenal. And Mainoo has already shown he can get a couple of goals from playing in CM without having a weak display other than the goal. So he may develop as a goalscorer as well.
He was starting to become a bit of a crutch when he was starting. He'd score every 3 or so matches, but in each of those matches he'd be one of the main reasons why our midfield looked worse than our opponents in general play throughout the match. Now we have the perfect role for him, when we want to get an extra body in the box at the cost of losing some of the team shape and defensive solidarity we can bring him on and he's a guy who can turn the ball in or get on the end of a cross. Its a good role.
But if you're half decent at spending money £30 million will get you a starting player for teams above us in the league. They absolutely are not all full of players that cost more than £30 million.
Oh one more thing. We seem to have no money at the moment at the end of last summer with the Amrabat shuffle where we seem to have been stiffed for a huge loan fee because we'd communicated to them that we'd be buying him outright and then we didnt have any money to make that work. And with what we did in Jan... So all the more reason why £30 million is more money than usual for us.