Why do we find it so hard to sell fringe players?

[padzilla]

It's a strange one for me that the likes of Chelsea can get almost 90 million quid for several of their fringe players this summer, meaning their total outlay on Lukaku is something like 7 million or thereabouts.
We have numerous players on the fringes of the squad who aren't likely to make a positive contribution to our first team but yet we seem to hold on to them for dear life and in several cases, reward them with lucrative long-term contracts, it's a little baffling.
The likes of Matic, Mata and Phil Jones are obvious examples of players whose best days are long behind them but who constantly get new deals.
One other point I would like to make is that we haven't even managed to sell a single player for a fee this summer.

 

[LuisNaniencia]

We probably need to recognise that they are not going to be good enough when they are on good form. Sounds counter intuitive, but we could have sold Martial to Spurs a long time ago and he's been a frustrating player ever since.

 

[JJ12]

We give them stupid wages, want too much of a fee.

 

[dinostar77]

We give them stupid wages, want too much of a fee.

This.

We never strike at the right time. When lingaard was scorig for west ham, we should have done a deal then.

One of fergie's greatest strengths was selling players at the right time. Whether it was physical deterioration, mental weakness, over inflated ego or plainly just not meeting the bar set by Utd. Fergie and Gill would get them out. Sometimes accepting a lower transfer fee so the outgoing player could higher wages at the buying club.

Now all we do is give fringe players new contracts to protect their stupid transfer value. A four year contract for injury prone phil jones. Crazy. Talk of giving lingaard a new deal. Again crazy.

 

[48 hours]

We give them stupid wages, want too much of a fee.

this. Take Williams, he had a decent season for us, so we gave him a huge new contract, which apparently would have made him the second highest paid player at Southampton.
He then barely played the next season, so any value he had plummeted.
if he wasn’t in our plans for last season, we should have sold him, without giving him the new contract. We’d have probably got £15 million back then.
We just don’t seem to be able to plan ahead.

 

[11101]

We've always been rubbish at selling players, and we have always given squad players good contracts. In the Fergie era those squad players had a real use in the team. Now they are either useless, or worse were bought and paid as first team members, only for us to find out they weren't good enough for that. Now we're stuck with squad players on first team wages and nobody else is going to take them off our hands on those terms.

Part of the problem is we have stopped enforcing the 1 year rule for over 30s. Nothing wrong with having players like Mata around year to year, but we should never have given Matic a 3 year deal.

Jones is just one of those things. He'll end up being the kit man one day, we'll never get rid of him.

 

[Solius]

It's a strange one for me that the likes of Chelsea can get almost 90 million quid for several of their fringe players this summer, meaning their total outlay on Lukaku is something like 7 million or thereabouts.
We have numerous players on the fringes of the squad who aren't likely to make a positive contribution to our first team but yet we seem to hold on to them for dear life and in several cases, reward them with lucrative long-term contracts, it's a little baffling.
The likes of Matic, Mata and Phil Jones are obvious examples of players whose best days are long behind them but who constantly get new deals.
One other point I would like to make is that we haven't even managed to sell a single player for a fee this summer.

I can't help but think if we had players like Zappacosta, Batshuyai, etc.. we'd struggle to get rid but Chelsea seem to have no issue with it. It is odd. Perhaps it's due to the perception of the players at Utd. I think we get highlighted a lot more and thus when players don't work out they're more in people's minds as being a bit rubbish.

 

[Pexbo]

I can't help but think if we had players like Zappacosta, Batshuyai, etc.. we'd struggle to get rid but Chelsea seem to have no issue with it. It is odd. Perhaps it's due to the perception of the players at Utd. I think we get highlighted a lot more and thus when players don't work out they're more in people's minds as being a bit rubbish.

I have a suspicion that the oil club’s owners compensate the players off the books to encourage them to move which then helps doctor the club’s accounts. Liverpool don’t pay the wages we do so naturally find it easier to move players on and get a fee.

 

[Schmeichel's Cartwheel]

Because we give them huge contracts.

Players like James, Jones, Williams and Pereira are all on 60k a week minimum. Nobody is going to pay them that. Mata and Matic are both on over 100k. Lingard is around that too. Henderson is on 200k as backup GK.

I remember last year when Southampton wanted Williams on loan, they wouldn't pay his wages because he'd be the highest paid player in the team. We're just illogical and extremely generous with the wages we pay.

 

[Pexbo]

Because we give them huge contracts.

What’s the alternative though?

 

[Solius]

What’s the alternative though?

Tiny contracts. Microscopic.

 

[Rozay]

We want to keep them because they are good lads and we’re a family club.

 

[Smores]

It's not just the huge contracts its the fact we almost give them out as rewards for a good season. Usually to players who would never think of leaving United or get paid higher elsewhere anyway.

 

[dinostar77]

We've always been rubbish at selling players, and we have always given squad players good contracts. In the Fergie era those squad players had a real use in the team. Now they are either useless, or worse were bought and paid as first team members, only for us to find out they weren't good enough for that. Now we're stuck with squad players on first team wages and nobody else is going to take them off our hands on those terms.

Part of the problem is we have stopped enforcing the 1 year rule for over 30s. Nothing wrong with having players like Mata around year to year, but we should never have given Matic a 3 year deal.

Jones is just one of those things. He'll end up being the kit man one day, we'll never get rid of him.

Can see it now, new deal for Phil Jones aged 40, now the Utd groundsman on 100k a week.

 

[Pexbo]

Tiny contracts. Microscopic.

Spoiler

 

[Solius]

Why don't we just buy players who are bald?

 

[Schmeichel's Cartwheel]

What’s the alternative though?

Letting them go or offering smaller contracts? Nobody is forcing us to pay Nemanja Matic and Juan Mata nearly 300k a week combined. Nobody forced us to offer Phil Jones a 5 year contract in 2019. Nobody forced us to offer Pereira 75k a week, or whatever he's on. Brandon Williams had about 3 good games and we offered him 60k a week. Do you really think he would've turned down 20k a week? We just massively overpay our players.

 

[AjaxCunian]

Because we give them huge contracts.

Players like James, Jones, Williams and Pereira are all on 60k a week minimum. Nobody is going to pay them that. Mata and Matic are both on over 100k. Lingard is around that too. Henderson is on 200k as backup GK.

I remember last year when Southampton wanted Williams on loan, they wouldn't pay his wages because he'd be the highest paid player in the team. We're just illogical and extremely generous with the wages we pay.

Your last sentence.. Ole Gunnar Solksjaer is one of the best paid managers in football. Some fans will also defend that.

 

[Andersons Dietician]

Because Chelsea sell them at decent prices. Yes they’ve sold Tamouri and Abraham for good fees because they are valuable players with plenty of time ahead of them. Then they sell others for reasonable prices.

The only Fringe players we know that are for sale are Lingard and Perreria. Perreria has left which leaves Jesse. We want 20+ mil for him. West Ham want him for as little as possible. They’ll wait till the very end to make their move to see if we are desperate enough to take a much lower valuation.

I mean the way I see it there is no place for Jesse in the squad. West Ham probably look at our rosta and think the same. If someone came for Phil Jones we’d probably pay them to take him off our hands.

 

[Tiber]

We overpay them, then try to extract the highest possible transfer fee. Instead of just selling Pereira we will pay half his wages for 3 loans until he leaves on a free.

 

[golden_blunder]

I think we take too long to decide that we don’t need them. Fergie was ruthless at this when he was younger. Remember when he sold Hughes, kanchelskis and ince in the same summer so that he could give playtime to Beckham, scholes, butt, Neville etc? Genius

we take too long deciding and give them long contracts plus wages which are higher than average in the PL

 

[#07]

As others have said: wages. @48 hours' example of Williams is bang on.

Its a different equation if you need to pay £ 20m for a player who's after £10k a week, than if you are being asked to pay £10m for a player but match wages of £40k a week.

We don't have a Zidanes and Pavons strategy. We pay Pavons like they're Zidanes. Then we wonder why there's not a queue to pick them up when we want rid.

 

[passing-wind]

It's wages and also the quality of our fringe players being below par. Some have made a good point with Chelsea for example that their fringe professionals are still recognised members of the national teams. Also the club's valuations at times is too high.

 

[Pexbo]

Letting them go or offering smaller contracts? Nobody is forcing us to pay Nemanja Matic and Juan Mata over 200k a week combined. Nobody forced us to offer Pereira 75k a week, or whatever he's on.

Periera earns just under 50k a week apparently. It’s hardly exorbitant and he signed the contract when he was 22 and beginning to get regular first team action.

Mata has been a great servant to the club and is being phased into a non-playing role.

Matic for 3 years was excessive, agreed, but it’s only going to cost us around £18m total. Theres some logic there if the club felt he was an important senior player who could help guide a young squad while still contributing as a squad player. The alternative was to let him go for free and then spend more than that looking for a similar profile player - experienced and happy with a squad role.

 

[AjaxCunian]

Periera earns just under 50k a week apparently. It’s hardly exorbitant and he signed the contract when he was 22 and beginning to get regular first team action.

Mata has been a great servant to the club and is being phased into a non-playing role.

Matic for 3 years was excessive, agreed, but it’s only going to cost us around £18m total. Theres some logic there if the club felt he was an important senior player who could help guide a young squad while still contributing as a squad player. The alternative was to let him go for free and then spend more than that looking for a similar profile player - experienced and happy with a squad role.

Which other club would do that? For Mata?

A player that is barely useful and has been for years, paying him one of the higher wages in the Prem because he is a loyal servant and there are plans to make him a mascot or ambassador? That is just charity.

 

[Sarni]

Because they aren't very good. The players that Chelsea sold were quite widely recognized as good: they got £23m for Tomori who had a great season on loan at Milan, Abraham who was largely good for them at £35m and Zappacosta who used to be Italy international not long ago for mere £7m. You can't really compare them with Jones, Pereira or Matic whose value is rather poor. We don't really have that many sellable assets.

 

[Beans]

Wages are too high.

 

[Zlatattack]

We give them stupid wages, want too much of a fee.

This.

We never strike at the right time. When lingaard was scorig for west ham, we should have done a deal then.

One of fergie's greatest strengths was selling players at the right time. Whether it was physical deterioration, mental weakness, over inflated ego or plainly just not meeting the bar set by Utd. Fergie and Gill would get them out. Sometimes accepting a lower transfer fee so the outgoing player could higher wages at the buying club.

Now all we do is give fringe players new contracts to protect their stupid transfer value. A four year contract for injury prone phil jones. Crazy. Talk of giving lingaard a new deal. Again crazy.

The above two posts sum up perfectly what the problem is.

Also this stupid notion on not letting players leave on a free. We extended Rojo, Jones, Lingard, Periera, Mata, Matic. All of these players were extended even though they were nothing but fringe players and a lot of us wanted them replaced. We've not managed to sell on a single one. I think eventually we let Rojo go on a free anyway? Where is the value? Arguably other than Matic, none of them played a significant role since they've been extended.

 

[Schmeichel's Cartwheel]

Your last sentence.. Ole Gunnar Solksjaer is one of the best paid managers in football. Some fans will also defend that.

He’s the manager of Manchester United. The status of that job & the stress it must bring means it rightly one of the highest paid jobs in football. Whether he’s competent or not, the wage reflects the size of the club, not the level of the manager.

 

[R'hllor]

High wages and our managers not being capable to turn water into wine, not even for short period, long enough to scam someone to come and get them of our hands. Since SAF retired, out of all players we bought, how many have their value stagnated or we managed to increased vs those with value going downhill.

Instead of letting deadwood run out of contract, we giving them new ones probably improved or similar one. There can be few reasons for such practice.

 

[tomaldinho1]

What’s the alternative though?

Don't Liverpool pay quite average wages but just load contracts with add-ons to be competitive?

 

[AjaxCunian]

He’s the manager of Manchester United. The status of that job & the stress it must bring means it rightly one of the highest paid jobs in football. Whether he’s competent or not, the wage reflects the size of the club, not the level of the manager.

And this is something probably only United does to that extent, which I disagree with. This reasoning is also extended to the players I think, and that's why we have been so poor for nearly 10 years now.

Competency should be a much bigger factor than it is, this is almost rewarding managers and players; oh, you dare to take on the job of being a Man United player/manager.

I think I dare it too, let's see it later whether I'm competent.

 

[Cloud7]

The biggest issue is that we keep and attempt to use players until they’ve proven without a shadow of a doubt that they’re useless, which makes them hard to shift. Other clubs recognize that while a player might have a period of good form, their ceiling isn’t that high and tend to sell them on when there’s interest, rather than clinging on to them and hoping they can end up being class, as we tend to do. It’s a very poor way to approach things in my opinion. The vast majority of players, even if they show good form for a while, are not good enough to play for Manchester United, and we should sell these on rather than clinging to them.

In addition, we pay these fringe players exorbitant wages, which make other clubs less inclined to try to take on that burden.

 

[Cloud7]

He’s the manager of Manchester United. The status of that job & the stress it must bring means it rightly one of the highest paid jobs in football. Whether he’s competent or not, the wage reflects the size of the club, not the level of the manager.

The status and stress aren’t any different to say Liverpool or Chelsea, or even the Spanish big two, but as far back as Moyes, we’ve constantly had our managers as one of the highest paid in the world, more often than not being paid higher than better managers at equivalent ranked clubs.

It’s still not the best approach.

 

[TheRedDevil'sAdvocate]

Because we want to generate money from the sales to fund our next signings. And since we seem able to sign players only on premium fees, we also want to maximize our profit from selling players. Nothing wrong with that. But it’s admittedly easier to sell fringe players when the team is doing well as a whole and it's achieving its goals. When the team operates as a well-oiled machine on the pitch, even mediocre players can look better by serving a specific purpose in the team. The potential buyer is also more likely to fork out good money for someone who is surplus to a successful side.

We could just let them go, but it was such a cull that created the "protect the assets" strategy in the first place. Remember when LvG came in and let go around 15 players in the span of two seasons? Keane, Hernandez, Rafael, Zaha, Evans, Nani, Welbeck, we got less than 30 million pounds for all of them combined. That's how much Burnley got for Keane a few years later. Never mind the fact that Palace rejected a 70 million offer for Zaha a few years back.

It looks as if we want to generate surplus value out of thin air. As long as we realize that being a United player doesn't mean anything special to the rest of the world for quite some time now, we'll hopefully dig ourselves out of this particular rut.

 

[AjaxCunian]

The status and stress aren’t any different to say Liverpool or Chelsea, or even the Spanish big two, but as far back as Moyes, we’ve constantly had our managers as one of the highest paid in the world, more often than not being paid higher than better managers at equivalent ranked clubs.

It’s still not the best approach.

Some fans must find a way to defend the club at all cost, it is commendable in some way.

 

[#07]

The above two posts sum up perfectly what the problem is.

Also this stupid notion on not letting players leave on a free. We extended Rojo, Jones, Lingard, Periera, Mata, Matic. All of these players were extended even though they were nothing but fringe players and a lot of us wanted them replaced. We've not managed to sell on a single one. I think eventually we let Rojo go on a free anyway? Where is the value? Arguably other than Matic, none of them played a significant role since they've been extended.

Completely agree. Can anyone explain to me why we renewed Bailly's deal? Its obvious as the nose on your face that Ole doesn't rate him. The club knew that we were going to go in for Varane. So why did we do it?

'To protect value'? Why is this going to end up any different than the examples you've given. Who is going to be racing to pay us for an injury prone defender? In the end all we are doing is committing to paying millions to players who, frankly, are unlikely to offer much.

We've seen it time and time again that Ole refuses to use his bench. He clearly, clearly does not trust many players in our squad. Yet, time and time again they get new deals. The way the club is run is crazy.

 

[acnumber9]

It's a strange one for me that the likes of Chelsea can get almost 90 million quid for several of their fringe players this summer, meaning their total outlay on Lukaku is something like 7 million or thereabouts.
We have numerous players on the fringes of the squad who aren't likely to make a positive contribution to our first team but yet we seem to hold on to them for dear life and in several cases, reward them with lucrative long-term contracts, it's a little baffling.
The likes of Matic, Mata and Phil Jones are obvious examples of players whose best days are long behind them but who constantly get new deals.
One other point I would like to make is that we haven't even managed to sell a single player for a fee this summer.

Chelsea isn’t a fair comparison. Their business model is basically human trafficking. They stack up youth players with the intention of loaning and selling. Chelsea have their share of high earning flops they haven’t been able to shift for years too, Bakayoko and Drinkwater for example.

Our issue is the marvellous negotiation skills of Ed Woodward. We’ve paid players more than their worth for years.Under achieving on the pitch has only made this worse as we seem to have felt the need to sign more mercenaries because of it.

 

[Abraxas]

I think you have to be specific when thinking of these things. It's definitely not the case that because Chelsea sold some player we should be able to do similar.

Everything comes down to whether the player is sought after and the economic cost. The latter has become even more important.

The problem with the players we are trying to shift is they're bad value. They've offered nothing for years, are on high wages or have not excelled on loan. So you really have to drill down into the individuals and ask yourself what they've shown, what type of club they're heading to and what they represent economically.

Tammy Abraham was a cast iron easy sale. A matter of time. He's young, and a relatively proven goalscorer. That is absolute gold dust. He's excelled on loan, he's done reasonably at Chelsea. The only question was which club can afford him, not whether they want him.

 

[Cloud7]

Chelsea isn’t a fair comparison. Their business model is basically human trafficking. They stack up youth players with the intention of loaning and selling. Chelsea have their share of high earning flops they haven’t been able to shift for years too, Bakayoko and Drinkwater for example.

Our issue is the marvellous negotiation skills of Ed Woodward. We’ve paid players more than their worth for years.Under achieving on the pitch has only made this worse as we seem to have felt the need to sign more mercenaries because of it.

Is the Chelsea model a bad one? If the players are good enough they end up getting a stint at the club, and if not they get sold and then club makes money off of it. What’s the issue?