but in Fergie's day we could rock up at Villa, Brentford, Fulham and take their best players for reasonable fees. Take Saha for example, who we got in January for what 13m? despite being Fulham's top scorer. Imagine going to Brentford in January and asking for Toney for like £40million, they'd just laugh at us. We'd be looking at double that for Toney, and in the face of that Fergie would likely find another solution.
Fergie moved with the times better than anyone and he'd do the same today. You can't apply his transfer strategy logic to todays market.
Maybe not, but you can easily see what kind of strikers he went for when even medium fees were applied - and those were proven (very often
PL proven) strikers who were ready to step in with immediate effect.
His other striker signings were punts, which he loved on the cheap-ish and NEVER relied on as the main CF.
There’s nothing wrong with pointing out that SAF would never sign this lad for this amount and to be Utd’s first choice CF at this point. It doesn’t even mean that Højlund will fail.
But for a number of fans who grew up with Fergie’s approach to CF signings - which was basically exemplary - it does stand out as a very, very big risk given how this squad NEEDS a ready to rock CF right now.
Also, SAF’s approach with CFs wasn’t dated, it was way ahead of it’s time, and I would hope that ETH was looking to SAF’s history of Utd CFs as he could quite clearly learn a lot there as Fergie was a master in that area, and it’s clearly an area that isn’t ETH’s strongest.