Who is a bigger flop if you consider his prior reputation and wages?Shaw and Sanchez as our biggest flops?
Must be new fans
Shaw is nonsense though.
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik @Rood and Imran @Annihilate Now! start with the good news by celebrating Manchester United Women's emphatic FA Cup win over Spurs at Wembley and the future of manager Marc Skinner.
Then it's the bad news and the ever worsening form of our Men with losses to Arsenal and Palace.
Finally the main debate - ETH Out now or keep him until the end of the season - if not longer. Are you Team Nik or Team Imran?
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Shaw is nonsense though.
Birtles, Hargreaves.
Sanchez has high wages but didnt cost a fee, so as much as you can blame wages you can also look to it being a free transfer. So the truth is somewhere in between.
Veron? Di Maria, Falcao?
Why was Hargreaves a flop? Because he got injured? That doesn't make him a flop. If so, that makes Van Persie a flop right?
He was outstanding in 2007-08 when we won the league and European Cup.
No, because he was a player we chased for over a year trying to get him from Bayern with the idea that he'd upgrade the Carrick and Scholes partnership. He came in for a pretty high fee at the time (English tax) played some games at CM and then lost his place. In the end he ended up a backup fullback and occasional side midfielder, not an upgrade. And thats without mention him being a sicknote, or going to Man City.
He went from having the rep as one of England's best players and being an upgrade on our CM, to being a backup fill in who is constantly injured.
Sanchez is at least still competing for the place he signed to play in. If he ends up a fullback then fair enough
He's not been as bad as Falcao.
Di Maria is probably the biggest flop weve ever had, he was MOTM in the champions league final the year before and he was amazing in multiple positions for Madrid. He excelled at RW & AM and was amazing wherever he played....then came here and after a few games it was like he couldnt be arsed anymore.
Veron was not suited to the EPL and was always inconsistent, Falcao was coming off multiple injuries but Di Maria doesnt really have any excuse
Not only that, but we (allegedly) experimented on him.
Our worst signing ever, all things considered.
Veron was a bit of a flop in the premier league, but he did play well in europe. Still overall a flop but dunno how big
Thats incorrect. We paid a transfer fee between 25-30m for Alexis. He also got an undisclosed sign-on fee on around the same amount. Plus we paid his agent like 10m. So the total cost for the Sanchez transfer was around 60-70m - excluding his wages -; an investment that will need to be written off completely since he will have no resale value because of his age and the fact that no one will ever pay a transfer fee for him being on those wages. We would probably need to subsidise his wages if we wanted to get rid of him.
Its easily the most expensive transfer United has ever made. Nothing comes even close.
Yeah so around £29 million for a winger, with expensive wages and swapping Miki.
The wages have been 1 year and would have been fairly high even if we paid full value for a star player from Arsenal. But obviously we've paid a lot more over a year with his high wages.
He was first choice last season and one of our most creative players, this season hes lost his place and isnt first choice. For now he's backup we'll see how he goes under Ole
Thought that was ridiculous myself. Absolute howler of a post by our social media team.What a thing to remind everyone about
What? 29m what?
And how did we "swap" Mikhy? Mikhy is irrelevant to this. If Arsenal had not bought him for 25m; someone else would have had. He had a transfer value. Sanchez had not since he had 4 months left on his contract.
We still paid around 70m in total for a 29 year-old who had 4 months left of his contract. Plus his enormous wages.
Hargreaves’ quality when we bought him was somewhere between his rep in England as too good to be English and his rep in Münich as expendable hardworker with increasing injury worries. His delivery after we bought him was somewhere between ‘outstanding for a season and a half’ and ‘a backup fill who was constantly injured’. A huge flop I wouldn’t call him, as he didn’t come for a world record fee and he certainly played a useful part in one of our greatest seasons ever.
Dubbing Sanchez a flop is also premature hysterics. People with high expectations should deal with their own disappointments.
Now Gary Birtles, that was a flop.
Interesting, somehow I've completely missed this and was still under the impression that it was a straight swap? I can't find anything about it not actually being swap deal, when doing a quick google search all that pops up is this:
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/42697836
https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...manchester-united-so-close-says-jose-mourinho
Do you have some sources where the real deal is explained?
Veron was way better than Sanchez. Falcao was just a loan and I dont know what people expected from him you looked at his performances in the months leading up to that. Had serious problems after his injury.
Maybe Di Maria, but at least got rid of him for a decent fee after a season.
Having a player who doesnt perform well on insane wages fecks up the wage structure can't be good for contract negotiation. It's also hard to get rid of him.
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This
"Straight swaps" does not happen in the real football world; just on FM. It has to do with practical issues, agent fees, and tax issues among other things.
What happened here what that Arsenal agreed to sell us Sanchez, but they needed to replace him so they wanted us to transfer them Mikhy: a player that had a transfer value probably over the 25m that we agreed to sell Mikhy for. Tbf we probably gave them a discount of 10-15m on Mikhy which then also could be seen as an additional "cost" for the Sanchez transfer.
But we could have got 25-35m for Mikhy from any other player on the market, so this is not some "zero sum"- deal.
And even if it had been a formal swap it does not really matter if you pay for Sanchez with 30m in cash or with an asset worth 30m. Same cost for the club.
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport...t-mkhitaryan-contract-deal-done-a8165426.html
This is one short recap of what happened. Independent is ABU, so I wouldnt believe the 490k a week salary, its probably inclusive of potential bonuses and image rights. Sanchez base salary is probably around 350-400k.
Its a crazy expensive deal in total and a big reason why Mourinho couldnt splash all the cash he wanted the following summer.
So has everyone lost faith in him coming good?
I would have rather kept Mickey than this guy. At least he would have been an option on the right. This guy is a massive reason we can't sign players at the moment. Whoever pushed for this deal should be fired. Oh wait...
I would be happy if we got rid of him. Even if it meant taking a hit and paying 30% of his salary. I genuinely think this will leave room for at least 2 new players.
I still have some faith in him becoming useful (mainly due to our change in style), but I don't believe he'll ever reach the level he had at Arsenal.
Mickey Thomas? The moneyforger?
Mkhi is pretty useless for Arsenal from what I've seen.
So is Alexis for us. At least Mickey doesn't cost as much. He's a far less expensive version of useless. I would rather him be here and it gives us room to give a salary of £100 - £150k to 2/3 young players than have this clown.
The board have made it clear that we need to sell to buy. This guy is a massive elephant in the room.
Mickey Mouse
It would. If he does not come good and perform we really should look at letting him and Lukaku (same goes with him having to perform to his salary) go. That would make room for 3 maybe 4 high quality players in.
We (hopefully, if they decide to stay) need to give Martial and De Gea some serious wage increases this summer as well. So we really need to evaluate the performances of some of our high earners in the squad.
Nah, Im still giving him a chance under Ole. 2 assists in 2 games under Ole before his injury too. Re-evaluate in the summer, but dont count on him to be carrying the team.
My honest feeling is that he's entered into the latter day Rooney zone, but I'd like to see us give him a few games back to back on the right, as if he can't play there he's not much use to us.
I have nothing against the guy other than that. He was top player and he would have been amazing for us between 2010-2016. I think we were linked with him when he was in Italy. Shame we got him too late.
The big concern and frustration for me is that we're seeing all these top players changing clubs right now. Yet we can't go for anyone unless we offload. Players like De Jong, De Ligt, Wan Bissaka are all players that Man Utd would have been in for. Also, I hear about Liverpool stepping in late for Hudson Odoi. That would be a genius move if the story is true and they pull it off.
Sad to see the outcome, I really had high hopes for him but I think his deadline must be the summer. If he is not a convincing starter by then we should part ways, it just hasn't worked for him and he is to much of a expensive player to have on the bench and will eventually become a problem in the dressing room.
We swapped plus paid around £29 million. Thats what we did. No need to talk around it, we didnt pay full value for Arsenal's star player
Forgive me for my ignorance, but say we'd waited until the summer before signing Sanchez when his contract had run out. Wouldn't the only difference be that Mkhi would've still been on our books, and we could've possibly sold him for 25-35m like you say? So effectively you can say that was 25-35 million down the drain.
Most reports speak about a 300k a week base salary plus some vague hints at bonuses and image rights. I can't imagine him receiving much of the bonus part considering his form, but maybe his image rights could bring it towards 400k a year/21 million a year in salary?
So a (perhaps slightly optimistic) recap: there's the 25-30 million we could've gotten for Mkhi. There's the signing on fee of 20 million and there's the agent's fee of 10 million. So am I right in concluding we effectively paid around 55-60 million for a 29 year old player with a contract for half a year?
On top of that he's now received a year's worth of salary of around 21 million. Making the total 'costs' so far around 75-80 million.
However, he is also our asset as you call it and has another 3.5 years left on his contract. Juventus value 31 year old Higuain at around 30 million (if Chelsea want to buy him this summer).
https://www.juventus.com/en/news/news/2019/gonzalo-higuain-joins-chelsea-on-loan.php
I don't see why Sanchez would be worth less than Higuain considering that he's a year younger, is proven quality, has a lengthy contract with us, and the fact that Higuain currently is on 6 goals in 15 serie A matches. So I don't see any reasons to not put Alexis Sanchez' current value at around 30 million as well.
So say we'd sell him now in this winter window, we have the efficively paid a 'fee' for Sanchez of around 55-60 million, minus his current value of 30 million = around 25-30 million down the drain.
On top of that you could also argue that he's been overpaid a little. He's a high level player but 250k-300k a week seems like a more appropriate salary than 400k for a player of his stature. This makes for another 5-8 million. So all things considered if we would sell him tomorrow there's around 30-40 million 'wasted'. Quite costly given the fact that he only incidentally has been important for us (2 assists at the Emptihad last year, scored against Tottenham in the semi-final FA Cup come to mind)
What do you make of this assesment? There's of course a bit of 'optimism', for example we might sell him for less than the 30 million he should be worth in order to create incentive for him to leave/make clubs eager to buy him, adding another 5 to 10 million to the costs or so. But then again the same applies to the fee we could've got for Mkhi had we wanted to offload him.
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Yes, exactly. The transfer fee we paid Arsenal was basically for letting him go in January. We could have made the same two deals in the summer and kept that part of the cash. Otherwise a good summary, me thinks.
Are you wumming or what?
We paid 25 -30m for Sanchez to get him in January, when he had 4 months left of his contract. In the summer he would have been free.
That we paid 25-30m in transfer fee for a player with 4 months left on his contract must easily be a world record to start with btw.
In addition to this we paid Sanchez a 30m sign-on fee and 10m to his agent.
That is a total transfer cost of up towards 70m.
In a separate deal Arsenal paid us around 25m for Mikhy, who had a market value of around that after not really setting OT on fire.
So in that deal we got 25m cash for a player worth exactly that or even more. We could have done that in the summer with Arsenal or another club. Same result.
The Mikhy deal did not monetarily in anyway affect what Sanchez-deal cost us; except for if one thinks that we sold Mikhy on the cheap, which would actually make the cost for Sanchez even higher.
You started by arguing that we got Sanchez on a free and that he just cost us wages. Now you seem to think that we somehow paid for him with Mikhy, which is just plainly incorrect.
That Arsenal did not want to let us buy Sanchez in January if they could not make the Mikhy deal then as well to replace him, does not make this a swap in financial terms.
All I can say about Owen Hargreaves is we would not have won the Champions league and Prem league without him. He also started in the final against Chelsea. He is someone we could do with in today's team to be honest. No way a flop.
Di maria is what you call a flop. Not Hargreaves.
Hargreaves was derailed by his bad knees, he wasn't a flop. He was very instrumental in the 08 CL final, I don't think we would have gone toe to toe with Chelsea's midfield without his quality.
If Alexis really is on a base salary of "just" 300k, and if he agrees to leave (and forfit his possibilities of bonuses if United suddenly is great again), which are to big ifs tbf: yeah, then maybe we could optimistically even get a transfer fee for him.
I am not so bitter about the fact that we took a real expensive punt on him and that it did not work out. So far. If nothing else it showed that the club is ready to spend.
That money is as the proverbial water under the bridge.
The problem with him going forward is that his wage makes it more difficult for us to get new players in that we need in the summer more than him. Thats basically my view, but if he starts to perform the rest of the season; great. Keep him. If not, his future should be considered this summer, and if we could get a deal near something that you are proposing it would be good business. Now. Not considering what we already spent.
I read a list of "the biggest flops" recently where it stated that Sanchez signed on a free. It didnt sound right to me, but thats what I remembered when I was posting before. Then when you mentioned it, I looked it up on transfermarkt and of course, there was a £29 million or so fee as well as Miki that I now remember. So yes my post before was incorrect.
However we obviously didnt pay full whack for Arsenal's best player at £29 million + a player people on here were constantly complaining about. He'd have cost a lot more than that
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