Idiotic Sales Post Fergie

[Sandikan]

This thread is clearly pure revisionism.

Evans was muck for the year or two before we got rid.
Nani and Rafael way off their top levels and huge injuries too.

Welbeck was one loads of people got irate about, but funnily enough not one person tries to say that's a mistake now.

 

[Raoul]

Much of this had to do with having lower quality management incapable of getting the best of the Fergie players.

I would've kept Nani for a couple more years for instance, but his general effectiveness would've been less at that stage of his career and under new managers every couple of years.

 

[kambinks]

I don't think people remember how bad Evans was in his final season. He's a decent player but he desperately needed to leave, just as much for his sake as United's.

Also remembered him being injury proned and we were pretty optimistic with Jones and Smalling as our future partnership. Can also say the same for Rafael really. Great direct player but hes even more frustrating to watch injury wise compared to Nanis decision making. Hes probably seemed to be a bad fit into Van Gaals system.

The only sale that i thought was a little premature was Blind. Seemed like a very good utility player and he could cover quite a few places in the team as a fringe player. And effin hell he was gorgeous

 

[Rood]

This thread is clearly pure revisionism.

Evans was muck for the year or two before we got rid.
Nani and Rafael way off their top levels and huge injuries too.

Welbeck was one loads of people got irate about, but funnily enough not one person tries to say that's a mistake now.

Ye a fair bit of hindsight revisionism going on - although I remember being disappointed at a few players LvG let go but at the same time he had a totally different philosophy that was not suited to certain players

Anyway this is all part of the issue about lack of DoF or footballing philosophy at director level so each time you get a new manager there is going to be players out the door regardless of their ability

 

[Cutch]

People are forgetting how utterly awful Evans was under Van Gaal. It was his chance to shine with Rio and Vidic gone and he totally fluffed his lines. West Ham and MK Dons were as inept a performances you could ever expect a Man Utd centrehalf to have and it was pretty unanimous at the time that he had to move on.

 

[jderbyshire]

Zaha has to be the worst case.

One of Moyes' many mistakes.

Simply disrespectful to Fergie not giving his last signing a chance and discarding him like that.

EDIT: I know he was sold under LvG's managment, but I imagine the die had been cast by the time he arrived.

 

[stevoc]

This. In terms of playing style and attitude, Rafael was a much better fit for United.

If Ole had to choose between Rafael and Darmian, who would he have chosen? I'd say Rafael.

Any manager with ambitions to play decent football would choose Rafael every time. Darmian is a defensive fullback who won't attack and can barely even defend.

 

[limerickcitykid]

Blind is the only one any good. The rest were rightly sold.

 

[Handré1990]

Definitely Zaha. We sold him for 3m without giving him any chances. He is now valued at 80m.
Evans too, we've spend 80m on Maguire, but Evans is better than him.

So, these 2 alone is nearly 160m wasted.

You absolute madman! Evans had to go. A CB who looked like a confidence player isn’t much of an option for ManUtd imo.

 

[Kasper]

Well if you look how sold players have done at other clubs after their United career I don't think that there are many idiotic sales.
I'd say Zaha looks like a mistake given how he has developed and I think it was wrong to sell Blind since he is a very versatile player who could decently play multiple positions and seemed like a great guy to have as a backup. Evans maybe, but I think a lot of his performance is down to Leicesters solid system.

 

[MalcolmTucker]

Some people with short memories, Evans was absolutely shocking for us post-Vidic.

 

[VeevaVee]

Pretty much every one of these deserved to go. People really need to move on. What did Rafael, Nani or Chicharito do after leaving United? Absolutely nothing. They were sold because they were past it.

I feel like I see a similar thread once or twice each year.

We struggled with having no proper RB for years. Valencia was largely very poor there, sometimes able to do a job but never offering us an improvement on our football. Rafael was better.

Nani shouldn't have gone when he did and certainly not for that amount. He wasn't passed it, just very inconsistent, and the manager wanted to impose their (shit) style. He would have been useful seeing as we also had wing problems for so long, and still do.

Hernandez would have been a useful backup if willing to play that role, considering we've been in a position where we've had no strikers, and have lacked goals and options to get them many times.

Blind would have been massively useful because he has a head on him and play in multiple positions.

We needed better than Evans, but he'd be better backup than Jones.

None of them world beaters, all would have improved us in the following years in my opinion.

 

[Andycoleno9]

1. Nani. He could have played few more seasons. Even maybe in first 11.
2.- 3. Depay and Zaha.
Depay never got second chance. Zaha didn't even get first chance.
4. Blind. Good backup option


Others were not United material and only thing which we could have done better is to get more money for them. (Hernandez, Evans, Cleverley)

 

[devilish]

Sir Alex was a great motivator who created a well oiled machine whom while severely flawed he was able to make it work. Once he left the entire house came tumbling down. Many players were too old, too shit or lacked the motivation to keep on playing for us. My only regret is seeing us getting rid of Zaha. I think that with enough patience and good management he could have become a star for us.

 

[Jericho]

After about 10 games i did.

After 10 games playing for United? Well yeah, I’m sure a lot of people were figuring that out by then as it was happening.

 

[RedRonaldo]

You absolute madman! Evans had to go. A CB who looked like a confidence player isn’t much of an option for ManUtd imo.

Evans is still better than Maguire though.

 

[Jericho]

I remember the week we bought him a journalist saying did anyone truly think he'd be a regular in two years and he wasn't the right quality.

And outside a good first month he was bang on

So? I remember a journalist that called Ronaldo a donkey.

 

[Hellboy]

Zaha has to be the worst case.

One of Moyes' many mistakes.

Simply disrespectful to Fergie not giving his last signing a chance and discarding him like that.

EDIT: I know he was sold under LvG's managment, but I imagine the die had been cast by the time he arrived.

Zaha was banging Moyes’s daughter apparently ...

 

[sullydnl]

If you have a well run team with a defined style then lesser players who happen to suit that set up can flourish and perform to a higher level than they would in other contexts.

If you keep switching managers and styles though then those lesser players will inevitably be the casualties, as they're simply not good enough to repeatedly avoid being on the sell list of multiple managers with different approaches.

Take Blind and Hernandez, for example. LVG rated Blind, didn't rate Hernandez. Mourinho didn't rate Blind, lamented Hernandez being sold before he arrived. If either of those managers had been a success here then one of those players would be have been rated as a highly useful player, the other sold without regret. Because both managers failed we imagine that both players could have succeeded here at the same time under "the right" manager, which isn't necessarily the case. Mostly because they weren't that good.

Most of the players mentioned so far were (to varying degrees and for varying reasons) lesser players. Sure some might have proven useful under a manager that suited them but few if any managers would have rated the majority of those players, let alone all of them. The problem with our sales is less the players themselves and more what it says about how disjointed our strategy as a club was. I wouldn't lose sleep over any of them being sold but not being able to find continued use in any of them isn't right either, especially given the time and money spend buying and replacing them.

 

[AltiUn]

Evans was absolutely useless the season we sold him, just because he became half decent years later doesn't mean it was a bad sale, he'd be good in our team now but wasn't at the time. Hernandez was a good player but he was never good enough to be starter for us, he wanted more minutes and that's why he left. Blind was a good footballer but we got a fairly decent fee, I don't really see how Mourinho or Solskjaer would've utilised him. Look how physical and energetic our current midfield is now, he'd have made a good back up to Matic but that's it. Rafael and Nani should never have been sold, I'm still disappointed about that to this day, that might just be me wearing rose tinted specs though.

Van Gaal got rid of a few players that managers later down the line may have found useful, in hindsight he was one of the worst picks for manager imaginable.

 

[berbatrick]

We haven't had a consistent option on the right since 2011 and Nani's fall (I never rated Valencia and nobody else is a specialist RW). Blind or Evans would have been nice to have at times.

 

[Sandikan]

So? I remember a journalist that called Ronaldo a donkey.

Slight difference is the guy on Darmian, along with most fans were totally right.

 

[Brightonian]

Don't know that any of those look like egregiously bad decisions to me. Of course we mostly got shit prices for them, which is just par for the course for us. But every single one of those players was being criticised to high heaven on here when they got sold. Some felt like they might have made it, Rafael and Evans notably, but they had failed to properly do so for season after season by the time they were sold.

The only one of those players who would be even in the running for our current first choice XI if we time travelled them from the moment we sold them to right now is Nani. At his best, of course, a brilliant player, but how often was he actually at his best? If we get Sancho this summer we'll be better off. Blind is in the Mata category - a reliable sub but with weaknesses to his game that mean he could never be a satisfactory first choice in any position.

 

[el3mel]

We struggled with having no proper RB for years. Valencia was largely very poor there, sometimes able to do a job but never offering us an improvement on our football. Rafael was better.

Nani shouldn't have gone when he did and certainly not for that amount. He wasn't passed it, just very inconsistent, and the manager wanted to impose their (shit) style. He would have been useful seeing as we also had wing problems for so long, and still do.

Hernandez would have been a useful backup if willing to play that role, considering we've been in a position where we've had no strikers, and have lacked goals and options to get them many times.

Blind would have been massively useful because he has a head on him and play in multiple positions.

We needed better than Evans, but he'd be better backup than Jones.

None of them world beaters, all would have improved us in the following years in my opinion.

Rafael in his last 2 years was getting injured more than half of the season. Starts well then gets injured fast and never manage to return well for the remainder of the season. Yes he was great in Fergie's last season but that's about it. Beside Valencia was actually great and well praised up till the end of 2016/2017 season.

Nani was past it by the time he left. He spent the remainder of his career in Portugal, hardly proved he was still good at top level.

Chicharito thought of himself as better than back up, while in fact he was never good enough to be a main starter in a top team especially at modern age when strikers are tasked with more than just scoring goals.

Blind simply never proved himself 100% in any position he played. Decent as a CB, but with many flaws appearing in many games, very slow as LB and a terrible midfielder whenever he played there.

Evans spent the majority of his last few seasons injured and I can bring his performance thread here in LVG's first season when the most was attacking him and had no problem with him leaving. Sure, he's the only of the lot who found form after leaving, but by that time it was the right call.

Simply the problem in most of these is the replacements were mostly pretty poor or non existent, hence people believed we lost them. The reality is all of them deserved to go by this time. We just didn't do well on the buying department.

IMO each and every player we sold post Fergie deserved to go. The problem was only we had many flops in buying players.

 

[harms]

I don't think that any of those sales qualify as "idiotic", although some of those players I'd probably keep. Only Blind and arguably Evans have performed at the level that was close that you'd want to expect from a United player, and neither would've performed as well for us as they did for their respective clubs.

I would've kept Rafa even if it was in Fred's place (the mascot Fred, not the other one), but he's hardly ever fit nowadays.

 

[tenpoless]

Vidic, Ferdinand and Evra left too early in my opinion. And I would have kept Januzaj as well, at least as a squad player.

 

[Utd7]

I watched the 8-2 game yesterday, and I must say - Fergie has a way of making average players play great football. That United team had a midfield of Nani (great that season), Anderson, Cleverly, and Young, and a defense of Smalling (at RB!), Jones, Evans and Evra. Yet they were moving the ball around (one touch) like a peak United team!

Magic touch. I would say any player at United in 2012 would have done much better if Fergie had not retired. No way we can pick a few names here and there.

RVP may have won 4-5 titles for all you know!

That’s why SAF is the GOAT.

Regarding bad sales post Sir Alex, RVP, Hernandez and Zaha.

 

[204Red]

Not all bad... (even though we never should have bought him in the first place), somehow we suckered Everton into paying £24 million for Morgan Schneiderlin!

 

[TrustInJanuzaj]

Only Blind was the wrong sake as well as Mourinho not doing everything to keep Herrera. Everyone else was terrible when they were sold and have proven nothing since leaving.

 

[stevoc]

After 10 games playing for United? Well yeah, I’m sure a lot of people were figuring that out by then as it was happening.

Yeah and if people who simply watch football as a pastime can see how bad he is after a few games. Then you would hope professional scouts and coaches would have seen or at least suspected it before we signed him.

And setting aside his quality as a player as that’s subjective depending on who you ask. But his stamina was shit so he wasn’t suited to playing In the PL as a fullback and he was horrible with the ball at his feet playing out so he definitely didn’t suit LVG’s possession game either.

Which begs the question why the feck did we sign him.

 

[limerickcitykid]

Vidic, Ferdinand and Evra left too early in my opinion. And I would have kept Januzaj as well, at least as a squad player.

The three of them were beyond shit at the end. Evra seemed to decide he didn’t need to bother defending anymore. Not to mention he personally requested to leave as well. And Ferdinand and Vidic practically immediately retiring after having the most forgettable spells ever sums how done they were.

 

[2cents]

None of them good enough, just look at what they've done after leaving. Did Nani do a single thing of note after leaving United? Has Rafael even been a regular starter for Lyon? Chicharito could barely get a game for West Ham. And these are the three most regularly mentioned players in these threads.

The problem has been replacing them with worse players.

 

[jem]

After about 10 games i did.

Actually that's pretty hard to believe given that Darmian had a very promising start to his United career. This comes off as pure revisionism.

 

[jderbyshire]

Zaha was banging Moyes’s daughter apparently ...

Wasn't true. But still hilarious.

 

[limerickcitykid]

Actually that's pretty hard to believe given that Darmian had a very promising start to his United career. This comes off as pure revisionism.

The only revisionism and make believe was people lying to themselves that he was somehow amazing at the start when he was nowhere near. Sure he got hooked at half twice in the first 10 matches of the season. He had a decent 5 games or so where he was still easily worse than all of Blind, Smalling, and Shaw.

 

[NoPace]

Tough to say on some of them but the clear and massive errors were:

1. Selling Evans - He's been very good for 5 years since leaving us (age 27-32) and Leicester fans say he was at least as good as Maguire and we paid 80M for a 26 year old Maguire. This was probably a 40-60M transfer quality mistake or so if you figure that's the normal fee for a very good but not elite 26 year old Prem proven defender who then works out for 5 years, like if we signed Rudiger or someone good but not great like that this summer, aged 27 or so.

2. No buyback for Zaha - Sell him fine, but we sold him for 3-6M, and if we'd had a 20M or so buy back clause instead of a fee sell on after 2 years like a club like a smarter club like Madrid would have done, we'd have brought him back and had a fun winger and odds are a non-Moyes manager would have gotten on fine with him. Versatile and productive winger, would now cost 50-70M it seems, but at his age now I'd be worried about paying that much for such a dribbling reliant player. Similar level mistake to Evans.

3. Blind - Smart and versatile player who would be getting 30-40 games a year here and doing well, maybe more of a 30M or so mistake than a 50M one.

4. Dwight McNeil - He was cut at 14 so this doesn't count, but our needs at LWB and RW are so great and the fact that he's done well playing LW while being left-footed means he might have untapped potential offensively if allowed to play RW. I genuinely think he'd have started at LWB a lot this year and let us go 5 at the back more because his crossing and playmaking from a similar position at Burnley is so good and Rashford is basically a forward at left wing anyways. Similar to Blind but with added upside at his age and not being unathletic like the Dutchman.

 

[Rampant Red Rodriguez]

Rafael, Evans and Nani for me. For a bit more tolerance I'd have liked to keep Hernandez and Blind a bit longer.

Imo appointment of Mourinho was a mistake in itself tbh, but I've let bygones be bygones.

 

[Schmeichel's Cartwheel]

Selling Nani for £4.25 million has to be one of the worst pieces of business I've seen

Rafael for £2m too

 

[Schmeichel's Cartwheel]

Phelan, Meulensteen and Steele were our worst releases since Fergie left.

Phelan was just a cone man mate. Agreed on the other 2 though

 

[Dave Smith]

I do not think that the transfers out have been too bad. Zaha and Depay were probably the worst as both are now worth a lot more, although I do not think either are much more than what I term Everton calibre players. Evans for me would be great as CB4 but he has kind of found his level/club which makes him look better than he is. Playing for Leicester and Utd are two different things (no disrespect to Leicester.)

The biggest problem has been transfers in. There are far too many to list as awful let alone disappointing.

If anyone is down about the sales, just think Chelsea have had it worse. Jose somehow managed to sell both De Bruyne and Salah in 6 months there.