Manchester United have been one of the weakest at player trading in world football
Manchester United have been one of the weakest at player trading in world football
With profit and sustainability rules (PSR) having become part of the football vernacular in recent seasons, the focus on how well clubs have been able to trade in the transfer market has come into sharper focus.
For Manchester United, the arrival of Sir Jim Ratcliffe as minority owner through his 27.7% stake purchase in the club at the turn of the year was important for the direction of travel, with the British billionaire having been handed oversight on football and strategic matters behind the scenes as part of the deal.
The bungled arrival and departure of Dan Ashworth as the club’s sporting director within a five-month period left something of an early black mark on the decision making of the new INEOS-led regime, with Ashworth’s brief time at the club a costly one.
That flew in the face of what Ratcliffe wants to achieve. The 72-year-old wants to see costs driven down, and in hiring Ruben Amorim the idea is that the Portuguese will be shrewd enough operator in the market with less resource at his disposal, with the era of excess that had gone before, one that did not deliver the kind of success fans craved, having now seemingly disappeared.
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When talking about strong player trading the topic of ‘pure profit’ comes into play often. That applies to the sale of players who have come through the academy and who did not hold any book value from accounting perspective, meaning that there was no transfer fee to be amortised over the life of their contract. At the point of sale, it was all profit to the club, not over and above what the player still held in outstanding amortisation charges.
Scott McTominay departed for Napoli during the summer, while Mason Greenwood (Marseille) and Willy Kambwala (Villarreal) were among the academy graduates to exit Old Trafford for healthy sums that all aided the club’s PSR position, with the profit realised instantly. But perhaps a better indication of United’s player trading strengths and weaknesses, with emphasis on the latter, can be found in data published this week by analysts at the CIES Football Observatory in Switzerland, a think tank that scrutinises the data behind the game.
Over the past 10 years, United rank second in terms of having the highest negative transfer balance for players who were bought and sold by the club and who weren’t academy graduates. The data shows that United spent €830m (£683.2m, based on present exchange rates) on players since 2015, the fifth-highest in world football.
But in terms of receipts from player sales of assets who were bought and sold, they recouped just €246m (£202.5m), 15th on the list, meaning a negative transfer balance of €584 (£480.7m). That was a worse performance that Chelsea in third (€580m) despite the heavy investments in the team made by owners Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital over the past two-and-a-half years.
The worst performers were Paris Saint-Germain with a negative transfer balance of €646m.
What the data shows is the profligacy of United in the transfer market when it comes player trading, and the club’s overspending on talent. The overspend, allied with the lack of success that many players have been able to enjoy at Old Trafford, has meant that there has been little prospect of seeing player values grow beyond acquisition, making it almost impossible to realise any profit at disposal.
The upshot of that is that the club’s wage bill has also grown, and that has created a PSR pressure that, given the lack of success, has been needlessly created through a prolonged period of poor management at executive level. The club will fly under the radar of PSR, but that’s thanks in no small part to its ability to continue to be a commercial juggernaut.
But as the club looks to redefine what it is over the course of the next decade, finding ways to end the overspending and take some lessons from some of their rivals who have achieved more through spending less, will be central to just how successful the Ratcliffe era will be.