Former Manchester United defender Gary Neville has ripped the transfer market acquisitions and player recruitment practices of his former club, saying it “hasn’t been good enough” in recent years.
The United club legend slammed the transfer business that has been conducted at Old Trafford since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013. Since then United have had three managers (David Moyes, Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho) each with different styles and values when it comes to player acquisition.
“If you look at that back five today then they were all there when Sir Alex Ferguson was at the club,” said Neville in a Sky Sports interview.
“They’ve signed eight defenders in the last four or five years and not one of them is in the team today. You’ve got Valencia, Jones, Smalling, Young and De Gea and you obviously have Lingard and Rashford, who were also at the club as well, so seven out of that 11 were there five years ago.”
In two summer transfer windows, Mourinho has spent £285 million on seven players, and in the process become the first manager to eclipse over £1 billion spent on new players over the course of his career. United have spent £609.5 million on 22 players since Ferguson stepped down in 2013.
“The recruitment has not been good enough in the previous five years. It’s been disjointed when David Moyes came in, then they flipped upwards towards Louis van Gaal and then backwards with Mourinho in terms of the profile of players,” Gary Neville continued.
“It hasn’t been good enough, the recruitment, it’s been all over the place and you can see still quite a lot of the players in that squad have been at the club for a long time.”
Neville does have a point when brings up the disjointedness.
As he said, there have plenty of new players brought in, but many of them flopped, and they can’t beat out the guys already there (especially in the back line). This year saw Forbes ranking United as the richest club in the world again, so they are essentially printing money over at the Theatre of Dreams. Last summer, United broke the all time transfer fee record with #Pogback, returning Paul Pogba to Old Trafford. PSG more than doubled that this past summer of course in the Neymar acquisition.
So while United have splashed the cash, they have done so inefficiently and unintelligently.
A November study, commissioned by the CIES Football Observatory, estimates the transfer market values of team rosters and ranks them, with United coming in fifth.
There has just been too much wasteful spending, and too many big money busts.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, currently contributes regularly to WGN CLTV and the Tribune company’s blogging community Chicago Now.
Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Sound Cloud, LinkedIn and YouTube.