Manchester United spent £89.3 million, and broke the all time transfer fee record to sign Paul Pogba; the best player on the whole entire global transfer market this summer. Was the fee ridiculously exorbitant? Did many outsiders call them out for spending way too much on one individual player?
Sure, absolutely. However, if you got it, flaunt it. They’re pretty much printing money at Old Trafford, so why not spend it? That’s what it’s for.
Remarkably, this is the first time United have broken the world transfer fee record. They broke the British transfer fee record 12 times, most notably with Angel Di Maria. In the David Moyes and Louis van Gaal years, they broke the club transfer fee record three times.
This summer, United very much went back to being “that evil empire” beloved by 680,000,000 supporters worldwide.
It’s the New York Yankees or Dallas Cowboys style “we’re much richer than everybody else so we’re going to spend more on all the best players than everybody else and we’ll bludgeon everyone on the strength of all our money” Manchester United that we’re grown accustomed to.
It wasn’t just Paul Pogba though.
In Zlatan Ibrahimovic, they landed the summer’s biggest brand name individual player and pleasantly zaniest character. The sixth highest paid player in the world at the time of his signing, Ibra has already started to pay many dividends for the Red Devils. Ibrahimovic has been scoring at will early on for United. He’s also the second most expensive player in history of combined transfer fees from all moves at £144 million.
A name United fans know all too well, Di Maria is first at £152 million. (For the United transfer window report card go here)
It wasn’t just United spending like a drunken sailor this summer transfer window; it was the whole league. Here are some amazing and interesting stats and facts via BBC:
Premier League clubs spent more than £155m on transfer deadline day as the summer window outlay reached a record £1.165 bn.
Teams had already spent a combined £1.005bn as of 08:30 BST on Wednesday, shattering last year’s record £870m.
Thirteen top-flight teams broke their own transfer records.
The 20 clubs in the Premier League have benefited from a record £5.1bn television deal which came into effect this season.
Read the whole BBC piece on the summer transfer window at this link.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, partnered with FOX Sports Engage Network. and News Now. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, currently contributes regularly to the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye publication and Bold Global.
He also consistently appears on numerous radio and television talk shows all across the country. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram and Sound Cloud.