Manchester United have been transformed in the transfer market. In our latest video deep dive, FourFourTwo's Matt Frohlich examines how they managed it.
For more than a decade, Manchester United approached the transfer window like a worldwide billboard, spending over a billion pounds on individual star power while the actual team on the pitch kept unravelling.
They chased clout instead of the right player profiles, paid the so-called ‘United tax’ without hesitation, and locked themselves into a damaging cycle of inflated wages and fractured dressing rooms. But that period has now ended.
From refusing to meet excessive asking prices to recruiting players already proven in the Premier League, here is why Manchester United can finally be trusted in the transfer market again.
After Sir Alex Ferguson left, Manchester United stopped functioning like a football club and, at times, seemed to operate more like a click farm. The commercial side found a profitable shortcut: sign the biggest names in world football, dominate the digital news cycle, and let shirt sales and sponsorship income surge so the club could keep chasing elite names. And so the cycle rolled on. Angel Di Maria, Paul Pogba, Alexis Sanchez, Romelu Lukaku and the emotional return of Cristiano Ronaldo were not always purely tactical additions – they were also brand exercises. In the boardroom, those deals looked like victories. Pogba's unveiling broke the internet with #Pogback. Sanchez playing the piano generated millions of impressions. But on the pitch, the evidence told a different story. Across 10 years and five permanent managers, United remained among Europe's biggest spenders, paying out a staggering £1.5 billion on new players after Ferguson, yet had little to celebrate on the field apart from a couple of trophies, none of which would sit front and centre among the club's most famous silverware. The structural conflict was impossible to avoid. Managers were given expensive collections of individuals instead of players suited to a coherent system. Louis van Gaal wanted functional system players; he got superstars. Jose Mourinho wanted defensive steel; he got commercial assets and difficult egos. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer built a fluid counter-attacking side only for it to be disrupted by the arrival of an ageing Ronaldo.
United were moving in the wrong direction when they should have been doing the opposite. The central lesson became painfully clear: clout may deliver instant social media numbers, but without a joined-up tactical blueprint, it leads to long-term football decline. And nowhere did that hurt more than in the transfer market. Every club in Europe knew United lacked a modern scouting strategy, knew they had money because of the club's size and revenue, and knew there was desperation to get back to the top and land the latest shiny name, so they added a premium to every negotiation. It was the classic case of everyone knowing you were easy to charge extra. The problem was that United never seemed to learn and kept paying up every single time. That was the birth of what became known as the ‘United tax.’
When Ajax asked for £86 million for Antony, a winger valued at roughly half that amount only a few months earlier, United paid it. When Leicester stood firm at £80m for Harry Maguire, a fee considered too high by Manchester City, United gave in.
Even more damaging than the transfer fees was the wage structure. To persuade world-class names to join what was effectively a Europa League-level project, United handed out huge long-term contracts. Alexis Sanchez earned nearly £500,000 a week, while David de Gea became the highest-paid goalkeeper in history. Despite constant rumours that the Spaniard could leave, this created the kind of financial paralysis that hamstrung the club for a decade. When a player underperformed, United could not sell him. No club in Europe – essentially only Saudi Arabia – was prepared to match the wages of United's fringe players. Footballers such as Anthony Martial, Donny van de Beek and Eric Bailly remained on high salaries for years, seeing their market value collapse to zero while consuming large portions of the wage budget. Internally, it was also a disaster because when an established player or a new signing sees a teammate earning £300,000 a week, wage demands across the squad shoot up. It wrecked the dressing-room hierarchy and left the club unable to move in the market without taking risks or accepting major losses. United's biggest weakness was a total lack of what we might call “walking away power.” By overpaying for everything, they built a cage that trapped bad players inside the squad and kept modern success out. And perhaps the most damning example of all was Jadon Sancho: £73m to sign him, five years of inconsistency mixed with a few loan spells away from the club, wages worth hundreds of thousands of pounds per week, and then leaving on a free at the end of it all. So how have INEOS changed things over the last couple of years since taking charge? And why does it feel like both a football reset and an image rebrand?
In previous years, Manchester United's success often appeared to be defined by a charismatic poster-boy leader – one or two star names supported by players willing to do the hard work. Eric Cantona, David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney. They won more titles than most care to count for United. But that success did not happen without Gary Neville, John O'Shea, Michael Carrick and Park Ji-sung. That was then, though, and this is now. Bruno Fernandes has been one of the Premier League's best players for years. But without the right squad around him, that quality has not translated into enough team success for United. Statistically, Bruno's output since arriving in 2020 has been extraordinary. Nobody has created more chances in Europe's top five leagues. But depending on one player to be the main creator, presser and emotional leader created an unhealthy reliance. When Bruno had an off day, Manchester United had an off day. Yet the strategy through those post-Ferguson crisis years never really adapted. They kept buying headline names and hoping those stars could cover the cracks. Enter Raphael Varane, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Pogba, Marcus Rashford's new contract and, to an extent, Casemiro, even if he did finish his Old Trafford spell in better fashion. That hero complex damaged the development of a modern team structure. Elite teams such as Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City do not depend on ‘heroball’. They focus on raising the floor of the squad so every player can regularly deliver a certain standard, whether in the starting XI or coming off the bench. Every player knows where to stand, where to pass and where to press when possession is lost. Is that mechanical football always the most entertaining to watch? No. Would we rather watch players expressing themselves with a joy that cannot be coached? Yes. But modern football is modern football, and this approach has been working for some time. The need for a hero also slowed youth integration. Young academy players were not entering a functional, well-oiled machine that protected them; they were being thrown in at the deep end. That has worked before, to be fair. Nothing captured it better than Marcus Rashford living out every club's dream scenario: a big club gives a young star his chance, he makes an immediate impact and never looks back. It is a brilliant story. But it hardly needs explaining why that is not the strongest strategy, because you simply cannot depend on it. Now, though, the picture has changed, and the most recent transfer windows are proof. United are doing three things that have improved their recruitment strategy and won back plenty of trust from supporters.
First, they are targeting Premier League-proven players who make sense both in terms of value for money and improving the squad. The arrivals of Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha represent a complete shift in direction. Let's be honest, moving from shopping at Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund to Wolves and Brentford is some change. These are not vanity signings made to sell shirts around the world, but high-intensity, ready-made, proven profiles recruited to win Premier League matches. Secondly, they have stripped back an enormous wage bill in favour of something more structured. The days of De Gea, Casemiro, Varane and Sancho-style salaries are gone. Now, wages are reportedly all kept below 200 grand per week. That probably explains why Sandro Tonali was not a target, with his 270,000 per week package having the potential to blow that structure apart immediately. It is also reflected in the wages of Mbeumo, Benjamin Sesko, Cunha and Youri Tielemans, all said to be between £150 to 180k per week. And finally, United have rediscovered the most powerful tool in negotiation: the walking away power mentioned earlier. When confronted with extreme, ransom-like demands for targets such as Fernandez from West Ham, United did not panic or overpay, but calmly stepped away. Instead, they landed Youri Tielemans for an outstanding £35m release fee – a move shaped by both his fit in United's starting XI and sound financial logic. You could argue that a quiet, pragmatic signing lacks the excitement of a £100 million marquee arrival that a club like Manchester United is expected to make in order to attract glamorous talent. But why keep banging your head against the wall if that approach does not work? Tielemans gives the midfield immediate control and experience, and he does so without blocking the development path of the gifted Kobbie Mainoo. Mainoo remains the long-term heartbeat of the midfield. The throne is still there for him to claim in time, but for now he is being supported by experienced players rather than being overshadowed or forced to compete with someone his own age who could block him for the rest of his career. For the first time in more than a decade, United are not buying players to solve a PR crisis or win a transfer window. They are buying to build a sustainable, modern football team – one capable of competing not only at the top of the Premier League, but also in European and domestic competitions. Paris Saint-Germain have shown that moving away from superstars can bring rewards. And while their domestic context is completely different from Manchester United's, it is not a bad model to follow. As the saying goes, Rome was not built in a day.
