The January transfer window was a busy one for Premier League clubs. Manchester City’s spending spree was the second-biggest January investment ever by any club in the world and the Premier League clubs as a whole spent their third-highest January amount.
Manchester United loaned Marcus Rashford to Aston Villa and Antony to Real Betis and brought in Lecce defender Patrick Dorgu. Teenager Ayden Heaven was signed from Arsenal but the Red Devils need to sell at a big profit in order to recruit proven talent in the summer.
In the era of the Premier League’s Profit & Sustainability Rules (PSR), that means players developed by the club moving on for fees that go on the books in one piece, while the cost of incoming players is amortised over the length of their contracts to keep Man United within allowable losses.
Manchester United need to sell young to buy new
In terms of profit, the outstanding candidates for sale along with a potential £40 million incoming from Villa for Rashford are Kobbie Mainoo and Alejandro Garnacho – in a nutshell, United’s most valuable home-grown players.
Ruben Amorim admitted in January that the club was listening to offers for Mainoo and Garnacho despite the fairly obvious fact that he’d prefer to keep them both. Their PSR position will limit the club’s summer transfer activity and United remain open to selling the pair, according to reporting by The Guardian.
England international Mainoo’s contract runs to 2027 with a reported option for United to extend it by a year. The 19-year-old has started 15 of the Red Devils’ Premier League matches this season.
Garnacho, who was ranked at no.6 in FourFourTwo’s list of the most exciting teenagers to watch at the start of the season, is one of the few United players with a proven track record of changing games in his team’s favour but hasn’t scored a Premier League goal since November as United have drifted down the table.
If United do sell them, they won’t be selling them cheap. Mainoo is valued at more than £80 million, Garnacho at £70 million. While any sale would be reluctant, those are figures that can wipe out surplus losses overnight.
It would be a case of short-term pain to back Amorim in the transfer market and arm him with the players he believes can help him turn the tanker around.
Few of the decision-makers at Old Trafford would want to see Mainoo or Garnacho leave but would be the sales that unlocked other manoeuvres in the market.
Ultimately, they would be paying the cost of the club’s habitual wasting of money on players who’ve made precious little impact despite hitting the books hard.
