Youri Tielemans

[Stinkin_Thinkin]

Let's hope we can play hard ball.

Rashford on a £5m deal?

more likely Shaw, Mount or a couple of their other stiffs

[Dante Lavelli]

Let's hope we can play hard ball.

Rashford on a £5m deal?

more likely Shaw, Mount or a couple of their other stiffs

Hands up if you think Mount would do well under Unai.

Just me?

[bilsim]

Horrible news, no way to sugarcoat it. Selling one of our better players to a major rival for a bargain price. Pretty much sums up what we already knew about the Sky 6 cartel and how we're trying to take them down with our hands tied to our feet.

[olaftab]

To be honest with you, he's exactly the sort of player Man U have been signing the last ten years. I can fully see him being absorbed into their belly and doing the sum total of fuck all.

Yes. Another player on his way to MLS/Saudi making his last mega money via manu. Being ex manu will get him a better retirement contract.

[ASHTONVILLA]

Let's hope we can play hard ball.

Rashford on a £5m deal?

more likely Shaw, Mount or a couple of their other stiffs

Hands up if you think Mount would do well under Unai.

Just me?

I agree, I think he has talent and would suit Emery.

[Olneythelonely]

There’s plenty of ways to sugarcoat it. He’s not getting any younger, we’re about to sign a 20-year old that could replace him. £35m is quite a bit for a 29-year old that has been playing professional football for 14 years. We need to bring wages and the age of our squad down. It might mean we don’t have to sell Rogers. Man U will financial kill themselves by giving him a 5-year contract on £250k a week.

Having said that, I’d prefer it if we didn’t sell him.

[Dave]

Let's hope we can play hard ball.

Rashford on a £5m deal?

more likely Shaw, Mount or a couple of their other stiffs

Hands up if you think Mount would do well under Unai.

Just me?

Wouldn't be against it, were it not for his injury record which makes Onana look like Ollie Watkins.

[Toronto Villa]

It’s shit news but Youri is also 29 years old. We need to get younger and this season clearly will be one of transition. This is made harder with the loss of Onana for a year. This much disruption in our midfield may be difficult to overcome. At least initially.

[Stu]

It’s sad but this is what team rebuilding looks like I guess.

[frank black]

It’s shit news but Youri is also 29 years old. We need to get younger and this season clearly will be one of transition. This is made harder with the loss of Onana for a year. This much disruption in our midfield may be difficult to overcome. At least initially.

Unlike the big six, we can’t afford transition seasons.

[ASHTONVILLA]

It appears Man Utd have pulled out of a deal to sign Ederson for £40m, in order to sign Tielemans. I would not be averse to us buying Ederson from Atalanta - he is a good player and only 26. Sort of player that could play well with Kamara.

[TheToffnar]

Horrible news, no way to sugarcoat it. Selling one of our better players to a major rival for a bargain price. Pretty much sums up what we already knew about the Sky 6 cartel and how we're trying to take them down with our hands tied to our feet.

Don't think on this occasion we can blame them much. Contracts been on the table for near enough a year which you'd imagine would have contained a higher release clause.

Can't blame him for gaming it.

[Monty]

£35m release clause is fucking criminal. Criminal.

He was signed on a free, though, and he would have had other options on the table at the time. All the power was on his side.

Why is the power always on the other side in every transfer we every do bar Rogers, then? Where was all that power in the Guessand deal?

I think we just have to accept that, for all the things we do well, we fucking suck at transfers.

The power in the Guessand deal was us using our clout to persuade a sought-after player to join us.

Good deal, wasn't it? Worked out beautifully. A stunning success.

Pardon?

My overall point is that our record at transfers is bad. Our clout in the Guessand case didn't save us from spending about as much on him as we're losing Tielemans for - it was a bad deal, a bad decision.

Your initial complaint in our interaction was about who holds the power in player recruitment.

We can be the stronger party and make poor choices (Guessand), we can be the stronger party and make good choices (Rogers).

We can be the weaker party and make good choices (Kamara) we can be the weaker party and make poor choices (Elliott).

In the case of Tielemans, we were the weaker party and broadly made good choices, if the alternative was not signing him in the first place.

Let's not get overly bogged down in what, yes, was a cheap bit of rhetoric in a post tossed off on my way to work.

My point is that our transfer activity is, broadly, bad. There was much marvelling at Unai's reaching the Europa final with such a similar team to the one that started his first game, but that is also undeniably an indictment. Yes, we're under sometimes bullshit restrictions - but Guessand, Sancho, these are not cheap punts (wages included). It says something that to find a really good deal other than Rogers you had to go all the way back to Kamara, signed under a previous regime (you might as well have mentioned McGinn), and who we still have in part because he's only ever good to go for a half a season. Maatsen wasn't cheap and can't dislodge Digne, I'm am Onana believer but you can't say that's gone entirely to plan. Torres, mostly a success with a fair amount of alarm asking the way, and we were bailed out by the Saudis on Diaby and to some extent on Duran (a qualified success). And we're now losing our best midfielder for about half his value.

Perhaps criminal is an exaggeration, but it's not great is it?

[AGRIPPA]

I’d rather sell Rogers….

[Toronto Villa]

It’s shit news but Youri is also 29 years old. We need to get younger and this season clearly will be one of transition. This is made harder with the loss of Onana for a year. This much disruption in our midfield may be difficult to overcome. At least initially.

Unlike the big six, we can’t afford transition seasons.

We have the best manager in the world. If anyone is going to pull it off it’s Emery. We couldn’t keep Tielemans forever. I’m not minimizing the loss because Youri is absolutely critical to how we set up and play. And going to Man U is a kick in the bollocks also. But at some point he was going to leave and we got a lot out of a player we got on a free transfer.