Remember Alexis Sanchez?
He was considered by many to be Manchester United’s worst signing ever until Antony showed up, and he’s had plenty of competition. Di Maria, Sancho, Fred, Pogba – United are very good at wasting money.
For my money though, the Sanchez deal is by far the worst of the lot, including Antony. Why? Because all of the bad deals we have made in the last 10 years started with him. He might have been ‘free’, but he broke the wage structure. He set the precedent for what was to come, and all of our current issues with offloading expensive players who are not delivering the goods stem from him.
To be clear, this isn’t directed at Sanchez personally. I know he stank out Old Trafford on a weekly basis, but what I am talking about is his deal. You can’t blame the player for taking the money.
But you can blame the guy who offered the money in the first place, at that guy was Ed Woodward.
Ed Woodward Set the Wage Spiral in Motion
Sanchez arrived from Arsenal in January 2018. He came as part of a swap deal that saw Henrikh Mkhitaryan go in the other direction, so he wasn’t exactly free, but he didn’t cost any money either. The real price paid for his services, however, was much, much more costly.
Sanchez was one of the Premier League’s most exciting attackers at the time, and Man City were in for him too. Ed Woodward wanted to beat our rivals to his signature, seeing it as a headline win, and was prepared to pay a reported £375k a week in wages to do so.
With no transfer fee to pay this half made sense. That is, for anyone with no ability to think a few steps ahead. However, the message it sent was disastrous.
When you have one player earning almost double the wages of your other star names at the top level, it breeds resentment. Or at the very least, means those other players will want equally high wages. Especially if that player earning twice as much as everyone else isn’t performing.
Sanchez was dropped from the team 5 months after arriving at Old Trafford, while the likes of Lukaku, Pogba, De Gea, and Martial played on for half the money. So what happened?
Sure enough, De Gea’s next contract was at £375k per week, Martial’s wages more than doubled to £250k, and on it went. The crazy wage spiral had begun. The club had set the ceiling too high, and players knew they could leverage that.
Knock on Effect Makes Sales Difficult
I could list loads of players who have stolen a living from Manchester United from 2018 to now, but the added issue is that it makes these players very difficult to sell if they underperform. And they often do underperform because they are not coming for the right reasons. They come for the wages, often with a massive price tag which adds a ton of pressure, so they flop.
When that happens, not only are we trying to offload someone who’s market value has dropped due to poor performance, but any buyer will need to either match or at least come close to their wages at United to tempt them away. Players know this, so they have the club over a barrel.
United’s options are:
- Loan – Saving a bit on wages perhaps, but not getting rid of the problem, not earning a transfer fee, and holding us back from signing better players.
- Keep – Let the player ride out the contract, contributing little and wasting millions in wages.
- Sell – At a huge loss and still under market value because everyone knows we are desperate to get rid.
None of those options are good.
Jadon Sancho is a perfect example of this. We paid too much for him, gave him a £350k weekly salary that he didn’t deserve, then fell out with him. No one is willing to pay anywhere close to to the £73 million we shelled out for him, nor meet his astronomical wage demands. So we are stuck with him unless we allow ourselves to get lowballed. And my God were we lowballed.
Juventus reportedly offered £8.5 million plus add ons, and Sancho said he will only move if United pay him off to the tune of £5 million – the amount Chelsea paid us to take him back. It’s the insult of the century, and it’s only been possible because we paid him so much in the first place.
The same difficulty existed in getting rid of Rashford. His £375k a week salary was a huge barrier for interested clubs, despite the modest asking price. As a homegrown player he should have been much easier to sell as we didn’t pay anything for him in the first place, but we paid him too high a salary, so he has little financial incentive to leave.
What keeps happening then, is we buy them too high, pay them too much, then the player underperforms, can’t be sold, and leaves on a free. Great business United. Well done.
The Legacy of Poor Planning
The Alexis Sanchez deal is where this all began, and all because Ed Woodward didn’t have the good sense to realise that once the wage ceiling was raised so high, everyone else would want their wages raised to meet it.
In fact, he not only made the mistake once but doubled down: Ronaldo on half a million a week, Cavani on £250k, Varane on £340k, Casemiro on £350k. Yes, you could argue that Rooney was on £300k back in 2016, but the difference is that Rooney was established and had proved his worth. Most of the others on big wages hadn’t, not at Manchester United anyway, and many of them did not play well for us.
We have got consistently worse as the annual wage bill has climbed. In fact, one of the only tables in which Manchester United are still in the top 3 every season is the annual wage bill. In 2025 we had the second highest wages only to Manchester City – and came 15th!
INEOS are attempting to reset the culture at the club, including the expectation of ridiculous wages, but it’s a slow process because you need to find a way to end contracts or wait for them to expire. In the meantime, United struggle to find high quality replacements because we don’t have the money to pay for them.
That’s the legacy of poor planning.
A Cautionary Tale
The Alexis Sanchez deal should be taught in football business schools – if such places exist.
The deal itself didn’t look so crazy taken on its own, but it triggered a chain reaction that is only starting to come to an end almost ten years later. By the time INEOS get rid of the last of our overpaid failures, it will have been more than a decade since Sanchez signed for us.
The guy played at Old Trafford for two years, but Manchester United are still paying for their mistake, and not just financially, but structurally.
The club must lose before they can win again, because they need to get the message out that the Manchester United tax on transfer fees has been abolished, and the era of inflated wages is over.
The grown ups are back in charge of the books.
I hope.