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For each of the last four summers, Manchester United have invested large amounts of money in a well-renowned forward from a European league, only to watch them struggle to adapt to the الدوري الإنجليزي الممتاز.
Jadon Sancho was a scoring and assisting machine for Borussia Dortmund, and his 120 goal involvements in 158 games seemed to justify his £74 million ($101m) price tag when United signed him in 2021. And yet in his two seasons at Old Trafford he scored just 12 goals and set up six before being banished from the squad for lashing out at Erik ten Hag on social media. Sancho showed signs of his Bundesliga self when returning to Dortmund on loan, but a further spell at Chelsea back in the Premier League was so unsatisfactory that the Blues preferred to pay a £5m penalty clause than sign him permanently.
Antony was regarded as one of the best young forwards in Europe in 2022, posting 0.56 goals or assists per game with Ajax, and Barcelona considered him their main alternative to signing Raphinha. United paid £85m ($99m) to sign the Brazilian, but after a blistering start of three goals in his first three games, he went on to score only nine in his next 93.
It wasn’t just his lack of productivity that meant Antony went down as a failed transfer, either. He did next to nothing in games beyond cutting inside on to his left foot and either missing the target or being swiftly dispossessed, yet once he joined Real Betis on loan, he became an icon in Seville as he scored as many goals in half a season in La Liga as he had in two-and-a-half in England.
The same pattern was repeated with Rasmus Hojlund in 2023 and Joshua Zirkzee in 2024. The strikers had scored a combined 20 goals in their final seasons in الدوري الإيطالي, but last season with United netted a combined seven league goals. But by finally signing Bryan Mbeumo after a long transfer saga United have shown they are finally learning from their mistakes. There is just one problem with the deal: the price.
For each of the last four summers, Manchester United have invested large amounts of money in a well-renowned forward from a European league, only to watch them struggle to adapt to the Premier League.
Jadon Sancho was a scoring and assisting machine for Borussia Dortmund, and his 120 goal involvements in 158 games seemed to justify his £74 million ($101m) price tag when United signed him in 2021. And yet in his two seasons at Old Trafford he scored just 12 goals and set up six before being banished from the squad for lashing out at Erik ten Hag on social media. Sancho showed signs of his Bundesliga self when returning to Dortmund on loan, but a further spell at Chelsea back in the Premier League was so unsatisfactory that the Blues preferred to pay a £5m penalty clause than sign him permanently.
Antony was regarded as one of the best young forwards in Europe in 2022, posting 0.56 goals or assists per game with Ajax, and Barcelona considered him their main alternative to signing Raphinha. United paid £85m ($99m) to sign the Brazilian, but after a blistering start of three goals in his first three games, he went on to score only nine in his next 93.
It wasn’t just his lack of productivity that meant Antony went down as a failed transfer, either. He did next to nothing in games beyond cutting inside on to his left foot and either missing the target or being swiftly dispossessed, yet once he joined Real Betis on loan, he became an icon in Seville as he scored as many goals in half a season in La Liga as he had in two-and-a-half in England.
The same pattern was repeated with Rasmus Hojlund in 2023 and Joshua Zirkzee in 2024. The strikers had scored a combined 20 goals in their final seasons in Serie A, but last season with United netted a combined seven league goals. But by finally signing Bryan Mbeumo after a long transfer saga, United have shown they are finally learning from their mistakes. There is just one problem with the deal: the price.
United started working on the deal for Mbeumo, who has signed in a deal worth up to £71m ($88.6m) after a third bid was accepted by Brentford, just after completing the signing of Matheus Cunha in late May. Cunha scored 15 goals last season to fire Wolves to Premier League safety while also chipping in with six assists, meaning he contributed to 38 percent of their total goal output.
The previous season, his first in England after switching from Atletico Madrid, Cunha scored 12 goals and set up seven. In both campaigns, he netted more times than any United player.
Wolves signing Cunha in the first place was a bit of a gamble given his unhappy time at Atletico, where he started just 10 La Liga matches in two years and said he “suffered a lot”. Yet he soon proved to have all the traits to thrive in the Premier League and that is why United have gone for him, despite his infamous temper.
Mbeumo is even more at home in English football than Cunha, having joined Brentford in 2019 when they were still in the Championship before getting better with every season.
Mbeumo’s 23 combined goals and assists in his first season propelled the Bees into the play-off final, where they lost to London rivals Fulham in extra-time. His 18 goals and assists the following year took Brentford back to the final the following year, where they saw off Swansea City to win promotion to the Premier League for the first time.
He continued to thrive, contributing 43 goals and assists in Brentford’s first three seasons in the top-flight before reaching a whole new level in 2024-25, when he scored 20 times to finish among the top five scorers in the league, while also chipping in with seven assists. For context, no United player has scored 20 league goals since Robin van Persie in 2012-13, Sir Alex Ferguson’s last season in charge.
“An unbelievable player” is how former boss Thomas Frank described him. Mbeumo is adept at running between the lines, controlling through balls and finishing ruthlessly. United will also be attracted by his durability: the Cameroon international started all of Brentford’s league games last season, having made 36 starts in 2022-23 and 34 the previous season.
Mbeumo, who has spent the last six seasons at Brentford after coming through the ranks at French second division side Troyes, might have had an unglamorous career compared to the majority of players that United usually sign, but it is easy to see why Ruben Amorim wants him. The Portuguese coach has been blown away by the physical intensity of the Premier League and has been up front about United’s recent failures to get to grips with it.
Take how he explained the team’s success in the Europa League last season compared with their domestic travails: “I think it’s nothing tactical. I truly believe it’s the pace of the game, the physicality of the game. We have the best league in the world, sometimes the games you don’t see a lot of intensity, but I can guarantee you compared to games in the Europa League – and I have the data to [prove] it – it’s completely different.”
Mbeumo makes sense for United on so many levels. There is only one aspect of this signing to argue with, but it is not as insignificant one.
The fee United have agreed to pay for Mbeumo (an initial £65m plus £6m in bonuses) might not seem too much more excessive than the £62.5m they paid to get Cunha, but there are two crucial differences.
Wolves had tied Cunha to a new contract until 2029 as recently as February and thus held all the cards, making it clear that they would only accept the Brazilian leaving Molineux if the Red Devils paid his full release clause. United were more than happy to oblige and pay the full fee as it allowed them to forgo the usual transfer negotiation game, one they have never been good at since Sir Alex Ferguson left. Indeed, the club have been perceived to pay above the odds for so many players that the notion of a ‘United tax’ was conceived. And it is hard to not think that United have fallen into that trap again with Mbeumo.
The Cameroon striker was in a favourable contract situation from United’s point of view as he had only one year left on his contract with Brentford, a deal he signed during the Bees’ very first year in the English top flight. United had the opportunity to take a leaf out of Real Madrid‘s playbook by waiting another 12 months to get Mbeumo for free or to try and drive the price down, trusting that Brentford would eventually accept their offer amid fear of the forward leaving for nothing the following season. Instead, they have given in, paying a massive fee for a player with less than 12 months on their deal.
The initial fee United have paid for Mbeumo is £10m more than Tottenham paid for Dominic Solanke last summer, when he had three years left on his contract with Bournemouth. It is also in a similar ball park to that which Chelsea paid for Pedro Neto when he had three years left.
Manchester City, meanwhile, paid just £25m up front for Mateo Kovacic when he entered the last year of his contract with Chelsea, and Pep Guardiola’s side followed a similar pathway to get Rayan Cherki, paying an initial £30.4m when he had one year to go on his deal with Lyon. City’s biggest signing of the summer so far, Tijjani Reijnders for £46.3m, had recently renewed his deal with AC Milan until 2030.
What is intriguing is that the man trying to change United’s reputation in the transfer market is the very same person who helped City earn such a positive reputation. Omar Berrada was City’s chief operating officer before being poached by United in January 2024, just weeks after Sir Jim Ratcliffe bought his stake in the club. While Berrada was involved in transfer dealings, City turned away from moves for Harry Maguire, Alexis Sanchez and Cristiano Ronaldo, who all ended up joining United instead.
He explained in 2020: “We have shown very clearly over the last few seasons that we will only go for a transfer if we feel it is the right valuation. So we look at the player’s quality, age, experience, what he can bring to the team, and then decide the correct valuation.” There was an expectation that he would bring the same balanced approach to United, and yet it would appear that not even an administrator as experienced and shrewd as Berrada, who worked at Barcelona before joining City in 2011, can avoid paying the infamous United tax.
United have much less financial wriggle room than in previous years due to the decade of wild spending between Ferguson’s departure in 2013 and INEOS’ arrival in December 2023. Ratcliffe has introduced brutal cost-cutting measures, the worst of which resulted in 450 people losing their jobs, with many others deciding to walk away on their own terms.
Berrada has defended the cuts, and claimed that the unpopular measures will help the team do better business in the transfer market, telling the The Athletic last month: “We’ve put ourselves in the best position possible by doing everything that we’ve had this year around cost-cutting. I’m confident that we will come out of the window with a much stronger team than what we’ve gone into.”
The numbers, however, do not quite stack up. United’s accounts showed that the first round of redundancies in 2024, in which 250 jobs were lost, saved between £8m-£10m. If we can assume an equivalent figure for the next 200 job losses, then United are saving a maximum of £20m from measures that have disrupted hundreds of lives, and those savings have been wiped out by spending £133.5m on two forwards this summer (plus teenage left-back Diego Leon for up to £7m) while so far selling no one at all.
Their plans to finance other deals with sales are not exactly going to plan, either. Marcus Rashford has received no offers while Alejandro Garnacho is unlikely to be sold for close to the £70m ($95.5m) fee that United are asking for given Amorim has urged him to leave and the player has been agitating the club and fans with sly social media posts.
There is, therefore, a lot of pressure on Cunha and Mbeumo to hit the ground running. Should they make slow starts, then Berrada and sporting director Jason Wilcox will quickly feel the heat. But unlike in previous years, the club’s executives know what they are paying for – players who have proven themselves in the hardest league in the world.
