Marcus Rashford, Casemiro, Jadon Sancho and Raphaël Varane would be the poster boys in any whitepaper from Sir Jim Ratcliffe exploring how to move Manchester United’s flatlining squad towards a more modest or even performance-related pay structure.
In the elite football world of hyper-inflated salaries, performance-related rewards are an illusion, but imagine if the United footballer’s lucrative base salary were reduced and generous incentives built in, based on things like goal ratio and minutes played.
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Why? Because an uncomfortable truth for the United boss is that no right-thinking judge can make a credible case this season for Rashford, the top earner on around £435,000 a week, Casemiro (£430,000), Sancho (£350,000) and Varane (£350,000 ). 340,000), which gave the club a blow for its overly generous money. It’s a trend reflected in the 11 years since Sir Alex Ferguson led the club to its most recent league title.
The factors range from the bad luck of injury and illness due to loss of form to Sancho’s standoff with Erik ten Hag, culminating in his return on loan to Borussia Dortmund. They all point out that financial policies regarding recruitment, contract length and pay require a restart for United’s long-term financial health.
The aforementioned quartet and many others include Ten Hag, who as a manager has a recruitment veto; his predecessor, Ole Gunnar Solskjær; football director John Murtough, whose department has the other veto; Ed Woodward and Richard Arnold, the past two CEOs; and the owners, the Glazers, who signed every deal until Ratcliffe’s Christmas Eve arrival.
As Ratcliffe, the new 25% shareholder, and his key lieutenants, Sir Dave Brailsford and Jean-Claude Blanc, undertake a structural assessment of how best to fix United, this story of inflated wages is certain to emerge. Injuries and other absences plus loss of form are part of every team’s vagaries, but the riches paid to United’s squad can make these picks wasteful if combined with questionable recruitment and deal offers.
In the five months since the start of September, United have paid out at least £500,000 (minimum £9 million in total) in each of the 18 weeks to players who were not in the matchday squad due to injury, poor form, illness, etc. private matters or, in the case of Sancho, for disciplinary reasons.
Sancho was in fact on strike after rejecting Ten Hag’s demands for an apology for calling him a liar when he claimed the striker was not visiting Arsenal because he had not trained at the right level. Including the 3-1 defeat at the Emirates Stadium on September 3, the 23-year-old missed 26 games while being paid £9.1 million. Whoever is right about Sancho and Ten Hag, there is little doubt that there has been a breakdown in the basic requirement of doing nothing to complicate the difficult business of winning matches.
From here we move to Rashford, Varane and Casemiro. Losing form is as undesirable (Rashford and Varane) as getting injured (Varane and Casemiro again). But as with Sancho, Ratcliffe can hardly miss how costly their prolonged absence has been. Should Varane and Casemiro be at the club or deserve what they do? The Ineos owner asked about the latter during his tour with United last March.
Ratcliffe could also question the wisdom of making Rashford United’s highest-paid footballer in July thanks to his return of 30 goals last season. A scan of his CV would have revealed an uneven record of five goals in 2021/22 and, in the previous seasons, 21, 22, 14, 13, 11 and eight goals for a total of 126 in 384 appearances.
So far, Rashford’s season has been disappointing – he has three goals – and last month Ten Hag dropped him in four games, from the 2-1 win over Chelsea on December 6 to his recovery for the 3-2 win on Boxing Day at Aston Villa (he was ill due to the 1-0 Champions League defeat to Bayern Munich during this period).
Over the five full months of the season, Rashford has earned £21.75 million and if goals are the benchmark, a striker is judged on his three that have cost the club £7.25 million each. Taking into account the 26-year-old’s six assists, Rashford’s price per nine goals is still an undervalue of £2.41 million.
There is less science to judge Casemiro’s return to midfield, but as Ratcliffe has noted, his age could have been weighed against the price and length of the contract – around £360,000 per week as a basic salary, plus 20% for the Champions League. qualification, for four years – and the profile of the selling club.
The Brazilian turned thirty in the summer of 2022. The fact that Real Madrid were content to let go a driving force behind their past five Champions League victories was a clue that could have alerted Ten Hag and Murtough to their assessment of Casemiro’s prospects.
This season’s evidence suggests that age may be causing a decline in the 31-year-old’s physical robustness. He was ruled out for three matches (from 21 to 29 October) due to an ankle injury and, after returning from the defeat at Newcastle on 1 November, suffered a hamstring problem from which he has yet to recover. Casemiro has been paid £7.3m during the 17 games missed.
In the summer of 2021, Real were keen to let Varane, then 28, leave. From September 3 to 26 this season, an injury forced the defender to miss four games. He missed another match against Brentford on 7 October with what Ten Hag said was a “minor problem”, and was dropped from the XI overall, before a loss of form for ten consecutive matches – from the defeat of Manchester City at the end of October to the defeat of Bayern on December 12. During the 14 games missed he was paid £4.7 million.
Add the money paid to Sancho, Casemiro and Varane if unavailable, plus the price of Rashford’s goals, and the figure is £26.5 million: a figure that should interest Ratcliffe, who as new controller of United’s football operations (once the Premier League has sanctioned his purchase) may see this as a useful part of the compensation for the elite midfielder, No. 9 or centre-back that Ten Hag craves.
For further evidence of United’s dubious value for money, consider Antony, who became United’s second highest signing in 2022 at £85m and earns £200,000 a week. He was placed on leave in September amid allegations about his private conduct, which he denies, and did not start for seven games. He later missed a further seven due to performances and in 21 appearances this season the striker has scored zero times. Anthony Martial has made just seven starts this season, scoring twice for his £250,000 weekly wage.
No player wants to miss games due to injury or illness, or loss of form, or whatever. But in an era of financial fair play, Ratcliffe will surely wish United’s pay structure, contracts and recruitment were not as expensive as this presents itself.