Marcus Rashford, Casemiro, Jadon Sancho and Raphaël Varane would be the poster boys in any Sir Jim Ratcliffe white paper examining how Manchester United’s flatlining squad could be moved to a more modest or even performance-related pay structure.
In the elite football world of hyper-inflated salaries performance-related pay is a pipe-dream but imagine if the United footballer’s lucrative base rate salary was slashed and generous incentives predicated on, for instance, goal ratio and minutes played, were built in.
Why? Because an uneasy truth for the United executive is that no right-minded judge this season could make a credible case for Rashford, the top earner on about £435,000 a week, Casemiro (£430,000), Sancho (£350,000) and Varane (£340,000) giving the club a bang for its over-generous buck. It is a trend that can be traced across the 11 years since Sir Alex Ferguson led the club to its most recent league title.
The factors range from the misfortune of serial injury and illness through loss of form to Sancho’s standoff with Erik ten Hag, culminating in his return on loan to Borussia Dortmund. All point to the financial policy regarding recruitment, contract length and pay requiring a reboot for United’s long-term financial health.
In the frame for the above quartet and copious others are Ten Hag, who as the manager holds a recruitment veto; his predecessor, Ole Gunnar Solskjær; the football director, John Murtough, whose department has the other veto; Ed Woodward and Richard Arnold, the past two chief executives; and the owners, the Glazers, who until Ratcliffe’s Christmas Eve arrival signed off every deal.
As Ratcliffe, the incoming new 25% shareholder, and his chief lieutenants, Sir Dave Brailsford and Jean-Claude Blanc, conduct a structural assessment of how best to fix United, this tale of bloated wages will surely leap out. Injuries and other absences plus the loss of form are part of the vagaries of any team yet the riches paid to United’s squad can make these eye-wateringly wasteful when compounded with questionable recruitment and deal offers.
In the five months since the start of September United have paid out a minimum of £500,000 in each of the 18 weeks (a total of at least £9m) to players not in match-day squads owing to injury, poor form, illness, private issues or, in Sancho’s case, for disciplinary reasons.
Sancho was, in effect, on strike after refusing Ten Hag’s demand for an apology for calling him a liar when claiming the forward was left out of the trip to Arsenal for not training to standard. Including the 3-1 loss at the Emirates Stadium on 3 September, the 23-year-old missed 26 matches while being paid £9.1m. Whoever is correct of Sancho and Ten Hag, there is scant doubt a breakdown has occurred in the base requirement of not doing anything more to complicate the difficult business of winning games.
From here we move to Rashford, Varane and Casemiro. Losing form is as undesirable (Rashford and Varane) as being injured (Varane, again, and Casemiro). Yet as with Sancho, Ratcliffe can hardly miss how expensive their prolonged absences have been. Should Varane and Casemiro be at the club or earning what they do? The Ineos owner asked this regarding the latter during his tour of United last March.
Ratcliffe may ask, too, whether it was prudent, in July, to make Rashford United’s highest-paid footballer on the back of last term’s 30-goal return. A scan of his CV would have shown an uneven record of five goals in 2021-22 and, in the preceding seasons, 21, 22, 14, 13, 11 and eight goals for a total of 126 in 384 appearances.
So far Rashford’s campaign has underwhelmed – he has three goals – and last month Ten Hag dropped him for four matches, from the 2-1 win over Chelsea on 6 December until his reinstatement for Boxing Day’s 3-2 victory over Aston Villa (he was ill for the 1-0 Champions League defeat by Bayern Munich during this span).
For the five full months of the season Rashford has earned £21.75m and if goals are the metric a forward is judged on his three have cost the club £7.25m each. If the 26-year-old’s six assists are factored in, the price per Rashford’s nine “goal actions” is still an undervalue £2.41m.
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There is less science to help judge Casemiro’s on-field return in midfield but, as Ratcliffe has pointed out, his age might have been weighed against the price and length of contract – approximately £360,000 aweek as basic pay, plus 20% for Champions League qualification, for four years – and the profile of the selling club.
The Brazilian was 30 in the summer of 2022. Real Madrid being content to allow a driving force of their past five Champions League triumphs to depart offered 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 games (from 21-29 October) with an ankle injury then, after returning for the Newcastle defeat on 1 November, he sustained a hamstring problem from which he is yet to recover. Casemiro has been paid £7.3m during the 17 missed games.
In the summer of 2021 Real had been happy to allow Varane, then 28, to depart. From 3-26 September this season injury caused the defender to be absent for four matches, he missed another against Brentford on 7 October with what Ten Hag said was a “minor issue”, and was out of the XI, in the main, for a loss of form for 10 consecutive games – from the Manchester City reverse in late October until the Bayern defeat on 12 December. During the 14 missed matches he was paid £4.7m.
Tally up the money paid to Sancho, Casemiro and Varane when not available plus the price of Rashford’s goals and the sum is £26.5m: a figure that should interest Ratcliffe, who as the incoming controller of United’s football operations (once the Premier League ratifies his purchase) may view this as a useful chunk of the fee for the elite midfielder, No 9 or centre-back Ten Hag craves.
For further evidence of United’s iffy value-for-money deals, consider Antony, who in 2022 became United’s second-highest transfer at £85m and earns £200,000 a week. He was given leave of absence in September to address allegations about his private conduct, which he denies, and did not start seven matches. He later missed another seven owing to performance and in 21 appearances this season the forward has scored zero times. Anthony Martial has made only seven starts this season and scored twice for his £250,000-a-week wage.
No player wishes to miss matches because of injury or illness, or loss of form, or whatever. But in an era of financial fair play Ratcliffe will surely wish that United’s pay structure, contracts and recruitment are not so costly should any of these occur.
