Come on Ed! You can do it! Don’t forget to breathe! Breathe! Just a few short weeks to go now and then you can retire to your office in Mayfair and forget all about the football side of the game until January. You can concentrate all your efforts on getting obscure conglomerates to sign massive sponsorship deals.
Of course it will be easier in January because, by then, José Mourinho will have worked out that, if he wants two players, he has to ask for four. He just has to be careful of the order in which he asks as he won’t want to be saddled with the two players he didn’t really want.
To be fair, there is still time for Dithering Ed to make this transfer window a success. All he has to do is take a leaf from the books of Manchester City and Chelsea who have both managed to sign four players and are both looking to sign more.
The secret to a successful transfer window isn’t really much of a secret, neither is it rocket science. If you offer a club pretty much the price they are asking for a player then they can hardly turn you down. This is what Chelsea and City have done.
So why is it such a difficult conundrum for Ed? He has, in the past, paid more than the asking price for players. Marouane Fellaini, for example, cost him £4 million more than his original price due to silly old Ed missing the buy-by date on his contract.
He vastly overpaid for Angel Di Maria, (who should never have been bought), a fact proven when he was sold twelve months later for £15.4 million less than his purchase price!
He has just overpaid for Romelu Lukaku which was probably a frantic gesture to prove to his manager that he could still buy a player. But, if that is the case, then why not just give Real Madrid what they were asking for Morata? It amounts to the same thing yet, reportedly, Morata was Mourinho’s number one target, not Lukaku.
In fact, history is proving that, if Ed doesn’t overpay for a player then he doesn’t get him. So just stop beating about the bush and pay the going rate.
Inter Milan say that Ivan Perišić can go if the right fee is offered. Chelsea are saying the same about Nemanja Matić and Tottenham would probably let Eric Dier go if offered the right fee. In all of these cases, the right fee appears to be around £50 million.
Perišić is 28, Matić is also 28 whilst Dier is only 24 so there is an obvious choice here from a value for money point of view. So what is happening? Ed is refusing, apparently, to meet the asking price for any of these players so attention has now turned to a transfer window favourite of old, Arturo Vidal.
Vidal is a great player, he is now 30 and would cost guess how much? Yep, £50 million. Whilst we here at WSA think Vidal would be a great signing we also can’t help but wonder where the sense would be in sanctioning a deal at that price for a 30 year-old, having refused deals for younger players for the same price.
Dithering Ed no longer has the excuse that he is new to the game. He has now had transfer windows with three different managers and must have learned something from all of them, even if it may not appear so.
He is still very wasteful with money and rarely gets a good deal for the club. Fortunately for him, United have plenty of money and so do not appear to hold him accountable, even though he is, particularly when van Gaal went mad with the cheque book or an average player like Fellaini cost more than he should have due to a schoolboy error.
José Mourinho, through loyalty more than anything else, is busy making excuses for Woodward’s poor performance but we can all see through them. If it is so difficult to get clubs to part with good players then how come Chelsea and City are not finding it to be a problem?
No. No more excuses. If, at the end of this transfer window, United still only have Lindelof and Lukaku as new additions to the squad then Woodward must be returned from whence he came, to concentrate on bringing money into the club. He is good at that, it is bringing players into the club where he experiences difficulty.
The time is nigh for a Director of Football.
WHY SAY ANYTHING? 
The facts are that since David Gill retired we didn’t have a good transfer. Ed Woodward gets us players we don’t want because he failed to get a deal on those we wanted. Every season has been the same. Time to admit it and replace the man with somebody that can do the job. If we want to be back on the top and stay there we need good players but with half a squad of mediocres we can’t achieve that and we may lose our managers too.
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