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| Does the signing of Joshua Zirkzee signal a shift in Manchester United's transfer strategy? Yes, but it's not a big enough one to compete in the Premier League. Manchester United via Getty Images |
There was at least one head-scratcher every summer.
Last year, it was €64 million for an out-of-form and one-year-left-on-his-contract Mason Mount. Prior to that? €71 million for a 30-year-old Casemiro. And one year before that: The disaster that was the second Cristiano Ronaldo era.
Among the many reasons why Manchester United have underperformed their resources over the past decade, the biggest might be they waste so much money in the transfer market.
The decision-makers at Man United seemed to be totally unaware of things such as age curves, negotiating leverage, contract lengths and positional value. Year after year, they'd pay premium fees for stars who were on the downswing of their careers, guys who no one else was interested in for similar prices, ones with limited time left on their contracts, or players who didn't do the things needed in that position.
Each move further decayed United's financial advantage over their rivals and ultimately created what we saw last season: an eighth-place finish and a team that conceded more goals than it scored.
But with new minority owners Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos overseeing the club's soccer operations, and Dan Ashworth appointed as the club's sporting director, that was all supposed to change. Early signs suggest that it has: Their first two signings this summer are a combined 41 years old, and their other reported targets are early-prime players with Champions League pedigrees.
So, is that it? Are Manchester United simply going to function like a normal soccer club now and see their results rise up to meet their resources? Not quite. Or at least, not yet.
It's a free season at Old Trafford
I've written approximately 600 articles about this over the past 10 months, but it bears repeating as a bit of table-setting: Manchester United were one of the worst teams in the Premier League last season.
They were eighth in the table, both by points (60) and goal differential (minus-1). But it was even worse than that. Their expected-goal differential of minus-12.5 was just the 15th-best mark in the league.
Ben Torvaney -- formerly an analyst with AC Milan and now employed at the consultancy helmed by Ian Graham, Liverpool's former head of research -- has done a bunch of publicly available research on the predictiveness of various metrics from one season to the next. When comparing goals to expected goals, he found that "the increase in predictive accuracy we get from using xG over goals is in the same ballpark as the difference between using goals scored/conceded vs. no team strength information at all."
That's a start; however, he later realized that a blend of xG and goals was even better -- a mixture of about 70% xG and 30% G being the sweet spot. "This suggests that teams with large differences between their xG tallies and actual goals are doing good/bad things that the xG models aren't picking up on," he wrote.
So, we can take a simplified version of this and create a goal rating that is an average of a team's xG differential and goal differential, weighted 70% to the former and 30% to the latter. Here's how those numbers look from this past Premier League season:.
Based on this, Man United head into next season with a predicted team strength of about the 14th-best team in the league. But let's be generous and bump that up to 10th. I'm not sure we should, but they're in a tier with about six other teams, ranging from Crystal Palace in 10th and Fulham in 16th. We'll say without so many injuries, United leap up to 10th, at the top of that tier.
So, even with that generous reading, United are way off from being a Champions League contender. Although a club of this size should not only be contending for Champions League qualification but contending to win the whole thing, United likely are not in either category. This means two things: (1) The roster is terrible, so you can sign nearly anyone at any position and assume it's an upgrade, and (2) They can target players who are more likely to help them in a couple seasons, rather than right now.
Failure has become a kind of freedom.
Why Leny Yoro and Joshua Zirkzee signify something new
Manchester United's first signing this summer was Joshua Zirkzee, a 23-year-old forward from Serie A upstarts Bologna.
I don't love the signing mainly because he's a center-forward who doesn't score goals: nine non-penalty goals from 7.4 non-penalty xG across 32 league starts. Per 90 minutes, he averaged 0.24 npxG -- or, just one one-hundredth ahead of what definitely-not-a-terrible-signing and Man United winger Antony averaged last season.
However, he's big, moves well, and is proficient at almost everything else. More often than not, these are the kinds of players coaches mistakenly fall in love with -- the ones who look good on highlight reels and in little moments of buildup play but who ultimately never do the one thing that really matters. But there's also a world where he develops a little more in front of goal, while maintaining all of his other in-possession skills.
The specifics aren't really all that important for now anyway. Per the site Transfermarkt, United paid €42.5 million to acquire Zirkzee. Top young prospects usually require about 10-15% of a club's revenue, but Zirkzee's fee makes up 6% of United's most recently reported revenue. This fee suggests a squad player, rather than a star.
That, however, is not the case for Leny Yoro, the 18-year-old center-back from Lille whom United acquired for €62 million -- the highest fee paid for a player so far this summer. Yoro doesn't turn 19 until November, and he's already played nearly 3,500 minutes in Ligue 1. Among pure center-backs 18 and under, only three others have played more minutes in a "Big Five" top European league this century: Rio Ferdinand, Kurt Zouma, and Malang Sarr.
Those names, I think, are a pretty good representation of the possible outcomes for Yoro. Ferdinand is an all-time-great world-class player. Zouma was a borderline Champions League-level player, and Sarr just moved back to France after a failed few years with Chelsea.
For all the talk of Yoro as the next great French center-back, there's still a ton of projection for a player of his age. And while it's still quite hard to quantify center-back performance, there isn't a ton of statistical signal to Yoro's performance thus far. He wins a slightly above average number of aerial duels and a below average number of tackles, while attempting few of each.
On the ball, he completes more than 90% of his passes, but he ranked 29th among Ligue 1 center-backs for the value he provided with his passes -- and second among center-backs on his own team. These are all of his passes that increased Lille's likelihood of scoring a goal by at least half of a percentage point:
But even with the question marks, this still feels like a gamble United can afford to make. The fee is about 8% of their most recent revenues, and that still falls slightly below the 10-15% range that it usually requires for a team to acquire a top prospect in their economic bracket.
Using the formula from a piece I wrote last week, we can apply a projection to both of these transfers. Looking at the 100 biggest transfers of the past four seasons, we can see which factors most predicted future success, as defined by the player's market value, one year after the transfer, being higher than the initial transfer fee.
Zirkzee is 23, and his crowd-sourced market value on Transfermarkt is €50 million, while Yoro is 18, with the same market value. Add in Zirkzee's €42.5 million fee and Yoro's €62 million acquisition cost, and the former is expected to see a 20.3% increase in value, while the latter is projected for a 27.8% increase.
While there are concerns with both players, they've paid not-far-off-market value fees for a pair of young players who still haven't hit their primes. For United, that's a large step in the right direction.
But there's always a 'but' with Man United
The results are sound enough, but the process isn't as inspiring.
We'll start with the manager. We all assumed Erik ten Hag would be gone as manager by now, but maybe the FA Cup win saved him -- or perhaps Dan Ashworth just wants to wait until Gareth Southgate is ready to return to the club game. Whatever the reason, the club activated the one-year option on his deal, extending the Dutchman's contract through the end of the 2025-26 season.
I don't think this is necessarily a ringing endorsement of Ten Hag. A ringing endorsement would've been an immediate contract extension at the end of the season -- rather than an announcement on July 4. The club didn't want to go into the season with a so-called "lame duck manager" with just a year left on his deal, so they added another one on to the end. Given that logic, "two years left on his contract" is the new "one year left on his contract."
And so, United, the club, have a freeroll of a season where immediate results shouldn't matter too much. But they also have a manager who probably feels the need to produce short-term results so he can get another contract extension so he doesn't go into next season with a year left on his deal. Put simply, United's front office needs to have a long-term vision for the club and they've given their manager the bare-minimum length of commitment. This seems like it could be a problem.
As our Rob Dawson wrote when United announced Ten Hag's one-year extension: "Ten Hag will remain on the existing terms of his contract, meaning he will keep the transfer veto which formed part of the agreement when he arrived from Ajax in 2022."
The dysfunction of the Ten Hag era at United can be summed up by just how many acquired players have some kind of previous connection to Ten Hag. Before this summer, four of the 16 players signed under the current manager previously played for the current manager. Three more are either Dutch or played in the Dutch league. And a further one, Rasmus Højlund, is represented by the same agency as the United manager.
For a club like United, who can pay competitive wages with every other team in the world, there's no universe where their optimal targets all just so happen to have these direct connections to the guy coaching the team. As I wrote a few months ago, it means either (1) Man United have limited their scouting to players in the current manager's orbit, or (2) Man United have a manager whose past success hinged on a specific set of talent. Neither instills confidence.
In Zirkzee, it's another Dutch player. And two of United's other reported targets this summer are center-back Matthijs de Ligt and fullback Noussair Mazraoui, both of whom played for Ten Hag at Ajax. Their other reported connection is to PSG defensive midfielder Manuel Ugarte, who is represented by Portuguese super-agent Jorge Mendes, who also represents Yoro.
The only target who falls outside of this group is Everton's center-back Jarrad Branthwaite, but he couldn't be much different from De Ligt. In 3,000-plus minutes last year, Branthwaite completed 74 progressive passes. In fewer than 1,500 minutes for Bayern, De Ligt completed 98. Why are these your two targets for the same position?
But even with all of the inefficiencies laid over these moves, it still is better than what came before.
Mazraoui is 26 -- not young in soccer years -- but De Ligt is 24, Ugarte 23, and Branthwaite 22. The reported fees for almost all of them would project well based on their ages and consensus market values. Only the €70 million-plus that Everton want for Branthwaite seems like it would not age well.
So, with United's new football leadership, there has been a pretty clear shift in approach. It's just that it's an improved version of the way things were already being done.
If United fans were hoping for a complete break from the past, a new and innovative approach to building a soccer team on a big budget that clearly puts the club back on track to challenging for the league and the Champions League, they're going to have to wait. If that's ever going to happen, it won't be for at least another summer.
- Ryan O'Hanlon, ESPN.com writer
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