According to a recent study from Moneycorp, poor timing during the summer transfer window cost Manchester United over £6.5million.
The UK-based company are money transfer specialists and recently reviewed all of the Premier League’s summer spending on international transfers, only to find that the English top flight’s poor timing had left them a collective £23.4million out of pocket.
Their study cross examines the Premier League’s expenditure on players from foreign leagues – a whopping £692million, which works out at around 82% of the division’s overall spend – with the fluctuation of exchange rates during the transfer window.
They say time is money and that’s certainly the case with Manchester United, who turned out to be the Premier League’s least savvy in the art of completing transfers during periods of favourable economic circumstance.
Indeed, they could have saved £6555749 in total during the summer, had they wrapped up deals for the likes of Memphis Depay, Bastian Schweinsteiger and Morgan Schneiderlin when the Euro exchange rate reached an optimum 1.437 on July 19th.
United’s eagerness to sign Depay following his title-winning 21-goal haul in the Eredivise last season, the Premier League’s first major deal of the summer, saw them miss out on £1.14million’s worth of potential savings. The exchange rate when they officially signed the Dutch international on June 12th was 1.371, during one of just three short periods in which it was lower than the window’s average of 1.397.
But other factors often take precedence in the world of football and as one of the beautiful game’s most exciting young talents, the Red Devils felt compelled to snap up the 21 year-old before a European rival got there first.
Manager Louis van Gaal revealed in May as Depay’s £25million Old Trafford switch hit the headlines; “I have been forced to sign him. I don’t want to sign him before the end of the season. But because of the market, I have to handle – I must handle it – because otherwise he would have signed for PSG. That is why I signed Memphis.”
It’s a similar story with deadline day arrival Anthony Martial. United inevitably left their £36million swoop for the French forward late as they explored more experienced options first, so perhaps the potential £1.8million they could have saved by signing him earlier in the window is an acceptable sum.
Other deals, however, might leave Red Devils fans feeling a little more disappointed in the efforts of chief executive and transfer head honcho Ed Woodward.
Chelsea’s infamous hijack of their summer-long pursuit of former Barcelona star Pedro not only saw United miss out on adding a three-time Champions League winner to their forward line, but also the chance to do so when the exchange rate was at 1.415 – a significant increase on the aforementioned window average.
Likewise, midfielder Angel Di Maria represents Manchester United’s biggest sale of the summer and their biggest opportunity missed. They parted with the now-PSG star for £44.3million on August 6th, incurring a £13.6million loss on their investment made just twelve months prior, but could have recouped an extra £2.38million if they’d sold the Argentina international two months earlier.
Bizarrely, the Red Devils allowed Di Maria to leave for Parc de Princes when the exchange rate was 1.430, just shy of the window’s peak, compared to when the Euro was at it’s weakest on June 10th at 1.357.
So what could United have done with an extra £6.5million?
According to MoneyCorp, that would be enough to fully support 13 football facilities funding schemes for grassroots clubs or UK schools. It’d also pay for over 6000 aspiring coaches to complete all three models of the FA Youth Award, the qualification required to teach pre-teen footballers, and be enough to purchase six state of the art 3G pitches for their training ground.
Failing that, they could have bought 0.19 Andy Carrolls, 108 Seamus Colemans or exactly half of Aleksandar Mitrovic.