Manchester United may be seeing the last of Brazilian forward Antony, with the 24-year-old top of the squad clearout list being prepared by Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s INEOS Group.
Since taking over the football division of the club a little over a month ago, the British billionaire and his sports management organisation have begun to make changes to the internal structure of the club.
A number of key appointments have been made, with the most prominent being Omar Berrada as the club’s Chief Executive and Dan Ashworth being the club’s sporting director. Berrada served as the chief football operations officer for Manchester City until joining INEOS and Man United in early February and Ashworth exited the sporting director role at Newcastle United to take up the Man United one.
More appointments are still ongoing but in the meantime, the group is focused on squad building
Players will come and go and they are determined to bring in the right ones while doing away with the ones they do not feel will serve the club’s goals.
According to the Manchester Evening News, the former AFC Ajax man is now up for sale ahead of the summer transfer window. He cost the club £81 million but they are not worried about losing money on him, according to reports. They are, however, optimistic that they can get something good for the player which they hope to reinvest into squad building.
Other players on the clearout list include Raphael Varane, Anthony Martial, Tom Heaton, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Facundo Pellistri, Victor Lindelof, Casemiro, Jadon Sancho, Donny van de Beek and Hannibal MejbrI.
Some of the players on this list have expiring contracts at the end of the ongoing season, but there is also a discussion on which ones to keep. Others have expiring contracts in 2025 and the same discussions are ongoing.
Sofyan Amrabat will return to Fiorentina after his underwhelming loan spell at Old Trafford, while Mason Greenwood’s future is still being discussed following his domestic violence saga. Youngster Alvaro Fernandez, currently on loan at Benfica and doing well, has also been offered to the Portuguese team, who will make a decision on whether to sign him permanently at the end of the season or return him to United.
One thing Ratcliffe is thinking about is FFP as he hopes not to get the club in the same kind of mess as Manchester City and Everton.
“It’s clearly a really critical part of running a football club and you have to think about how you can manage FFP to the benefit of the club”, he said.
“There are different ways in which you can do that. But ultimately, FFP says you have to operate the club within its own means. And, effectively, it takes into account your prior expenditure, and the club has spent quite heavily in the last couple of seasons, so that does impact FFP going forward because they’ve used quite a large part of their allowance if you like.”
“We need to be quite clear in the summer as to the extent of it. I don’t know the full answer to that question at the moment. It’s obviously related to sales as well as purchases and so we need to get our heads around that well before the summer window so we understand the number.”
