First of all, I’d just like to welcome Marouane Fellaini to Manchester United. We’ve been crying out for another quality midfielder for a good few years now and I like Fellaini and feel that he has the quality to fit right in with us.
At 25 he’s a good age and last season he scored more Premier League goals than all of our own midfielders combined.
However, this summer’s transfer business has left a lot to be desired from the top bods at Manchester United.
I spent most of yesterday glued to my Twitter account reading all kinds of speculation regarding at least three midfielders (including Fellaini).
At one point, it seemed certain that we had almost signed Herrera from Athletic Bilbao but I’m still not certain what happened with that – some reports are suggesting that hoaxers pretending to be United representatives were involved whilst others say that there was a last minute hitch which meant that a couple of i’s and t’s couldn’t be dotted and crossed.
Earlier in the day, I’d heard that Real Madrid were welcoming offers for Sami Khedira and that we’d offered them £40million which they subsequently rejected.
All in all, from an outsider’s point of view, it looked like a shambolic mess as the top brass at United thrashed around like amateurs with no clue who they were after, much less how to actually bring them in.
This summer was always likely to see us experience a disruption in the normal service with Moyes not starting until July but even that is now two whole months ago.
It seems clear to me that Moyes always wanted to bring Fellaini with him from Everton so why leave it until the very last minute of the transfer window to do so?
The only reason I can think of is that Fellaini was not his first choice (I suppose Fabregas was) but once it was clear that Fabregas wouldn’t be leaving Barcelona, we should have gone straight in for Fellaini while his buy-out clause was just £23million. As it turns out, we have had to pay £27.5million for him.
With Fallaini in the bag, perhaps Ed Woodward and co could have been a little more focused on any other targets that Moyes had identified?
Of course, the official line from the club will now be that Fellaini was the only player Moyes wanted this summer and the rest was all speculation but I suspect that the press will be doing their own digging in this regard and I also suspect that we won’t come out of it smelling of roses.
In the meantime, I’m just thankful that this awful transfer window has finally closed and now we can get back to what it’s all really about… actually playing football.