Just when we thought all was well for Jose Mourinho in his new job at Old Trafford, along comes one of those pesky ‘transfer stand-offs’ with the Manchester United board to spoil things.
It was all going so well, too. Eric Bailly, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Paul Pogba have been added to the United squad, who have opened their 2016/17 campaign with three wins on the spin.
Sure, his treatment of Bastian Schweinsteiger has brought about the odd call for his imprisonment and people are still convinced that he and Juan Mata hate each other with a passion, but life in Manchester has been largely good to Jose so far.
As United prepare to take on fellow high-flyers Hull City in an early season title decider on Humberside, a report by The Sun claims that Mourinho’s plans to sign Jose Fonte from Southampton. Having just blown the best part of £100m on Pogba, you’d be forgiven for thinking that affording Fonte’s price tag would be nothing for the free-spending United board.
However, Ed Woodward et al are apparently tightening the purse strings, and insist that Mourinho will only be given the green light to buy Fonte for an almost-certainly-inflated fee if he manages to offload a few of United’s current squad. This might seem like a perfectly logical thing to do, but according to The Sun, this amounts to a ‘transfer stand-off’.
With days remaining of the transfer window, it’s expected that Bastian Schweinsteiger will leave United a year on from his arrival from Bayern Munich. The German international has struggled with fitness since moving to England and has been spending the summer training with United’s Under 23 squad since returning from Euro 2016.
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