Manchester United sell Harry Maguire to West Ham

Manchester United have finally parted ways with their most controversial asset. Harry Maguire came to him in 2019 as a potential leader of the defense, costing a record £80 million for a defender, and now leaves for West Ham for almost three times more modestly in the status of the most hated player for Manchester fans and with a train of blunders .

Leading British media outlets such as the BBC and The Guardian, reported on the next deals in the current transfer window. Before the English Championship starting next weekend, they were made by West Ham, which has been insanely modest on the market so far. The London club took only 14th place in the previous championship, but won the third European Cup – the Conference League. West Ham agreed two transfers at once. He acquires goalkeeper James Ward-Prowse from Southampton, who left the Premier League, and central defender Harry Maguire from Manchester United. Each of the players, according to British publications, cost West Ham £30 million.

It was the transfer of Harry Maguire that drew particular attention to the deal. There is nothing strange in this, given that he was the continuation of a very dramatic story that turned Maguire into the most controversial asset that the Manchester football giant has ever owned.

Harry Maguire was bought by Manchester United from Leicester in 2019 for £80m, a hefty amount considering the player’s role. So much for the defenders before no one paid. Maguire’s record was broken only a few days ago, when Manchester City signed Croatian Joshko Guardiola from Leipzig for slightly more than the Englishman.

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who coached Manchester United at the time, insisted on the purchase. But his desire to get Harry Maguire at all costs did not surprise anyone. The fact is that even before Solskjaer, two other, much more experienced and eminent mentors were hunting for Maguire – Jose Mourinho, who also worked with Manchester United, and Pep Guardiola, who heads Manchester City. All of them found approximately the same win-win set of qualities in a football player – from athleticism, tall, under two meters, height, good reading of the game and icy calm in difficult situations.

The beginning of the Manchester segment of Harry Maguire’s career was cloudless. He quickly established himself at the base, and already in his debut season for the new club, Solskjaer entrusted him with the captaincy for the first time.

It seemed that Manchester United really found almost a reference central defender.

But then everything suddenly changed. In August 2020, Harry Maguire was arrested in Greece for assaulting a police officer. He avoided a real prison term, but he opened his second season at Manchester United after personal troubles with rather mediocre performances. Moreover, the situation has not improved over time. On the contrary, English football experts increasingly paid attention to how clumsy Maguire is, how often he makes mistakes when faced with nimble opponents. Because of them, Manchester United often suffered painful defeats like 1:6 from Tottenham or 0:5 from Liverpool. It resulted in the resignation of Solskjaer in November 2021.

Signs that Manchester United management – like their fans – regret spending a lot of money on Harry Maguire have been around for a long time. But in the past season, they have become very obvious.

Before him, Manchester United was headed by Erik ten Hag. And with the Dutch specialist, who won the championship bronze with Manchester, which is not such a bad result by today’s standards, Harry Maguire has become in fact the fifth most important center back of the club – after Lisandro Martinez, Rafael Varane, Victor Lindelof and Luke Shaw. The fall in status is perfectly illustrated by statistics. At the heart of Manchester United, Maguire appeared in only 16 official matches, spending a total of 1600 minutes on the field, despite the fact that, for example, in the first Manchester season he had almost five thousand of them. Meanwhile, even in these meetings, the player was still regularly marked by blunders, and the whistle addressed to him by the home stands was transformed from a rare phenomenon into a completely familiar one.

Harry Maguire did not help even an amazing credit of trust from England coach Harry Southgate. At Southgate, he played constantly at the base, including at the World Cup in Qatar at the end of last year.

The crisis between Maguire and Manchester United management escalated this summer. First, Eric ten Hag deprived the footballer of the formal captaincy, passing him to Bruno Fernandes and provoking the defender to a post about “exceptional disappointment” in connection with such an act. And soon the public saw how, in a friendly match lost in July to Borussia Dortmund, goalkeeper Andre Onana, who arrived at Manchester United from Inter, yells at Maguire because of a sloppy pass, being in a state of extreme irritation. It seems that it was then that the leaders of Manchester United made the decision to sell the defender, albeit for an amount almost three times more modest than was invested in him.

Alexey Dospekhov