That's according to Roberto Martinez, he said this morning in the Liverpool Echo that one club made an offer a final offer and that was it, interesting that he didn't mention Fellaini in his interview.
If Moyes wasn't prepared to trigger his release clause @ £23.5m last month, then I can't see him paying the £30m+ that is going to be the asking price now. He always was a ditherer in the transfer market, you'd better get used to it, as it was always a source of frustration for us.
The evidence so far isn't very encouraging is it Matth ? I'm begining to wonder if all these VERY public pursuit of players was just to make it look to the fans like we've tried to sign players when in fact we've done nothing of the sort ??? Thiago said he never had an offer from us. Fabregras stated he or his agent never spoke with us - I know he wouldn't say if he did but Thiago has nothing to gain by lying.
I think this is where his weakness (if weakness it is) lies. For me there are 2 categories of players. Those that are at the very top and considered world class and could walk into most teams and those who are very good but at the second rung. The first one you have to pursue amid huge competition from other top teams and the club of that player may even refuse to sell. Moyes has experience of buying the second type of player but sadly very little or no experience of buying that star world class player and he and Woodward have shown their inexperience. The chasing of Fabregas was naive in the extreme. The chasing of Bale is even more farcical.
But he's gonna quash the doubters by signing CR7, or maybe not. Thank god we didn't sign Baines, or is it really over?
Still think he will end up at UTD, maybe January or next summer, especially if he has another good season
He probably means it would take a lot more money to sign Baines and considering the age of the lad, the money would be better spent elsewhere since Utd have Evra who can still effectively do a job at fullback. I agree Utd will not be signing players with large sums of money. Yes sometimes it happened, Rio, Berbatov, Veron being examples. But compared to other clubs, any guys we sign will more likely cost us a moderate amount of money. I know we have signed people late on before but if we don't sign anyone by this 17-18 of August, I'm starting to fear we will sign no one.
Most managers will need to get to know 3 or 4 new players. DM needs to know more about his whole squad of players. Everyone is new to him..
Fair enough though in saying that its not like he's never heard of the Utd players. He's only managed against them for years! Moyes knows the PL inside and out and I'd imagine was one of the reasons for him being hired. I mean Pellegrini cannot use that excuse at City. I'm not criticising Moyes here. More of a criticism of the board tbh.
If you think about it, not signing anybody may not be the end of the world. Barring Scholes and Zaha, its pretty much the same team as last year, and apparently Utd were ****e but still won the league. I know the team would be accused of stagnating and not improving if no new signings are made, however we get to see how good Moyes really is as a manager with the same players as Fergie. And who knows, the wingers might get their acts together and improve the team.
To be fair, every manager struggles to sign world class players consistently, particularly world class players at the very top of their game when their current club doesn't always want to lose them and there's competition. How quickly we forget SAF missing out on Sneijder, Ozil, Sahin, Martinez etc over the past few seasons. Expecting Moyes to come in and fix all our CM issues in his first transfer window is probably expecting a bit much imo - who could he feasibly sign who would definitely be better than what we have already? Every manager and club have problems getting those world class players to fix problem positions. Chelsea haven't signed a top class striker since Drogba, and Mourinho shows no sign of changing that, Guardiola made a monumental cock up with Ibrahimovic, Mancini failed to get any good players in last summer, and Pellegrini has thus far done nothing other than pick up squad players who will give City depth, but none of who would walk into our starting XI. Ditto Chelsea. And squad depth is definitely not something we have an issue with at the moment, other than LB. I'd rather we spent all summer trying for the one or two players who would really improve our team than dick around buying players to give Nani and Anderson competition for their places on the bench.
