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Manchester United midfielder Donny van de Beek has joined Bundesliga club Eintracht Frankfurt on loan until the end of the season.
The 26-year-old has been the main bluetooth for United with just six starts in the Premier League since leaving Ajax in 2020 for £40m.
Frankfurt sporting director Markus Krosche said on his club’s website: “Donny van de Beek fits perfectly with our concept of play and is a piece of the puzzle for our team. “
When, at last, Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos Sport Group takes over Manchester United’s football operations and begins the process of unraveling years of chaotic recruitment, the worst thing they can do is adopt the mantra: “No more Donny van de Beeks. “
In reality, many players may simply be portrayed as symbols of an inconsistent, dispersed, and negligent movement policy over the past decade and beyond.
But Van de Beek – a £40 million signing from Ajax who would go on to make just six Premier League starts over a thoroughly miserable three-and-a-half years in Manchester – is as good an example as any of the aimless hire-and-hope mentality that has taken root at Old Trafford.
The Dutch midfielder has finished his loan at Eintracht Frankfurt until the end of the season; However, the failure that United fails to sell.
There is the option of a permanent move at the end that would give United a starting payment of £9. 5m with an additional £2. 6m and in that sense, the club can expect Van de Beek to offer more than he has done. He has already done so on loan at Everton.
There have been too many players who have been loaned out only to underperform and return more unnecessary than ever. With the strings of the bag tight and another wonderful summer of rebuilding in the future (when was the last time we said that?), United can be sure that Van de Beek gives Frankfurt plenty of reasons to turn this loan into a permanent deal.
Ratcliffe and his director at Ineos, Sir Dave Brailsford, know that United will never wake up from their slumber until the club starts buying and promoting with much greater success. This is the number one priority of the new minority shareholder and his team.
Repeat failed purchases over a long period have a severely damaging cumulative effect on and off the pitch. Just taken in isolation, for example, the £40 million United blew on Van de Beek and the £30 million they paid above their original valuation for another Ajax player, Antony, two years later and you more or less have the bulk of the cash for what could have been a bid for Harry Kane in the summer.
A senior United moving official once told this correspondent that “sometimes you don’t know what they’re going to look like until they’re in the building. “There’s a fact to that. Some clubs are incredibly thorough in their due diligence, tick all the boxes and possibly it is that some signings have not arrived yet.
But if you don’t do your homework well enough, the chances of failure inevitably increase, especially if you also identify the bad players.
And Van de Beek, another one of those mistakes, a player who failed to deliver on any of the urgent wishes of United’s midfield at the time, adding to the lack of a world-class presenter, and that’s before he realised his utter lack of form. . to the intensity and aggressiveness of the Premier League.
It is debatable as to whether Ole Gunnar Solskjaer ever wanted Van de Beek in the first place but his interim replacement, Ralf Rangnick, had established after one session that the Dutchman was simply not cut out to play for United in the Premier League.
The stance taken by Erik ten Hag, who has massively recruited players with links to the Eredivisie, has been even more damning. Van de Beek had been a key component of the Ajax squad under Ten Hag that reached the Champions League semi-finals in 2019 and won the Eredivisie name that season, but it soon became apparent that the manager did not have the player at United.
His only two league starts under Ten Hag ended after 66 minutes and 47 minutes respectively and he was left out of United’s Champions League squad this season after a summer in which the club couldn’t even loan him out.
Van de Beek sported an expression of almost permanent pain and fear and this was reflected on the pitch, where he looked lost and defeated through the speed and physicality of what was happening around him.
There simply can’t be any more Donny van de Beek signatures now that Ineos is in the building.
A version of this article was first published on December 19, 2023
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