Rashford could earn over £300,000 a week in new deal
Marcus Rashford is close to signing a four-year deal with Manchester United which could be worth upwards of £330,000 a week.
The deal will commit the England striker to Old Trafford until June 2023, although it is understood to include the option of a fifth year.
United are expected to make an announcement before the club fly to Australia on July 8 for the start of their pre-season tour.
Rashford, 21, has been linked with a number of leading European clubs, for his red card at
Selhurst Park in January
1995 before he launched himself at Palace fan
Matthew Simmons en route to the changing rooms. Shaw and coach Dave Reddington drilled Wan-Bissaka to defend despite the player’s initial scepticism. “I only probably started tackling in the under-23s,” Wan-Bissaka reflected this season.
What a transformation. In a Palace team who finished 12th, Wan-Bissaka was invaluable. He made his debut against Christian Eriksen in February last year, then held his own against Alexis Sanchez and Eden Hazard. These are the kind of players who can make a youngster wonder if he would have been better off on loan in League One. But not Wan-Bissaka. He just kept getting better.
Palace turned him into a Palace player. Who at Old Trafford will turn Wan-Bissaka into a United player? The question begs itself because the club, post-Sir Alex Ferguson, have become such a graveyard for big reputations, young and old, starting with WanBissaka’s friend Wilfried
Zaha. There have been other higher profile casualties too – Angel Di Maria, Sanchez, Paul Pogba – but it is the young ones in particular who seem to have struggled. It has including Barcelona, but he sees his future at United and, after successful negotiations, the new contract will catapult him towards the top end of their pay scale, but behind top earners Alexis Sanchez and Paul Pogba.
The contract is heavily incentivised but if Rashford meets his performance-related targets it could be worth more than £300,000 a week – over £15.6 million annually.
Rashford has usurped Romelu Lukaku as first-choice centre-forward under manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and will be entrusted to spearhead the attack next season. Lukaku is hoping to move to Inter Milan.
United also still hope to tie goalkeeper David de Gea, out of contract at the end of next season, to a new longterm deal.
The majority of Solskjaer’s squad are due back in tomorrow but Aaron WanBissaka, whose £50million move from Crystal Palace was formally announced yesterday, will have a short holiday before joining up with the squad after the right-back’s involvement at the European Under-21 Championship.
Wan-Bissaka became United’s second signing of the summer after Wales winger Daniel James and, according to executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward, the club are working to sign more “exciting” players who fit the “long-term vision” of the club.
Solskjaer is thought still to be in the market for two midfielders, a centrehalf and possibly a right-sided forward, although arrivals may be influenced by who departs amid doubts over the likes of Lukaku, Pogba and Sanchez.
Solskjaer has hailed Wan-Bissaka as the prototype of the player he wants to attract as he tries to remodel his squad.
The 21-year-old has signed a fiveyear contract, with the option of a sixth year, worth about £80,000 a week after United agreed an initial £45 million deal with Palace, with a further £5million payable in add-ons. taken Luke Shaw years to establish himself. Diogo Dalot must wonder where he stands. Adnan Januzaj has been and gone. Different players and different struggles, but a big turnover.
Romelu Lukaku must wonder where it all went wrong. He is ready to depart this summer having once been the £75million investment to score the club’s goals for another six to seven years. There have been basic problems: when he becomes fatigued the Lukaku touch can go south – a seal trying to catch a bar of soap on a water flume. But a glance at his statistics will tell you that he is being asked to do more with less. In his last two seasons at Everton, when he scored 18 in the league in 2015-2016 and then 25 the following year, he averaged 45 and 42 touches every 90 minutes respectively. At United his touches per 90 minutes fell to 35 (in 2017-2018) and 36 last season. It correlated with fewer goals: 16 in 20172018 and 12 last season. There were fewer shots. In his final season at Everton, Lukaku hit 110 shots in 37 games. Last season at United that had fallen to 55 in 32 games. His average per 90 minutes in his last year at Everton was 3.0, which fell to 2.3 for his most recent at United.
That average of 2.3 shots per game was low among his Premier League peer group. He ranked 32nd among all strikers who played 1,000 minutes or more, lower even than his nominal replacement at Everton, Cenk Tosun. The conclusion? United bought Lukaku as one kind of striker and then asked him to do the job differently. What can Wan-Bissaka read into this? His defensive statistics last season were spectacular. There is, however, room for improvement in the attacking part of his game. He was 14th among defenders for assists (three all season) and was ranked the same when it came to successful passes ending in the final third. That is to be expected at Palace, a team who averaged 46.6 per cent possession all season. Now he is joining a club ambitious to return to a model of dominating games and attacking opposition. He will be asked to do something different.
Wan-Bissaka was a tricky winger in whom Palace spotted a full-back, and, judging by the player’s own testimony, his coaches worked hard at bringing out that quality.
United need his defensive qualities but they will also need him to summon his inner-winger. They will want him to be more like AlexanderArnold, whose 12 assists last season were more than any other full-back. Like fellow new boy Dan James, also 21, these players are not the finished article.
At United, with the intense
He is no longer the interesting newcomer in the last half-hour of Match of the Day
Now he is joining a club ambitious to return to a model of dominating games
scrutiny and the enormous transfer fee, there will be no hiding place. Wan-Bissaka is no longer the interesting newcomer to be celebrated in the last half-hour of Match of the Day. At 21, he is being asked to play a different style in a different kind of team for the biggest club in the country, and just as he needed guidance to make it at Palace, he will need the same at United too.
It always felt like a long shot at Nottingham Forest: the return of Martin O’Neill to the club he once served in their heyday with Roy Keane, another great favourite, by his side.
With the club four points and one position outside the play-off places, the pressure was on from the start to get promotion. Even so, given O’Neill’s history at Forest, his sacking this week felt unnecessarily brutal in its execution, with the club pitching themselves as helpless in the face of a tide of player dissatisfaction.
Sabri Lamouchi, a former France international midfielder, will be the 12th Forest manager since June 2011.
The club have made their position abundantly clear. It will be intriguing to hear O’Neill’s version of events.