Man Utd to pay Mason Greenwood off to avoid ‘ramshackle selection’ of leagues?

Mason Greenwood could get a massive pay-off from Man Utd his week or join a club from a ‘ramshackle selection’ of leagues…
Who wants to lose a millionaire?
It’s over a week since The Sun claimed that Manchester United ‘are facing a mad scramble to get rid of Mason Greenwood in just ten days or face losing millions’ (we covered it in Mediawatch at the time) so maths dictates that ‘Manchester United have just days to find a new club for Mason Greenwood or face losing millions’.
Except it really is still absolute bollocks.
A reminder – should it be required – that the clubs most strongly linked to Greenwood are in Turkey, where the transfer window closes on September 15.
But The Sun care not a jot for this because they have realised that the twin traffic towers of a) Mason Greenwood and b) Manchester United possibly f***ing up, are too tall to ignore.
The 21-year-old must be sold or loaned out by Friday before the transfer window closes at 11pm.
If United miss the cut-off, they face paying the £75,000-a-week striker around £8 million to cut his contract.
They ‘face’ doing something they almost certainly will not do? Do they bollocks.
If ‘United miss the cut-off’ (and this is entirely out of their control if no club from the major European leagues makes a suitable offer) then they ‘face’ three choices: a) try and sell him to a club whose transfer window does not close on Friday, b) continue to pay him and then try and sell him in January or c) pay him off.
If United cannot mutually agree on cancelling Greenwood’s deal, his options are slim.
This is because most of Europe’s top leagues also shut their transfer windows on Friday.
In this scenario, Greenwood would be left with a ramshackle selection of tiny national leagues whose windows remain open.
These include: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Greece, Israel, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Switzerland and Turkey.
A ‘ramshackle selection of tiny national leagues’ that includes the country ninth in UEFA’s current rankings list? Not to mention Saudi Arabia, who we hear have a little money to spend.
Not only is it an absolute load of bollocks, but it is a patronising load of bollocks too.
Race across the world
Where one leads, others inevitably follow. The Mirror have this risible version:
Man Utd face race against time to offload Mason Greenwood as new club prepares offer
They tell us that ‘United announced on August 21 that Greenwood will leave Old Trafford in the near future. The two parties “mutually agreed” for the striker to find a new team after the Premier League club concluded their own internal investigation. With the Premier League summer transfer window closing at 11pm on Friday, they are rapidly running out of time to achieve that objective’.
So what about this ‘new club’? It’s Besiktas, of course. In Turkey. Where the window closes on September 15. It’s almost like Manchester United don’t face a ‘race against time’ after all.
The Times they are a-changing
We expected better from The Times, who claim that ‘Manchester United may have to terminate Mason Greenwood’s contract before Friday night if he is to have the best chance of securing a move to a leading European league’.
Mediawatch cannot help but think that if a club from a leading European league wanted to sign Mason Greenwood, they would have done so by now.
United can leave it until late in the window before deciding whether to cancel Greenwood’s contract.
Tottenham Hotspur did so with Serge Aurier two years ago. The London club announced the mutual termination of his contract 15 minutes before the summer transfer window was about to close. The Ivory Coast full back, now at Nottingham Forest, joined Villarreal five weeks later.
As precedents go, this one is entirely unrelated to the Greenwood situation. Aurier had a year left on his contract at Tottenham and was worth pennies to the club. He was also 28 years old and his club had not just publicly announced that they were committed to finding him a new club as part of a duty of care towards him. Also, and this seems important, he was not a PR nightmare to any prospective club.
Elsewhere in The Times, Martin Samuel writes at length about Greenwood and the unlikelihood of any independent panel kicking him out of Manchester United.
But it’s this sentence that sticks out:
Still, he’s out of the club. Despite this appraisal, it was decided he couldn’t play for United. Could an independent panel have concluded likewise with the same findings; could it have recommended such punitive measures? Legal caution could prevail.
‘Punitive’? It wasn’t exactly a crippling punishment to be told that your club is committed to finding you new employment while continuing to pay you £75,000 a week.
Dub be good to me
Elsewhere on The Sun website:
Man Utd hold transfer talks over ‘Bruno Fernandes 2.0’ and have upper hand over Chelsea after Enzo saga
We are told that ‘MANCHESTER UNITED have held talks with Benfica over the signing of wonderkid Joao Neves. Dubbed Bruno Fernandes 2.0, United hold a very strong interest in the 18-year-old.’
A quick Google and Twitter search later and we can confirm that nobody has ‘dubbed’ him Bruno Fernandes 2.0 until The Sun on this very morning. He doesn’t even play in the same frigging position.