With Manchester United closing in on Atalanta midfielder Ederson for around £38 million, it felt like a good moment to highlight a trend that plays out every single summer.
United are linked with a player, the fee gets reported, and within hours the takes begin rolling in. Spend big, and you’re out of touch, trying to buy your way back to the top, throwing money at problems.
Spend modestly, and you’re skint and unambitious, bargain-hunting while City and Liverpool invest in world-class talent. The framing shifts to fit the conclusion that was already decided before the contract is signed.
It’s almost a ritual at this point. The media have always done their thing. But the more cutting dismissals often come from closer to home, a section of the fanbase, and the club’s own legends, now sitting comfortably behind microphones and TV cameras, passing judgment before a player has pulled on the shirt for the first time.
The most glaring recent example? Paul Scholes on Senne Lammens.
When United signed the 23-year-old Lammens on deadline day in September 2025, Scholes said on The Good, The Bad & The Football Podcast: “You buy this lad from Belgium. What’s he cost €20m? I think that tells you everything about him at this point… It tells me he’s not a top goalkeeper.”
This was delivered before Lammens had played a single minute for the club. The fee, in Scholes’ view, was all the evidence needed. Nine months on, that verdict looks embarrassing.
Lammens topped the Premier League charts for most goals prevented in the 2025/26 season, and according to advanced metrics, he prevented 5.5 more goals than the average Premier League goalkeeper based on the quality of shots he faced, a record no other Premier League keeper matched since his debut.
Furthermore, the Athletic judged him as United’s best signing of the summer. He has since earned a senior Belgium call-up and will be at the World Cup this summer.
The £18m fee didn’t tell you he wasn’t good enough. It told you United’s recruitment team spotted something the pundits couldn’t see from a podcast studio in Salford.
It’s not what you know about a Manchester United signing, it’s how much noise you can make
Unsurprisingly, there’s rarely much noise when a low-cost signing performs. Nobody queues up to revisit their hot take when they’re proven wrong.
There wasn’t much fanfare around Lammens’ arrival, and the same was true for Patrick Dorgu and Ayden Heaven, who both arrived for relatively modest fees and quickly became important figures in Ruben Amorim’s squad.
The quiet signings who work out don’t generate the same appetite for reflection that the loud dismissals generate for content.
I often look at things from a psychological perspective. We fans are emotionally invested in a way pundits no longer are. There’s a comfort in a familiar face from the glory days telling you what to think. But “I won five league titles here” is not the same as “I understand what this manager needs and what this 23-year-old can become.”
The authority feels earned. The analysis often isn’t.
It also taps into something deeper for United fans, specifically, years of legitimate frustration over poor recruitment and wasted fees. That history creates a fertile environment for scepticism, and scepticism is easy to weaponise.
A pundit who tells you the new signing isn’t good enough is validating your anxiety. A low transfer fee becomes shorthand for low quality, because it fits a narrative that already feels true.
But the fee has never been a reliable indicator of quality. Some of United’s worst signings have cost fortunes, and some of our best have cost almost nothing.
The honest approach, the one that actually serves supporters, is simple. If a player is at this club, the people responsible for bringing him here believe he has something.
Truthfully, it is a model that deserves a fair run, especially in the past couple of seasons, when our recruitment has turned a corner.
If it works out, brilliant. Suppose it doesn’t, move on. But writing someone off before they’ve had a chance to prove themselves, based on a number attached to a transfer fee, isn’t analysis, it’s noise dressed up as expertise.
So, this summer, when the signings are announced and the takes start coming from reporters, pundits, and the legends who should probably know better, remember Lammens.
Remember what the €20m “told” Paul Scholes. Then watch the actual football.
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