There’s stupidity, and then there’s trying to shove Bruno Fernandes out the door to Saudi.
If the reports are true, someone in the new INEOS-blessed brain trust looked at the one man who has dragged this team through the murk and thought, yes, that’s the asset we should cash in. Not the passengers, not the busted flushes on big wages, but the lunatic who plays every minute, runs himself into the grave and still finds a way to put up numbers that would make a prime-era No. 10 blush.
For years now, Bruno has been the nearest thing United have had to an adult in the room. While the club turned into a theme park of half-baked projects and doomed “resets,” he just kept showing up: goals, assists, chances created, pressing, endless barking at teammates who don’t meet the standard. You can quibble with his histrionics, his Hollywood passes, the occasional tantrum. But you cannot question the work or the output. In a squad that has spent twelve years trying on identities like cheap cologne, he is the only constant.
And the plan was to replace that with a wire transfer.
One hundred million, they say. Maybe more. Enough to make a spreadsheet sigh with pleasure. Enough to tick the “FFP flexibility” box in a PowerPoint. But not enough, not in ten lifetimes, to replace what actually matters: the lunatic, obsessive, slightly unhinged desire to win football matches that radiates off Bruno like heat from a forge. You do not buy that at 26 from some hipster shortlist. You do not find that in a data set. You either get lucky and a player like that falls into your arms, or you spend a decade wandering the desert trying to find him.
He’s past 30 now, so the story goes, time to be rational, time to “recycle assets.” This is where modern football has completely lost the plot. You can build a team around a player like Bruno for another five years, easy. Not because his legs will never go, but because his brain and his standards will still be better than most of the league when he does start to fade. The man plays like someone who remembers when this club meant something, when wearing that shirt implied obligations beyond social content and a boot deal.
Selling that – or worse, pushing him towards a league that exists as a soft-power theme park – would not just have been bad business. It would have been a confession. A confession that the people in charge don’t understand what they’ve bought, or what they’re supposed to be restoring. That they see this place as a portfolio entry, a distressed asset to be restructured, not a living, howling organism powered by the stubborn loyalty of millions of people who know exactly how much Bruno has carried this mess.
You can trim around the edges. You can move on the squad players, the serial disappointments, the careers that never quite justified the fee. That’s what ruthless clubs do. But the heart of it, the ones who never hide, who show up in every grim away game and every big night under the lights, those you protect like family. Those you overpay if you have to. Those you build statues for later.
If INEOS really did try to hustle Bruno out to the desert, it should haunt them. Not because of the money left on the table, but because it reveals how close they came to amputating the only healthy limb this club has left.
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