5 months ago
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Manchester United must pay £100m to sign Crystal Palace midfielder Adam Wharton this summer, insists football finance expert Professor Rob Wilson.
Wharton only joined Palace from Blackburn in February but has already caught the attention of some of the biggest clubs in the country, who will be watching Euro 2024 with intrigue after he made Gareth Southgate’s England squad.
Manchester City have reportedly earmarked Wharton as long-term transfer target and won’t be the only Premier League heavyweights keen on the 20-year-old.
Should United join the race to sign Wharton – who is under contract at Selhurst Park until 2029 – they’ve been warned they will have to pay a huge transfer fee.
‘Manchester United would spend huge money on Adam Wharton without blinking, because you’ve got the kind of commercial upside alongside the playing upside,’ football finance expert Wilson told OLBG.
‘United have also got Kobbie Mainoo coming through as well, so being able to put together two of the finest young English talents in the same team is really exciting from a sporting perspective. That then has a major impact on the kind of off field opportunities for them.
‘For Wharton to maximise himself and his brand, it might be that he needs to move at some point, but Crystal Palace would be pretty keen to keep him.
‘I don’t think he’s in the kind of 100 million plus bracket just yet, but that value from Crystal Palace might just stop the deal from happening.
‘The dynamics that you typically see are club premiums, so if it’s Manchester United, you add 20% to the transfer fee immediately.
‘Then you have the English player premium as well, which probably adds another 30% on top of that. So you can easily double that transfer value as a result of those. At Manchester United you also have the INEOS ownership who favour those kind of young British talents. I think they’ve made that fairly obvious.
‘If someone like Jarrad Branthwaite goes in there from Everton and they manage to get Wharton, all of a sudden you’re kind of building this young English spine of a very ambitious Premier League team that is putting all the systems and structures in place to get back to the top.
‘Say Adam Wharton plays for England and plays well at the Euros then Palace can probably demand £100m because those short-term benefits will always yield an outcome and we’ve seen it time after time after a major championship.
‘The player sets the world alight and the next thing you know it’s a major transfer.’
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