houston4044 wrote:I did say in my prior post I was referring to recent years. The most recent player out of all the ones you've mentioned left 9 years ago. Since then Utd have blown that perception of themselves out of the water, and that's not just me trying to score points here
I actually had more to write in that post but my train was pulling into the station at the time!
Let's look at the last time United won the league in 2012-13. Who did we have? The last of the Class Of '92 were still kicking around (Scholes and Giggs) along with some younger youth system players like Evans, Rafael, Welbeck and Cleverley. Evra and Vidic were both bargains at £7m and £5.5m while bigger money was actually spent on far less influential (at the time) players like Phil Jones and Antonio Valencia who came from much smaller Premier League clubs. See also Carrick and Young, although they were far more important. Big international purchases like Nani, Chicharito and Anderson had become more fringe players by that point while Shinji Kagawa was hardly a big splash at £12m.
Only Ferdinand, Rooney, Van Persie and maybe De Gea (in his second season there were still doubts about his slender frame) could you point to and say there are the big money spends that won United the league that year. And even then, £18.9m for De Gea and £24m for Van Persie were hardly insane transfer fees. Rooney and Ferdinand obviously seemed like crazy money at the time but both proved to be well worth it.
Here's the kicker though- None of them had ever won the Prem before coming to United. In fact nobody in the squad that year had ever won one of Europe's top 5 leagues before apart from Shinji Kagawa who was a 2-time Bundesliga winner with Dortmund. The only other major trophy winners in their pre-United careers were De Gea and Van Persie who'd both won the Uefa Cup.
So tell me, how can we be accused of buying trophies if we mostly buy players who haven't won much silverware before?