Manchester United manager Michael Carrick has ruled out the possibility of making a £100m signing this summer, citing financial constraints. This comes as the club has only invested a total of £85m on Youri Tielemans and Andrey Santos in the current transfer window, a sum that has not reached the £100m mark for any single player. In contrast, other top clubs like Manchester City, Tottenham, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Chelsea have all spent £100m or more on a single player recently.
Carrick, who guided the team to third place last season, was asked about the club's ability to compete without such large-scale investments. 'Money is money,' he said. 'It’s still about football and that’s where the competition lies. What we feel naturally as a group is to try and win games. So there’s a lot that goes into that, but certainly the situation is what it is as well, whether that’s finances or whatever.' The 45-year-old manager acknowledged the need to maximize the resources available, stating, 'For now, we’ve got to make the most of it, push everything in every boundary that we can to be able to win again, basically.'
The manager was also asked about the club's title ambitions without any players worth £100m or more in the squad. 'A little bit depends on what position that is and what you’ve got and the dynamics you need at certain points. Sometimes you do need that if it’s the right player. Again, it’s not purely on money. Obviously over time we need to be pushing to look to enhance the squad. So, yeah, 100% we need to do that,' Carrick said. 'We’ve done really good business. So we’re delighted with that [but] we want more, we need more, we keep looking for how we can do that, so that never stops.'
Marcus Rashford, who has been on loan at Barcelona and Aston Villa, has rejoined the squad following a post-World Cup break. Carrick stated, 'He’s our player and has trained really well,' and added, 'It’s been good to have him around the group again.' Despite Rashford's preference to leave, the club is keen to retain him, with Carrick emphasizing, 'He’s a very good player, Marcus, and if you’re going to have a career over 10 or 15 years, there’s going to be times when things go in a direction and maybe a different direction. All right, that happens. There’s ups and downs, and that doesn’t judge you as a one-off kind of [state]. It’s what happens over time, and now we’re in a positive place as a group, and Marcus can offer us so much. He has done, and he can do again, so it’s quite exciting.'
