Man Utd transfer error revealed and Liverpool miss out on deadline-day signing

 The transfer window is but a distant memory, the interlull yet to truly get properly going. We’re all stuck in limbo.

But the need for content is constant, and into that news vacuum some content must flow. Which leaves us with Rio Ferdinand pretending Man United’s big mistake came two years ago in not making two £100m signings they had little chance of actually making, and more headlines pretending that Liverpool have made some kind of damning decision on Hugo Ekitike’s role.

There’s just a load of absolute guff basically. And Mediawatch lives for guff.

The little things they make me so happy

The thing with elite, top-level sport is that tiny little things can make a huge difference. Marginal gains, and all that.

The whole caper is a series of tiny sliding-doors moments that could have changed everything.

Manchester United, for instance, are a clown-car basket case of a football club, whose penance for years and years of childhood-ruining dominance in the 90s and 00s now appears to be to spend the rest of their time existing merely as a punchline for everyone else’s jokes.

But it could have been so different. The Sun has more…

More than a decade has passed since Manchester United last won the Premier League, but one member of that squad things (sic) just two signings could have made things very different.

That’s all. Just two signings. Two titchy little signings. And which two signings are those, Rio? (Because of course this is Rio Ferdinand.)

Rio Ferdinand won his sixth and final league title in 2012-13, as part of a strong English core under Sir Alex Ferguson, and believes compatriots Declan Rice and Harry Kane could have set United right in the years since.

Yes, if United had simply signed the best English midfielder of this generation and the best English striker possibly ever, things could all have been so different. Fine margins.

Of course, you do have to ignore the fact that by the time either of those players represented any kind of solution to United’s problems the Red Devils had already been quite sh*t for quite a long time and those two elite players therefore had far better offers. Which is a big part of why they are not now Man United players.

‘I honestly think, I’ll say this and I’m convinced, if United had gone and got Declan Rice and Harry Kane in that [summer 2023] window, Man United are in a different place now.’

Well… yeah. Probably. If a conspicuously sh*t football team had simply bought what were at the time England’s two best players, they might now be less conspicuously sh*t. But you could say that about a lot of other mid-table clubs too, Rio.

Really is baffling where this idea of ludicrously entitled Manchester United arrogance comes from, isn’t it?

Breaking news

A classic Modern Football Journalism wheeze is to ‘innocently’ publish a story of deeply questionable relevance and value talking about some bit of ancient history or other while by sheer serendipitous happenstance framing it in such a way that by total unplanned accident it alas tricks people into thinking it’s quite a significant story about current events.

And the Mirror have provided a textbook example with this piece published entirely coincidentally just after the transfer window closed now in September 2025 under this surely unintentionally potentially misleading headline

‘Liverpool wanted me on transfer deadline day – but I decided to turn them down’

Duje Caleta-Car, obviously. January 2021, because of course. Get out.