Scott McTominay’s Manchester United exit and the sad decline of the one-club player

Farewell, Scott McTominay. As the teenage striker who became a holding player, a box-to-box dynamo and even a goal-scoring poacher at times, McTominay was a bit of everything to Manchester United, and finally nothing. A 22-year relationship with the club he joined aged five comes to an end with his sale to Napoli for £25m, to fund the arrival of Manuel Ugarte from Paris Saint-Germain.

All of which makes some footballing sense. United are selling a player who didn’t command a first-team place and replacing him with, potentially, exactly what they’ve been crying out for – a midfield destroyer who can stitch play together from deep, like Casemiro before his legs deserted him.

McTominay, too, may benefit from a new page. And yet as the ink dries on his departure, there is something sad about the prospect. His transfer has echoes of another this month, Chelsea’s sale of Conor Gallagher to Atletico Madrid, two players who joined their clubs as young boys with a dream and got to live it, players appreciated by the fans who know, players whose ability was overshadowed by their hunger for the cause.

Both were sold to meet the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR). Their clubs exploit amortisation, the accountancy practice that sees transfer fees spread over the length of a new signing’s contract. By contrast, they can sell homegrown players like McTominay and immediately record the entire transfer fee as profit, thus buffing the books in the short term.

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Given the Premier League’s new-found backbone for implementing financial rules, with points deductions handed out to Everton and Nottingham Forest last season and Manchester City in the dock, clubs are performing accountancy gymnastics to stay within net-spend limits.

PSR was designed to protect our football clubs – great cultural institutions – from being abused by transient owners and laden with debt. Instead the rules have sparked a race to the bottom line. Debt is being kicked down the road and clubs are selling parts of their soul to make a fast buck.

It is part of why Arsenal wanted to sell Eddie Nketiah and Emile Smith Rowe, why Manchester City sold Cole Palmer, why Chelsea sold Mason Mount. It might explain increasingly inflated fees in the transfers of young players, like Ian Maatsen and Omari Kellyman between Chelsea and Aston Villa this summer.

But PSR is just one piece of something broader, powerful market forces causing the gradual extermination of the one-club player. Take Jack Grealish, who left Aston Villa for Manchester City in 2021. Grealish might have been at the Euros this summer had he spent the past year firing Villa to the Champions League under Unai Emery. Instead he spent most of the season on the bench for City, and spent the summer in Ibiza.

Or Kalvin Phillips, who is somehow a worse footballer since leaving Leeds United two years ago. He is Leeds to his blood and bones. Both were the captains of their hometown clubs, rocks who represented their city. Would Villa, Leeds, England and football in general not be richer had they stayed?

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That option was never likely given the vast financial chasm behind the Premier League’s richest clubs. This is what happens when a squad player at City is paid double that of a star at Villa or Leeds. It is the inevitable result when football’s authorities cram in so many fixtures that the biggest clubs acquire an entire substitutes’ bench of elite players, gathering talent in stagnant pools. Meanwhile the lower club is weakened, and so the chasm grows.

The one-club player is being squeezed in every direction. These are the players who connect with a fanbase, who build bonds that take a shiny new signing years to forge. They add a layer of meaning to this gilded circus of millionaires. They still exist in the Premier League – Lewis Dunk, Marcus Rashford, Trent Alexander-Arnold – but they are increasingly an endangered species.

That was brought into focus on a recent episode of Monday Night Football in a discussion between Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher, two players who represented their local clubs and are still deeply entwined with their communities. Neville sounded pained recounting the departure of Gallagher and will no doubt feel the same way about McTominay, who wanted nothing but to play for United and made it happen.

United probably won’t regret selling McTominay. There are parallels with Danny Welbeck and Tom Cleverley, two academy players baptised in the first team by Sir Alex Ferguson but sold soon after the manager stepped down in 2013. They were soon forgotten, and although McTominay sustained his importance to the team for a few more years, he will not be mourned for long.

Yet he represents a loss of more than just a versatile midfielder. McTominay was a seed planted two decades ago that grew and bloomed, now chopped down for wood. In football’s thirst for more – more players, more matches, more revenue – the game is eroding those long-held connections between player and place, a delicate link becoming hard to spot and even harder to repair.