Bruno Fernandes turned down Saudi riches – but Man Utd skipper still did club wrong

Manchester United captain Bruno Fernandes turned down a £700,000-a-week offer to join Al-Hilal but the drawn-out transfer talk probably leaves more questions than answers

Probably – no, definitely – the most interesting five minutes of the recent Europa League final in Bilbao came soon after the last whistle of a truly abject football match. Bruno Fernandes, to his credit, fronted up as he always does.

Unsolicited, in front of a knot of reporters in the bowels of Estadio de San Mamés following the loss to Spurs, he suggested he would understand if Manchester United wanted to sell him and move on without him. At that point, any elite club worth its salt might well have thought long and hard about selling him and moving on.

This is Manchester United we are talking about. For all his foibles on the field, Fernandes is a good guy. Off the pitch, he represents United brilliantly, speaks well and comes across as a fine captain.

He is a good guy and a very good player. But for him to now be lauded for deciding to stay at Old Trafford is not the best reflection of what the club has become. Re-reading his explanation of the dalliance with Al-Hilal – whoever they are – it is hard to believe his commitment to United is as rock-solid as everyone makes out.

“The president of Al-Hilal called me a month ago to ask me about the possibility of moving there,” he said. Which, in my old-fashioned mind, constitutes an illegal approach.

Which, in my old-fashioned mind, is tapping up. And, in my old-fashioned mind, it should have elicited a response along the lines of…’mate, if you want to sign me, talk to the club that has given me a contract worth £300,000 a week for the next two years’.

Phone down. Yes, tapping up has gone on since the dawn of professional football but this was still a bizarre way of doing things.

To have your captain and star player in discussions with another club while under contract is just odd. Unless, of course, United gave him permission, which does not seem likely.

Fernandes, apparently, had to ‘wait a while to think about the future’. After all, the president of Al-Hilal was, Fernandes said, ‘a fantastic person’.

In the end, his wife and Ruben Amorim helped convince Fernandes that his immediate future did not belong to Saudi Arabia. Which, considering he has been a decent player in a terrible United team in recent seasons, is, on the face of it, a good thing for the club.

But this should never have been an issue. That Fernandes took the call from Saudi when under contract at United, that he seriously considered the move, is still a slight against what remains an iconic institution.

Openly, Fernandes has happily admitted to talking to a Saudi Arabian club while being under contract at Manchester United. That is just wrong.

And don’t forget, as good as Fernandes has been – and he is a smashing footballer – he is still the leader of a very mediocre Manchester United team. He is still a part of failure.

There are many strange elements of the whole Fernandes-Saudi saga. Let’s face it, if Al-Hilal had actually tabled an offer of £100million for a player who soon turns 31, would United really have pleaded with a captain – a captain who led his team to only 11 Premier League wins in one season – to stay?

For a multi-billionaire, Sir Jim Ratcliffe sometimes seems daft … but not that daft. Fernandes is a rare talent.

But as skipper of a side that needs total transformation, it might have been best, all round, if he had taken up an offer that he clearly gave serious consideration to. And I suspect he, and the club, knows it.

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