Manchester United get £75m boost by getting contract situation under control

In the last two summers, Manchester United have waved goodbye to seven senior players with more than 1,500 games for the club, letting World Cup winners, title winners, players of the year and academy graduates depart without recouping a fee for any of them.

But the exodus has saved in excess of £75million a year off the wage bill and it is finally allowing football director John Murtough and Erik ten Hag to bring the contract situation under control at Old Trafford.

Nemanja Matic, Juan Mata, Jesse Lingard, Paul Pogba, Edinson Cavani, Phil Jones and David de Gea were the seven players to leave when their contracts expired and it's hard to make a case that the wrong decision was made in any instance. Pogba has been plagued by injury at Juventus, Lingard had little impact at Nottingham Forest, and none of Matic, Mata or Cavani were really missed last season.

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Jones' woeful luck with injuries meant his time was always going to be up this summer and it was time to move on from De Gea. If United complete a deal to make Andre Onana their new No. 1 goalkeeper then it will vindicate that switch in goalkeeping priorities.

It is the departure of Jones and De Gea that sums up the folly of some of United's recent contract decisions. Under the leadership of Ed Woodward, there was a desire to use contract extensions to protect the value of players, but all it did was create an unsustainable wage structure and mean that players were almost unsellable if they didn't perform.

Jones was handed a four-year deal in