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#3 Henrikh Mkhitaryan
Henrikh Mkhitaryan was never going to fit Jose Mourinho's plans for Manchester United. He is not someone who is keen on getting back to defend and was always going to struggle to become a part of a Mourinho low-block. However, it has to be said that Mkhitaryan was coming off the back of an excellent Bundesliga season for Borussia Dortmund.
Mkhitaryan took a long time to settle down at Old Trafford and finally became a mainstay for them in the Europa and league and proved to be pivotal in their cup triumph. However, though he started off on the right foot in his sophomore season, his contributions dwindled to a trickle quite soon.
Mkhitaryan became a shadow of the player he used to be and the Armenian who was bought for £30 million was included in one of the worst swap deals in Premier League history involving two high-profile players.
#2 Angel Di Maria
Angel Di Maria is an excellent player. He was surprisingly offloaded by Real Madrid in the summer of 2014 after he was arguably their best player of the 2013-14 season. However, Manchester United manager Louis Van Gaal had no idea how to use the Argentinian.
Deploying him out wide at first and leaving him to work his magic, Di Maria flourished in the opening few weeks of the season after joining Manchester United for a whopping £59.7 million. A lot of positional changes hampered Di Maria's flow and Manchester United crumbling as a team did not help.
However, Di Maria still registered 12 assists in the league that season. Manchester United should have tried to keep him or at least managed him better. But they sold him after the season was over for a loss of £16 million. Thus Di Maria joined Paris Saint-Germain and has now become one of the most important players for the Ligue 1 champions.
The indecisiveness and short-sightedness of the Manchester United top brass meant that there was no long-term plan and they were simply moving from one manager to the next and from one philosophy to another in a reckless manner and Di Maria was a victim of that among other things.
#1 Alexis Sanchez
The costliest mistake of them all. Alexis Sanchez was close to signing for Manchester City before the Red Devils decided to hijack the deal. After wreaking havoc for Arsenal, scoring 80 goals from 166 games, he was available for a cut-price deal but his wages were going to be ridiculously high.
The move was not going to benefit Manchester United. The Red Devils already had Anthony Martial and Marcus Rashford playing down the left wing and Sanchez's arrival was only going to impede their growth. But Mourinho decided to demote the youngsters and make an underperforming Sanchez the regular starter.
The Chilean was paid wages in excess of £300,000 per week and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had no use for him once the Norwegian took over. But United couldn't sell Sanchez and hence they loaned him out to Inter Milan whilst still paying his wages.
Manchester United finally sold him to Inter Milan earlier this transfer window and thus put an end to paying him to not play for the club. It was going to take something quite special to beat the likes of Fellaini, Schweinsteiger, Schneiderlin, Mkhitaryan etc. as the worst transfer story in the post-Ferguson era, but the Sanchez signing definitely tops it.
