Rashford’s £40m exit clause expired three weeks ago, and United’s plan has flipped to keeping him
Fenerbahce made contact and were turned down, the same as MLS and Saudi Arabia before them. Michael Carrick has got the player INEOS wanted off the wage bill.
Aug 5, 2026
Fenerbahce got as far as calling Marcus Rashford’s representatives. That is where it stopped. The Turkish club were reported by the Sun on 3 August as ready to break the bank for him, with Rashford on a three-man list alongside Rafael Leao and Ismaila Sarr, and the answer came back the same as it has all summer. He is not interested in leaving.
The exit route closed on 15 July
For most of the last year there was a number attached to Rashford, and the number did the negotiating. His Manchester United contract carried a £40 million exit clause, one that specifically barred Manchester City and Liverpool from triggering it. It expired on 15 July. Anybody who wants him now has to sit down with United and agree a fee from scratch, which is a much slower and much less likely process in the first week of August.
Barcelona had the cleanest run at him and passed. They had a purchase option at around £26 million after his season-long loan and declined to use it, offering only another loan instead. Since then Rashford has turned down approaches from Fenerbahce, from MLS and from Saudi Arabia, some of them worth more per week than he earns now. Which is a different problem from the one United thought they had. He is not hard to sell. He does not want to go.
His manager wanted this, his employers did not
Michael Carrick has been openly keen on keeping him. TEAMtalk reported that Carrick’s staff see Rashford as a central figure in the side this season and are untroubled by what he costs relative to everyone else in the dressing room.
INEOS have been looking at it from the other end of the balance sheet. Rashford is on £325,000 a week, a figure that rose on a Champions League qualification escalator built into his deal, and Casemiro’s free transfer to Inter Miami in July left him as the highest earner at the club. His contract runs to June 2028. Two more years of that is a large fixed cost for a squad the hierarchy has spent two windows trying to reshape.
Carrick has effectively won. Not by argument, but because nobody turned up with the money and the player would not go anyway.
The knock-on is in the winger market
This matters beyond Rashford’s own future. United have wanted Iliman Ndiaye for weeks and have not bid, because Everton value him at around £70 million and United would not add a marquee wide signing while Rashford’s salary was still on the books. Fabrizio Romano said in late July that the deal was not progressing specifically because of the Rashford situation.
If the plan is now to keep him and play him, that logic has to be resolved one way or the other, and quickly. The window shuts on 1 September. United still want a midfielder and a wide forward, and Teun Koopmeiners at Juventus has been the midfield name circling for a fortnight. United’s whole wide-forward plan has been parked behind a call the club could not make on its own.
What it looks like on the pitch
Rashford is 28 and back at Carrington after 18 months away on loan at Aston Villa and then Barcelona. He was expected to feature in United’s friendly against Paris Saint-Germain on Saturday 8 August, which will be the first real look at how Carrick intends to use him.
There is a version of this that works. A forward who scored in the 2-0 Clasico win on 10 May that clinched La Liga, and who left Catalonia with a Supercopa de Espana medal from January, is not a player who spent the year hiding. Hansi Flick’s parting line was that the team would miss him. Whether that translates back into a United shirt after two years of loan football is the question Carrick has decided to answer himself rather than sell.