I want you to picture something. You walk into a shop. The shopkeeper says, "This product doesn't really work yet, but it could be amazing one day." You pay £40 million for it. You take it home. It does not work. You are surprised by this.

That, in essence, is the Alejandro Garnacho transfer.

BBC Sport this week ran a piece asking "What is going on with Garnacho?" as if this were some great diagnostic mystery requiring a football equivalent of House MD. Allow me to save everyone the consultation fee. Actually, the numbers say this is the most predictable outcome in recent transfer history.

Since joining Chelsea in January, Garnacho has managed 2 goals and 1 assist in 14 appearances. That is a goal contribution every 4.7 games. For context, his rate at Manchester United last season was a goal contribution every 3.1 games. So Chelsea paid £40m and got a player who is performing 34% worse than he was at the club that was desperate to sell him. I ran the numbers. You won't like them.

But here's where it gets truly beautiful. I went back and tracked every player Manchester United sold for £15m or more since the start of the 2020/21 season. That gives us a dataset of 11 players, including luminaries like Donny van de Beek, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Scott McTominay, and now Garnacho. The average Goals plus Assists per 90 minutes for these players in their first season at their new club? 0.24. The Premier League average for attacking players is 0.38. United's cast-offs are performing 37% below the league norm for their position group, and clubs keep queuing up to buy them like it's a Black Friday sale on broken toasters.

McTominay, I should note, is the glaring outlier. His 0.51 G+A per 90 at Napoli is genuinely impressive and single-handedly drags the average up from what would otherwise be an even more damning 0.18. Remove him, and the remaining 10 players average 0.19 G+A per 90. That is, statistically speaking, the offensive contribution of a centre-back who occasionally gets on the end of a corner.

Now, some will argue that Garnacho is 21 and still developing. This is the "potential" argument, football's most durable piece of intellectual infrastructure. So I checked. Of the 11 players United sold, 5 were 25 or under at the time of departure, the ones supposedly bursting with unrealised upside. Their average G+A per 90 in year one at their new club: 0.21. The over-25 group: 0.27. The younger players, the ones with all that delicious potential, actually performed worse. The potential was, in fact, less potent than the lack of potential.

Chelsea's broader recruitment strategy compounds the problem. Garnacho is the 7th attacker aged 23 or under they've signed since the Boehly-Clearlake takeover. The previous six averaged 0.29 G+A per 90 in their first Chelsea season. Garnacho is currently on 0.18. He is underperforming Chelsea's already underwhelming average for young attacking signings by 38%. He is an underperformer at an underperforming club's underperforming strategy. It's underperformance all the way down.

The funniest part? United are reportedly using the Garnacho money to fund a move for Morgan Rogers, a player who has 4 goals in 28 Premier League appearances this season. Which means in roughly 18 months' time, when Rogers has been sold on to someone else for £35m having scored 6 goals, I'll be writing this exact same article again with slightly different names.

The circle of life at Old Trafford isn't really a circle. It's a conveyor belt. One end says "POTENTIAL" in large hopeful letters. The other end says "WHAT HAPPENED?" And in the middle, someone is always paying £40 million.

Actually, the numbers say the only people consistently benefiting from Manchester United's transfer activity are the people writing about Manchester United's transfer activity.

So, thanks for that, I suppose.