Manchester United, Barcelona, Juventus, PSG, Chelsea and Real Madrid have all spent fortunes bringing in some of the greatest footballers of their generations. And sometimes, they’ve ended up worse off.

It sounds ridiculous. How can signing proven bonafide footballing royalty possibly make a team worse? Because in real life, football doesn’t work like FIFA Career Mode.

We’ve identified eight big-name players who had an adverse effect on the club they joined.

Ruud van Nistelrooy to Manchester United

Van Nistelrooy!? One of the most clinical strikers in Premier League history? Surely not? Bear with us.

Sir Alex Ferguson had been chasing the Dutchman for over a year, patiently waiting for him to recover from a serious knee injury before finally bringing him to Old Trafford in 2001.

United had just won three consecutive Premier League titles. Van Nistelrooy was supposed to keep them at the summit.

There’s no questioning his individual brilliance. He scored 150 goals in just 219 appearances, winning the Golden Boot in 2002-03.

Was he actually what they needed, though? His five seasons coincided with Fergie’s leanest spell in the Premier League era, yielding just one league title, an FA Cup and a League Cup.

Compare that to the five years either side. Four league titles, an FA Cup and the Champions League before his arrival. Four more titles, two League Cups and another Champions League afterwards.

There were other factors behind United’s early noughties struggles, not least some questionable recruitment and a squad in transition.

Van Nistelrooy wasn’t the root of all their problems, but building everything around a penalty-box poacher ultimately wasn’t a recipe for success.

Back-to-back Premier League champions. Jose Mourinho at the helm.

A generational Ballon d’Or-winning striker arriving to take them to the next level.

What could possibly go wrong?

Barcelona’s decision to part with a shedload of cash Samuel Eto’o, a key figure in Pep Guardiola’s treble-winning side, remains perplexing all these years later.

Ibrahimovic was a serial title-winner and a phenomenal goalscorer, but his larger-than-life personality was always going to be an awkward fit for Guardiola’s carefully cultivated collective.

“Lionel Messi is amazing. He’s totally amazing. He joined Barca when he was 13,” Ibrahimovic reminisced in his autobiography.

“He was brought up in that culture and doesn’t have a problem with that school crap.”

Barca retained their league title, but Ibrahimovic was gone within a year. Meanwhile, Eto’o won a second successive treble with Inter, eliminating his former club from the Champions League along the way. Ouch.

The damage wasn’t lasting, at least. Guardiola replaced Ibrahimovic with David Villa, who proved a much better fit and helped Barcelona win another Champions League. The signing they should’ve made in the first place.

Ronaldo’s army of online acolytes will point to his 101 goals in 134 appearances for Juventus and suggest we’re talking nonsense.

Fair enough. That is a of goals. Well done Ronaldo. But it’s also ignoring the entire crux of this article.

Was the team any better with Ronaldo in it? No. Was it worse? Demonstrably so.

Juventus smashed their transfer record to sign Ronaldo as the final piece of the jigsaw, having lost two of the previous four Champions League finals. Who better than the competition’s all-time top goalscorer, fresh from Real Madrid’s historic threepeat?

Instead, they went backwards in Europe, suffering successive shock eliminations to Ajax, Lyon and Porto. In the preceding years, they’d gone deeper and been knocked out by Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid.

They won two more Scudetti, but they’d already won seven straight. By Ronaldo’s final season the Old Lady had slipped to fourth, beginning a title drought that continues today. You can pinpoint that signing as the key mis-step that sparked their decline.

Cristiano Ronaldo to Manchester United

Again, your sycophantic Piers Morgans of this world will point to Ronaldo’s 24 goals in all competitions in 2021-22 and suggest he couldn’t possibly have been the problem.

That’s a sound argument if you view football as ultimately one quadragenarian’s egotistical quest to score a thousand goals.

Back on planet earth, where the sport is generally viewed as a collective endeavour, Manchester United massively went backwards after bringing Ronaldo back to Old Trafford.

His second debut was welcomed like the return of Jesus at Old Trafford, and prompted the single most embarrassing thing ever written by a football journalist. The honeymoon didn’t last. Solskjaer’s side became a shambles trying to carry an ageing superstar who wouldn’t (couldn’t?) press.

The season before, they’d finished second and gone unbeaten away. They then thrashed Leeds 5-1 in their opening match. Nine months later, United were sixth with their lowest-ever Premier League points tally.

Just like Juventus, they’re still dealing with the fallout years later.

Pipe down Ronaldo fanboys. Here’s a bit of balance.

In fairness to Messi, his two years at PSG were largely business as usual for the Qatari project. Domestic dominance, back-to-back league titles, disappointment in Europe. You could reasonably argue he didn’t make them any .

But Messi was perhaps the ultimate symbol of where that project went wrong before Luis Enrique’s revolution. Too much star power, not enough balance. PSG had come within touching distance of winning the Champions League in 2020, but adding another forward who offered little off the ball to Neymar and Kylian Mbappe only exacerbated their problems.

Modern football simply can’t accommodate three passengers out of possession. Even if they might’ve been the three best attackers in the world at the time.

Kylian Mbappe to Real Madrid

Are you sensing a theme here?

Mbappe has scored 94 goals in 114 appearances for Real Madrid. Phenomenal. But we’ve made this point about Van Nistelrooy, Ronaldo and Messi already. Football’s a team sport.

Mbappe, widely regarded as the world’s best player, joined the reigning champions of Spain and Europe. So why have they gone backwards?

Failing to replace Toni Kroos and Luka Modric is arguably the bigger issue, but Madrid increasingly resemble the failed Galactico project that Mbappe left behind. Is that a coincidence?

PSG and Real Madrid have won four of the last five Champions Leagues between them. Mbappe’s played for both throughout that period, yet has none to his name.

Perhaps it’s time to heed Luis Enrique’s advice, look in the mirror and ask himself why.

Right man, wrong time? Wrong league? Or simply overrated?

Whatever the explanation, Wirtz is giving us flashbacks to Juan Sebastian Veron at Manchester United. Although Andoni Iraola hardly seems the type to storm out of a press conference declaring him a “f*cking great player”.

It’s easy to forget just how coveted Wirtz was after starring in Xabi Alonso’s Invincible Bayer Leverkusen side.

Jamie Carragher sums up the disappointment:

“I’m sorry to say this, Florian Wirtz, it’s not working and it hasn’t worked so far.

“I struggle to think of one game where he’s won Liverpool the game, he’s been the man if you like,” the former Liverpool defender said.

“He was bought in to be a star of the Premier League. I felt he could be the Kevin De Bruyne that City had, that I think at times got Man City over the line with Liverpool in league title runs.

“But I think you could make a case for there being 10 or 12 players in Liverpool’s Premier League era in that position who have done more than Florian Wirtz.”

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