Premier League Transfer Window Analysis: Winners and Losers

Two days on from the closing of the Premier League’s most deranged transfer window yet, the dust hasn’t so much settled as thickened. The numbers blur, the logic dissolves, and you’re left staring at a table of fees that reads less like a market and more like a dare.

Who won? Who lost? Does that even mean anything anymore?

This was the summer the Chelseafication of the transfer market felt complete. Money flung at problems, then flung again at the consequences. Fees so swollen they’ve stopped being shocking and started becoming background noise. The whole thing carries the air of a housing bubble: do almost anything, however daft, and the value still rises. Spend £100m on a dud? No problem. Someone else will be along shortly with £80m and a straight face.

Chelsea paying £60m for Mykhailo Mudryk, watching him struggle, then watching him sit out a ban, and somehow emerging with a deal that might yet produce a profit this time next year is not a system behaving rationally. It’s a system that’s decided rationality is optional.

You can’t really apply reason to that. But you try. So let’s go back three weeks, before the football barged in and messed with the theories, to the list of the 10 biggest problems or glaring gaps across the Premier League. The question now is simple: did anyone actually fix anything? Or did everyone just throw more money into the void and hope for the best?

Tottenham’s missing No 9

The best place to start is the place where the answer is still a shrug.

Tottenham wanted goals. What they got was Savio, Omar Marmoush and Mykhailo Mudryk. They did not, crucially, get a classic centre-forward. Dominic Solanke and Richarlison remain, both still circling in uneasy orbit around Roberto De Zerbi, who is as spiky as they are.

De Zerbi has already set Savio a double-figure goals target. The plan is obvious enough: spread the goals around, turn the front line into a collective rather than a focal point.

Marmoush looks a sharp pick-up, another forward who decided that playing understudy to Erling Haaland at Manchester City was a waste of a career. But he, like Savio, is not a pure No 9. The other attacking names that slipped away – Cody Gakpo, Iliman Ndiaye – tell their own story. De Zerbi doesn’t seem to want a fixed-point striker. He got almost everything he asked for. A traditional centre-forward wasn’t on the list.

Two Premier League games in, Spurs have not scored. They have not really looked like scoring. The new attack needs to stop being a concept and start being a threat quickly, or this bold, big-spending version of Tottenham risks stumbling into another season of angst dressed up as ambition.

Manchester City’s midfield reset

The concern about Manchester City’s midfield began, as these things so often do, with an overreaction to the Community Shield. Cardiff, Elliott Anderson, Mateo Kovacic, a flat performance and a few alarm bells.

City’s response was pure City: identify the problem, then lob a nine-figure fee at it. Enzo Fernandez arrived from Chelsea, another huge cheque written in the club’s now-familiar handwriting.

Fernandez was already a pantomime villain after his World Cup antics with Argentina. Now he has doubled down, moving from one of the Premier League’s great financial lightning rods to the other. He has become the face of this window’s excess, the poster boy for a league that has stopped pretending to care how the numbers look.

There will be plenty who want this to blow up in his face, and in City’s. If that happens, Anderson may yet become collateral damage in a saga that was never really about him.

Manchester United’s creaking back line

Manchester United did what they had to in midfield. The defence, though, remains a gamble.

Two games, two promoted opponents, four goals conceded. It looks uncomfortably familiar. Four years ago, this was a back line conceding four at Brentford. The faces have aged, not necessarily improved.

The calendar will be merciless. When the two-games-a-week schedule bites, the strain on this defence will be relentless. A huge amount rests on Luke Shaw staying fit and functioning for almost the entire next four months. That is not a plan. It’s a hope.

Liverpool’s fitness and the expensive déjà vu

While City, Chelsea and Spurs hogged the drama, Liverpool quietly ended the window with the biggest net spend of all. And yet, you look at the squad and it doesn’t obviously feel better than last season’s version.

Bradley Barcola is the headline arrival: quick, daring, expensive. He joins a forward line already stacked with thrilling, pricey attackers who are still trying to turn potential into consistency. Liverpool need at least a couple of last summer’s signings to wake up properly if this is going to amount to more than a reshuffle.

On the specific question of fitness, the evidence is contradictory. Two games, two 2-2 draws, two late equalisers. You can argue that late goals show legs and belief. You can also remember that this time last year they were snatching late winners that disguised deeper structural problems.

Maybe this is fine. Maybe it’s the same story in slightly different colours. Or maybe it’s just noise – a bunch of stuff that happened, signifying nothing.

Chelsea’s goalkeeper problem – one they actually fixed

At last, a clean tick in the box.

Chelsea needed a goalkeeper. Everyone knew it before the season started. The first game made it even more obvious. Then they acted.

Emi Martinez arrived, and with him a rare moment of consensus in a summer built on disagreement. Martinez is better than Robert Sanchez. No debate. No caveats. Just a simple, shared truth in a market that has forgotten what those look like.

Of course, this is Chelsea, and the calm never lasts. Enzo Fernandez has gone and nobody has arrived to replace him. That leaves a midfield that looks worryingly thin for a club with such grand designs. The absence of European football softens the blow; they can probably grind their way to January with Moises Caicedo as the constant and a rotating support of Romeo Lavia, Valentin Barco and Reece James.

If that doesn’t hold, there’s always the January solution: another £80m thrown at whoever looks vaguely available.

Or the other route: the free-agent lucky dip. Given Tottenham’s enduring taste for Chelsea cast-offs, there is a certain mischief in the idea of Chelsea themselves turning to Yves Bissouma or, for the full chaos option, Tanguy Ndombele as a warm body to plug a squad gap until the new year.

Aston Villa’s rebuilt midfield

Another club, another midfield in need of surgery. Aston Villa at least went about it with a degree of stealth.

Leon Goretzka arrived on a free after his Bayern Munich exit, a late-August move so underplayed that many barely clocked it. That might not last. Once the wider league realises Goretzka is there, the mood around Villa’s business could shift.

They have lived through another summer of churn, trying to refresh a squad while clinging to the edge they carry on both shoulders. So much of the spine that powered their recent rise – Emiliano Martinez, Ezri Konsa, Youri Tielemans, Morgan Rogers, Ollie Watkins – has gone, or at least been disrupted, that the whole thing should feel fragile.

Yet Villa’s work across the pitch has been quietly sharp. The start has been goalless and pointless, yes, but it doesn’t feel terminal. Not like some others.

Newcastle being Newcastle again

Forget the worries here, for now. Matthias Jaissle looks like he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Four points from games against Liverpool and Tottenham is a strong return, but it also carries a nagging question. Have those results told us more about Newcastle’s resilience, or about the current state of Liverpool and Spurs?

We’ll get a clearer answer soon enough. Bournemouth away this weekend is the sort of fixture that exposes pretenders and confirms the real thing.

Fulham’s bench gamble

At Fulham, the anxiety sits in the dugout.

Alvaro Arbeloa, the Temu version of Xabi Alonso as some have unkindly dubbed him, is already leading the early-season Sack Race. That’s despite Tottenham’s misfires and despite Evangelos Marinakis, elsewhere, going a few weeks without dismissing anyone and surely starting to twitch.

The split with Marco Silva made sense on paper for both parties. On grass, it feels like a rupture of something rare: the right manager, at the right club, at the right time. Arbeloa, by contrast, has always felt like the flimsiest of this season’s new Premier League appointments.

He has to prove that perception wrong quickly. The table, and the owners, won’t wait.

Coventry’s Sky Bet hangover

Coventry still smell of the Sky Bet Championship, and that is not a compliment in this context.

The defeat to Hull has left their fixture list looking ominous. Manchester City, Brighton, Nottingham Forest and Newcastle arrive over the next month. That is a brutal run for a side still trying to shed its second-tier skin. By the time they reach the traditional balm of Dr Tottenham in late October, they could already be staring up at safety from an uncomfortable distance.

The numbers tell their own story. Coventry have spent £150m just to assemble what looks, at best, like Championship Deluxe. In an age where the giants burn through hundreds of millions on upgrades, the real absurdity might be how hard – and how expensive – it has become simply to make a promoted side look vaguely Premier League-ready.

Crystal Palace’s fragile back line

The alarm remains firmly on at Crystal Palace.

Two games, two defeats, and the sight of a very much unfinished Manchester City side trampling all over them last Friday was a grim watch. The response? The Chelsea rota.

Axel Disasi has arrived on loan from Stamford Bridge, as he seems contractually obliged to do for every Premier League club at some point. There’s a queue, and Palace’s turn has come.

They also have Honest Ahanor on loan in a move that manages to be both clever and queasy. Officially, he’s on loan from Atalanta. In reality, he’s joining Chelsea next summer and spending this season at Palace as part of the arrangement. It’s a deal that sprints through a loophole while waving at the rulebook on the way past. The fact the player is literally called Honest only adds to the absurdity.

The Chelsea flavour is completed by Ben Chilwell’s return, this time from Strasbourg after a previous loan spell at Selhurst Park. Another talented player, another battered fitness record.

You can roll your eyes at all of it, but experience tells you one thing: clubs only sign an injured Ben Chilwell on deadline day when they are distressed. Deeply, structurally distressed.

And that, more than any single fee or flashy arrival, might be the most honest reflection of where this wild, distorted window has really left the Premier League.