Premier League Transfer Window: Winners, Losers and Ongoing Issues
Two days on from the window slamming shut and the Premier League still feels like it’s wobbling on the edge of a financial hallucination. Numbers flew around so wildly they stopped meaning anything. Fees lost all connection to reality. Logic packed a small bag and left.
Who won? Who lost? Does any of it even qualify as winning or losing when the market has gone full Chelsea, where the answer to every problem is “spend another £80 million and see what happens”?
The whole thing has the air of a property boom that can never burst. Buy badly? No problem. Someone else will pay a slightly smaller fortune to take your mistake away. Spend £100m on a dud? Relax. There’s always another club ready to talk themselves into paying £80m for the same headache.
Chelsea dropping £60m on Mykhailo Mudryk, watching him struggle, then get banned, and somehow manoeuvring into a position where they might yet make a profit on him next year is not a transfer. It’s a parable for where this league now lives.
You can’t apply reason to it. But we’re going to try anyway.
Before the season kicked off, 10 glaring issues stood out across the division. The games have started, the money’s been spent, the panic has subsided. So what actually got fixed? And what still looks like trouble dressed up as ambition?
Tottenham’s missing striker
This is where the whole thing starts to wobble. Because the answer to “Did Spurs sort their striker problem?” is basically: sort of. Maybe. Not really. Depends what you think a striker is.
They went shopping and came back with Savio, Omar Marmoush and, yes, Mudryk. They did not, crucially, come back with an out-and-out No 9. Dominic Solanke and Richarlison remain, both still at a frosty distance from Roberto De Zerbi.
De Zerbi has already set Savio a double-figure goal target, and the plan is clearly to spread the goals around rather than pinning them on one centre-forward. Marmoush looks a clever pick-up, another forward who decided that competing with Erling Haaland at Manchester City was a waste of a career. The last man who made that call did all right.
But again, Marmoush isn’t a pure nine. The fact Spurs barely even flirted with a proper penalty-box striker – Cody Gakpo and Iliman Ndiaye were the other big attacking names that slipped away – suggests De Zerbi doesn’t want one. He asked for plenty this summer and, by and large, got it.
The early evidence? Two league games, zero goals, and not much sign of a coherent threat. If this is going to be a fluid, interchangeable front line, it needs to click fast. Otherwise the first big-spending Spurs summer in years risks morphing into yet another season of angst, just with a higher wage bill.
Manchester City’s midfield panic
That wobble after the Community Shield in Cardiff felt dramatic at the time. Elliott Anderson and Mateo Kovacic looked like a pairing that didn’t quite add up. It was a glorified friendly, but City don’t tend to wait for problems to become real.
They responded in the only way they know: by hurling another nine-figure solution at the middle of the pitch and plucking Enzo Fernandez from Chelsea.
Fernandez had already painted himself as a Premier League villain-in-waiting with his World Cup antics for Argentina. Moving from one financial superpower to the other, becoming the face of a summer defined by unchecked spending, has only sharpened that image. He is now the lightning rod for every argument about excess, entitlement and City’s dominance.
Plenty of people will want this to blow up in their faces. That includes those who quite liked Anderson and now see him shoved to the margins by another enormous cheque.
Manchester United’s defence creaks on
United did the hard work in midfield. The surgery there was overdue and, on paper at least, looks sound. The back line, though, still feels like a relic from another era.
Two games, two promoted opponents, four goals conceded. The same issues that were exposed at Brentford four years ago are still lurking. The legs are older. The fixtures are about to pile up. The margin for error is shrinking.
When the two-games-a-week grind kicks in, the strain on this defence will be relentless. A huge chunk of the plan rests on Luke Shaw staying fit and sharp for months on end. History suggests that is an ambitious bet.
Liverpool’s fitness and the strange net spend crown
While City, Chelsea and Spurs grabbed most of the headlines with their circus acts, Liverpool quietly ended the summer with the biggest net spend in the league. Yet the squad doesn’t obviously look much better than the one that limped through last season.
Bradley Barcola is the headline arrival: thrilling, electric, expensive. But Liverpool already had a handful of forwards who were supposed to be thrilling, electric and expensive. Some of last summer’s recruits still need to prove they’re more than vibes and potential.
On the fitness front, the signs are mixed. Two games, two 2-2 draws, two late equalisers. You can frame that as resilience. You can also remember that at this stage last season they were pinching late winners that turned out to be papering over serious cracks.
Maybe this is nothing. Maybe it’s just football happening at random. Or maybe Liverpool are once again running hard just to stay where they are.
Chelsea’s goalkeeper – and a new hole in midfield
At least one problem got fixed properly. The goalkeeping situation at Chelsea was a glaring issue before a ball was kicked, looked even worse after the first game, and then got sorted.
Emi Martinez arrived. Robert Sanchez did not stay as No 1. Everyone, for once, could agree on something: Martinez is an upgrade. In a summer full of arguments, that felt almost wholesome.
But this is Chelsea 2026. Solve one problem, create another. Enzo Fernandez has gone and nobody has come in to replace him. That leaves a midfield that looks light for a club with such grand designs.
The one saving grace is the lack of European football. Chelsea can probably stagger through to January with Moises Caicedo holding everything together and a rotating support cast of Romeo Lavia, Valentin Barco and Reece James filling in where needed.
If it all starts to unravel, there’s always the £80m January reset. Or the other route: the free-agent lucky dip. Given Spurs’ enduring weakness for Chelsea cast-offs, the idea of Chelsea taking a short-term punt on someone like Yves Bissouma – or going full chaos with Tanguy Ndombele – would be peak banter. Warm bodies, short contracts, long-term confusion.
Aston Villa’s ripped-out spine
Villa’s summer looked chaotic from the outside. Big personalities gone, key pillars of their recent rise – Martinez, Konsa, Tielemans, Rogers, Watkins – all moved on. The spine that carried them up the table has been pulled apart.
Yet in the middle of the churn, they might have landed one of the shrewdest deals of the window. Leon Goretzka, arriving on a free after leaving Bayern Munich, slipped in almost unnoticed at the end of August. That could change quickly once everyone clocks what Villa have actually done.
They’ve had to juggle the perpetual sense of grievance that seems to fuel the club with the reality of another overhaul. It’s more change than you’d want in an ideal world, but the business across the pitch looks smarter than the drama suggests.
They’ve started with no goals and no points. Even so, you’d still back this to be a blip rather than a warning siren. There are other goalless, pointless sides who look far more fragile.
Newcastle’s Newcastle problem that never was
So much for the existential angst. The question of whether Newcastle could remain Newcastle after all the upheaval has been parked for now.
Matthias Jaissle looks, at this early stage, like he knows exactly what he’s doing. Four points from games against Liverpool and Tottenham is a strong opening statement.
The nagging doubt? Those results might say more about Liverpool and Spurs than they do about Newcastle. Beat silly teams, and you can look clever by accident. Bournemouth this weekend should offer a clearer reading. A less chaotic opponent. A better barometer.
Fulham’s bench and the Arbeloa gamble
Alvaro Arbeloa has barely started and already finds himself as the early favourite in the Sack Race. That takes some doing in a league where Tottenham are struggling and Evangelos Marinakis hasn’t fired anyone for what feels like an eternity.
Fulham and Marco Silva always felt like one of those rare perfect fits: the right man, right club, right moment. Both sides decided it was time to move on. On paper, that’s understandable. In practice, it has left a void.
Arbeloa has arrived with a thin CV and a heavy weight of comparison. Of all the new managers in the division, he always looked the most fragile appointment. The one where you could already see the headlines if it goes wrong.
Coventry and the Sky Bet stench
Coventry still reek of Sky Bet. You can smell it off the fixture list as much as the squad. Defeat to Hull has only darkened the mood.
Next up: Manchester City, Brighton, Nottingham Forest and Newcastle. That is a brutal run for a promoted side still trying to remember what the Premier League even feels like. By the time they get the traditional respite of a visit to Dr Tottenham in late October, they could already be staring up at safety from a worrying distance.
The most telling detail in all this? Coventry have spent £150m just to assemble what looks, at best, like a Championship Deluxe squad. That’s where the game is now. You can burn through that kind of money just to look vaguely competitive in a relegation scrap.
Crystal Palace and the Chelsea carousel
Crystal Palace still set off alarm bells. Two games, two defeats, and a work-in-progress Manchester City side walked all over them last Friday night. The defence looks brittle, and the solutions feel familiar in all the wrong ways.
Axel Disasi has arrived on loan from Chelsea, continuing what now feels like an unwritten Premier League rule: at some point, every club must take Disasi on loan. The rota says it’s Palace’s turn.
They’ve also taken Honest Ahanor on loan, but not from Chelsea, because that would break the rules. Instead he’s technically on loan from Atalanta, will join Chelsea next summer, and currently exists in a sort of administrative limbo that makes everyone slightly uneasy. A player literally called “Honest” being used to sprint through a loophole feels on the nose even by this window’s standards.
To complete the Chelsea flavour, Ben Chilwell is back. He spent time on loan at Palace a couple of seasons ago and now returns via Strasbourg, injured again, on deadline day.
That last detail matters. Clubs only sign an injured Ben Chilwell on deadline day when the situation is urgent. Palace’s defence doesn’t just need patching up. It needs rescuing.
And that, in the end, might be the clearest verdict on this transfer window: the money keeps flowing, the loopholes keep widening, but the same old problems never really go away.
