Gary O’Neil didn’t bother hiding it. This was a landmark night for Town.
Exequiel Palacios, a World Cup winner at the heart of Argentina’s midfield and a title-winner with Bayer Leverkusen, is now a Town player. The deal, finally signed off last night, runs to the summer of 2030 and is worth €22.5 million (£19.2 million) up front, with a further €5 million (£4.3 million) in add-ons and a 10 per cent sell-on clause for Leverkusen.
For a newly promoted club, this is not just business. It’s a statement of intent.
A World Cup winner in blue
“He’s a talented boy and has obviously had some huge success over the last few years, club and national level,” O’Neil said, calling Palacios “an incredible signing” and openly praising the work that dragged the deal over the line after a summer-long pursuit.
The manager talked about a club that has been building quietly, then suddenly started landing names that make the rest of the division sit up. Palacios, at 27, arrives at his peak, not on the way down. O’Neil knows exactly what that means for the dressing room and for the terraces.
You could hear it in the way he spoke about belief.
“You can feel the belief around the place just constantly growing,” he said, pointing not only to the new arrivals but to the core that earned promotion and held the club together: Dara O’Shea, Jacob Greaves, Leif Davis and the rest. Eight weeks of hard work, he insisted, have put Town in a position where they “believe we can do something special this year”.
Now they have a World Cup winner to drop into the middle of it.
Manchester United debut on the horizon
Supporters won’t have to wait long to see him.
“I’m sure you’ll see him on Sunday. I’m sure you’ll see him,” O’Neil smiled, all but confirming Palacios will feature against Manchester United.
The transfer had gathered a sense of inevitability in recent weeks as Town kept coming back with improved bids. O’Neil, for his part, never doubted the outcome.
“No, I knew he was coming,” he said. “Probably the more challenging bit was agreeing club-to-club, I would guess. The moment I spoke to the boy, I could tell he was desperate to come and play for the football club.”
That, for O’Neil, is the real marker of progress. A newly promoted side convincing a key figure in one of Europe’s best teams to buy into its project tells its own story about the club’s trajectory.
Everyone who has helped drag Town to this point, he said, “should be really proud”. Then he cut off any temptation to bask in it.
“But it doesn’t stop, we don’t rest at that, this is only the beginning now… we need to make sure that we use all of this to continue to push and keep trying to raise the ceiling higher than it’s been.”
Building a squad for a brutal season
Palacios is not arriving as a luxury piece. He is ammunition for a long, unforgiving campaign.
“It’s a long 38-game season, cup games as well. We’re going to need as many bodies as we can,” O’Neil said. The plan is clear: depth everywhere, and not just any depth.
“We’re trying to make sure we’re well covered in every position with quality, with experience, with youth, with athleticism, trying to cover everything that the Premier League will test and Pala gives us real quality in the middle of the pitch.”
The manager knows Palacios is a little behind the rest of the squad in terms of tactical work, with the group having banked seven or eight weeks of detailed preparation. That will come. What arrives immediately is mentality.
“He definitely brings a desire to win. He’s South American, I’ve worked with a lot of them. They bring an unbelievable enthusiasm for the game, passion, desperate to win.”
That edge is exactly what Town will need when the novelty of promotion wears off and the grind of the Premier League kicks in.
Why Palacios chose Town
So why walk away from a title-winning Leverkusen side for a club just up from the Championship?
“He wants to test himself in the Premier League, and I understand why, it's the best league in the world, the most challenging league in the world,” O’Neil said.
Palacios has already lifted major trophies and navigated the pressure of a World Cup. The next test, in his mind, had to be England. That alone might have been enough, but O’Neil and his staff did the rest.
“We spoke to him about the project, we spoke to him about how the team was going to play, how he fitted it, how his role would help us,” the manager explained. “We had a real good alignment on how we felt we could move forward together as a football club and as a talented footballer.”
That alignment is becoming a theme. It’s how Town have been able to tempt proven Premier League players such as Issa Diop and Sasa Lukic, alongside recruits from across the globe, to a club that, on paper, should still be fighting just to stay afloat.
Ambition that pulls people in
O’Neil understands that pull better than most, because it worked on him first.
He turned down previous chances to return to the Premier League. “They didn’t feel quite right,” he admitted. He was happy in France, and not inclined to walk away for just another job.
Town felt different.
“The ambition that this place has, the support they give coaches and the direction of travel,” he said, were decisive. That same ambition is now being sold to players who might once have looked elsewhere.
“So I’m really grateful for the owners’ backing. I know they’re committed to making this club as special as they can. And we’ve had a really good go in the window to make ourselves competitive, which is needed, by the way, if you look at the recent history of teams that are promoted from the Championship. You need to improve your squad fairly significantly to give yourself the best chance of being competitive in the Premier League.”
Does Palacios’ arrival send a message to the rest of the division? O’Neil shrugged that off.
“I try and make a statement at three o’clock on Saturday, if I can, that’s the biggest opportunity for me and the team to let people know where we’re at.”
The exam, as he put it, comes every weekend when the whistle blows.
On Sunday, at Old Trafford, he’ll walk into that test with a World Cup winner in his midfield and a club daring to believe it can be more than just another promoted side passing through.
