Two days on from the Premier League’s most deranged transfer window yet, the dust hasn’t so much settled as thickened. The numbers have stopped moving. The logic never really started.
Who won? Who lost? Does any of that even apply when the market now behaves like a housing bubble with shin pads – where the only rule is that everything, and everyone, somehow costs more than they did yesterday?
This was the summer the Chelseafication of the transfer market felt complete. Fees stopped being a measure of value and turned into a kind of performance art. Spend £100m on the wrong player? Don’t worry. Someone else will probably give you £80m for him next summer just to keep the carousel spinning.
Chelsea paid £60m for Mykhailo Mudryk, watched him flounder, watched him get banned, and still found a way to agree a deal that might actually turn a profit a year from now. Try applying traditional football logic to that. You can’t. You either laugh, or you start drawing economic graphs.
But let’s pretend this is still a sport that rewards coherent thinking. Three weeks ago, before the football rudely interrupted the fantasy spreadsheets, we picked out 10 glaring problems across the league. The clock has stopped. The chequebooks are closed. So what, if anything, did anyone actually fix?
Tottenham’s striker: everyone and no one
This felt like the cleanest problem of the lot. Tottenham needed a striker. A proper one. A number nine who lives between the posts.
Instead, they built a committee.
Savio arrived. Omar Marmoush arrived. Mudryk arrived. Dominic Solanke and Richarlison, both on uneasy terms with Roberto De Zerbi, are still there. It is a crowded room, but not a classic centre-forward in sight.
De Zerbi has already thrown down a double-figure goal target for Savio and the plan is obvious enough: goals by swarm rather than spearhead. Marmoush looks a sharp piece of business, another forward who decided fighting Erling Haaland for minutes at Manchester City is a career choice only for masochists.
But again, not a pure nine. And the names Spurs chased but failed to land – Cody Gakpo, Iliman Ndiaye – only reinforce the suspicion that De Zerbi never truly wanted one. He got almost everything else he asked for.
Two games in, Spurs have no goals and barely the hint of one. At some point soon, this fluid, interchangeable, theoretically terrifying front line has to start looking like an attack rather than a concept. Because if this is what throwing your weight around in the market looks like, another season of angst is waiting just around the corner.
Manchester City’s midfield: problem, money, repeat
The Community Shield should never be a barometer for anything, yet it still finds ways to infect the discourse. In Cardiff, a midfield of Elliott Anderson and Mateo Kovacic looked flimsy, and City reacted in the only way they know: they threw another nine-figure solution at the problem.
Enzo Fernandez walked in from Chelsea, a £100m-plus answer to a question Pep Guardiola wasn’t going to let linger. Fernandez was already cast as this summer’s pantomime villain after his World Cup theatrics with Argentina. Now he has doubled down by becoming the face of the Premier League’s most excessive window, moving from one financial superpower to the other.
He will be booed everywhere. City will be willed to fail in certain corners. Anderson, the likeable academy story, might become collateral damage. But the pattern is clear: City saw a wobble, real or imagined, and bought their way out of it again.
Manchester United’s defence: unchanged, unsurprisingly exposed
United did the heavy lifting in midfield earlier in the summer. The surgery there felt overdue and, on paper, logical.
At the back, they gambled.
Two promoted teams have already scored four times against them, a grim echo of that four-goal capitulation at Brentford four years ago. The back line still creaks in the same familiar places. The legs are older. The calendar is about to get busier.
Once the two-games-a-week grind kicks in, the strain on this defence will be relentless. A huge amount now rests on Luke Shaw staying fit and dependable for months on end. That is a medical plan rather than a transfer strategy, and it shows.
Liverpool’s fitness and the cost of standing still
While Chelsea and City and Spurs set fire to piles of cash, Liverpool quietly ended up with the biggest net spend of the lot. Look at the squad, though, and it’s hard to say they look significantly better than last season.
Bradley Barcola is the headline arrival: electric, expensive, and exactly the kind of winger Liverpool fans love to fall for. But this only works if some of last summer’s pricey, underwhelming attacking signings finally catch fire. The squad is now stacked with forwards who promise chaos and goals. The bill suggests they should deliver both.
On the fitness front, the early signs are murky. Two games, two 2-2 draws, two late equalisers. You can spin that either way. They’re still running in the 90th minute. Or they’re still needing the 90th minute.
Twelve months ago, Liverpool were nicking late winners that disguised deeper problems. This time, the late goals are only enough for parity. Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe it’s a warning. Maybe it’s just noise in a season that hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet.
Chelsea’s goalkeeper: one problem solved, another created
At least Chelsea gave us one clean storyline. Goalkeeper was a glaring issue before the season started. Robert Sanchez confirmed it in the opening game. Chelsea reacted.
Emi Martinez arrived, and on this, everyone can agree: he is better than Sanchez. In a summer of arguments, that is rare, almost soothing consensus.
Of course, this is Chelsea 2026, so fixing one hole meant opening another. Fernandez left with no like-for-like replacement, leaving the midfield looking lighter than it should. The absence of European football offers some cover – fewer games, fewer rotations, fewer chances for the flaw to be brutally exposed.
If Moises Caicedo stays fit and upright, a rotating cast of Romeo Lavia, Valentin Barco and Reece James can probably drag Chelsea through to January. Then, inevitably, there will be another £80m solution.
If not, there is always the free-agent tombola. The idea of Chelsea turning to Yves Bissouma, or even the full chaos pick of Tanguy Ndombele, as a stop-gap would be pure theatre – especially given Tottenham’s enduring fondness for Chelsea’s discarded parts.
Aston Villa’s midfield: quiet surgery, loud risk
Villa’s summer looked chaotic from a distance: big names out, big personalities gone, the spine that carried them – Martinez, Konsa, Tielemans, Rogers, Watkins – stripped back in unnervingly short order.
Hidden inside that churn was a move that could define their season. Leon Goretzka arrived on a free after leaving Bayern Munich, a deal so understated it almost slipped under the radar. It shouldn’t.
Goretzka brings experience, presence, and a level of midfield control Villa badly needed. For all the upheaval, they’ve made sharp signings across the pitch. The start – goalless, pointless – looks ugly on paper, but there is more structure here than the table suggests.
Compared to some of the other early-season strugglers, Villa feel more like a team in transition than a team in trouble.
Newcastle’s Newcastle problem: maybe there isn’t one
There was a lingering fear that Newcastle might spend the summer being a parody of themselves – noise, bluster, and an identity crisis.
Matthias Jaissle has cut through that. Four points from games against Liverpool and Tottenham is a serious return, and the football has looked coherent, not just combative.
The nagging doubt is what those results actually tell us. Have Newcastle kicked on? Or have they simply exposed flaws in two clubs trying to reinvent themselves on the fly?
Bournemouth this weekend offers a different kind of test. Less glamour, less chaos, more truth.
Fulham’s manager: the wrong kind of experiment
Alvaro Arbeloa, the Temu version of Xabi Alonso, has already been installed as favourite in the Sack Race. That takes some doing in a league where Tottenham are goalless, and Mr Marinakis has gone several weeks without firing anyone.
Fulham and Marco Silva always felt like a rare perfect fit: right man, right club, right moment. It worked. It made sense. Which, in this league, is probably why it didn’t last.
Arbeloa, by contrast, has never felt like a natural successor. Of all the new faces in Premier League dugouts this season, his is the one that carries the least obvious logic. It looks like a club trying to be too clever at precisely the wrong time.
Coventry’s Sky Bet smell won’t shift
Coventry still reek of the Sky Bet, and not in the nostalgic, plucky-underdog way. In the “have they actually escaped the Championship at all?” way.
A defeat to Hull has already turned their fixture list into something ominous. Next up: Manchester City, Brighton, Forest, Newcastle. It is not hard to sketch out a scenario where they are adrift before a late-October trip to Dr Tottenham, the league’s traditional emergency room for struggling sides.
The numbers around them tell their own story. Coventry have spent £150m just to assemble something that looks, at best, like Championship Deluxe. In an era when mid-table clubs throw £50m at squad players, the cost of simply becoming Premier League-standard has spiralled beyond reason.
Crystal Palace’s defence: Chelsea-flavoured panic
Palace remain firmly in the danger zone after two defeats, the second a bruising lesson from a Manchester City side that still looks some way short of full speed.
The response has been oddly familiar. Axel Disasi has arrived on loan from Chelsea, because at some point every Premier League club now seems contractually obliged to sign Axel Disasi on loan from Chelsea. There is probably a rota.
Then comes Honest Ahanor, also Chelsea-flavoured but technically on loan from Atalanta, with his move to Stamford Bridge already agreed for next summer. It is the sort of deal that makes you queasy. A player literally called Honest navigating a loophole that appears to flick two fingers at the spirit of the rules.
To complete the set, Ben Chilwell is back. Another Chelsea alumnus, another late-window punt, another injured full-back walking through the door on deadline day. That is not the sort of signing you make from a position of calm.
You can roll your eyes at the whole thing, but Palace’s recruitment screams distress. When a club is dragging in an injured Chilwell at the last possible moment, it usually means one thing: they know exactly how much trouble they’re in.
