Premier League Transfer Window Review: Winners and Losers

Two days on from the window slamming shut and the Premier League still feels like it’s waking up from a fever dream. The numbers don’t look real, the logic doesn’t stack up and, frankly, the entire market has drifted into a place where cause and effect no longer seem connected.

You don’t so much build squads now as ride the bubble.

Chelsea have become the template. Spend £60 million on Mykhailo Mudryk, watch him struggle, watch him get banned, then somehow line up a deal that might even turn a profit a year later. Spend £100 million on a dud? Don’t panic. Someone will be along with £80 million soon enough. The absurdity has become its own safety net.

Against that backdrop, trying to judge “winners” and “losers” feels faintly ridiculous. Still, three weeks ago, before the football got in the way, there were 10 glaring problems across the division. The window is done. The chequebooks are closed. What actually changed?

Tottenham’s missing No 9

This was the obvious place to start and remains the most awkward to assess.

Tottenham have thrown names at the problem rather than a single solution. Savio, Omar Marmoush and Mudryk have arrived. Dominic Solanke and Richarlison, both with a spiky relationship with the equally spiky Roberto De Zerbi, are still in the building.

De Zerbi has already set Savio a double-figure goals target. The plan looks collective: goals by committee, not a classic centre-forward as the focal point. Marmoush appears a sharp bit of business, another striker who decided that trying to nick minutes off Erling Haaland at Manchester City was a career cul-de-sac.

But he’s not a pure No 9 either. The fact Spurs barely went near one – their other attacking pursuits were Cody Gakpo and Iliman Ndiaye – suggests De Zerbi doesn’t really want an old-fashioned nine at all. He pretty much got everything he did ask for.

The early evidence is brutal. Two league games, no goals, and not much sign of one. If this new, fluid front line is going to work, it has to click quickly. Otherwise that long-awaited big-spending Spurs era risks dissolving into another season of angst and gallows humour.

Manchester City’s midfield patch-up

This one started as a Community Shield overreaction. Those are dangerous at the best of times, never mind when the game is essentially a glossy friendly.

But the sight of Elliott Anderson and Mateo Kovacic trying to anchor City’s midfield in Cardiff did set alarm bells ringing. City’s response? The usual. Drop another nine-figure solution on the table and bring in Enzo Fernandez from Chelsea.

Fernandez had already painted a target on his back with his World Cup antics for Argentina. Now he has moved from one of the league’s great money-burners to the other and become the face of this untethered summer. A symbol of excess. A lightning rod.

Plenty of people will be willing him – and City – to fall flat. If that happens, Anderson, once a likeable story of internal promotion, becomes collateral damage in a much bigger argument about what City have turned into.

Manchester United’s creaking back line

United did the heavy lifting in midfield earlier in the summer. The surgery there felt overdue and, on paper, sensible.

The gamble was at the back. Stick with an ageing, creaking defence and hope it holds. Two games in, against two promoted sides, and the warning signs are already flashing. Four goals conceded. Echoes of the day they shipped four at Brentford four years ago.

The real strain is still to come. Once the two-games-a-week grind kicks in, that back line will be asked to absorb wave after wave. A huge amount now rests on Luke Shaw staying fit, available and reliable for almost the entire next four months. That is a fragile foundation for a club of United’s size.

Liverpool’s fitness – and finances

While City, Chelsea and Spurs hogged the headlines with their chaos, Liverpool quietly ended up with the biggest net spend of the lot.

And yet, look at the squad and you struggle to say with conviction that it’s markedly better than last season’s.

Bradley Barcola brings pace, flair and a frightening price tag to the attack. He’s thrilling. So were a couple of last summer’s signings, who still haven’t truly ignited. At some point, those “projects” have to become production.

On the specific question of fitness, the early signs are ambiguous. Two games, two 2-2 draws, two late equalisers. That hints at legs and resilience. Or it hints at a repeat of last season, when late winners papered over cracks that soon split open.

Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe it’s just noise. Or maybe Liverpool are once again living on the edge of a physical drop-off they can’t quite see yet.

Chelsea finally fix the obvious problem

At least one club addressed one glaring issue with ruthless clarity.

Chelsea’s goalkeeping situation was a concern before a ball was kicked. Robert Sanchez’s first outing of the season underlined it. The club then did the simple, correct thing: they signed Emi Martinez.

On this, there is rare consensus. Martinez is better than Sanchez. Everyone can agree on that.

Of course, this is Chelsea, and equilibrium never lasts long. Fernandez has gone without a like-for-like replacement. The new anxiety sits squarely in midfield. Without European football, Chelsea can probably muddle through to January as long as Moises Caicedo stays upright.

Behind him, a rotating cast of Romeo Lavia, Valentin Barco and Reece James might just about cover the gaps until the club inevitably throws another £80 million at the problem in the winter.

The other option? Dip into the free-agent bin and pull out something wild. Given Tottenham’s long-standing habit of collecting Chelsea cast-offs, the idea of the Blues turning to Yves Bissouma – or, for pure chaos, Tanguy Ndombele – as a short-term body would carry a certain dark comedy.

Aston Villa rip up the spine – and rebuild

Villa’s summer could have spiralled. Key figures from the spine that drove their recent rise – Martinez, Ezri Konsa, Youri Tielemans, Morgan Rogers, Ollie Watkins – have gone. That is destabilising on any scale.

Through the churn, though, there has been method. The late arrival of Leon Goretzka on a free after his Bayern Munich exit barely registered amid the deadline-day noise. It might end up as one of the smartest moves of the window.

Villa have again leant into their siege mentality, chips on both shoulders, everyone against them. There has been more change than you’d want in an ideal world, but the squad still looks coherent. Competent. Capable.

Their goalless, pointless start feels more like a temporary wobble than a structural collapse. Other clubs with the same record can’t say that with quite the same conviction.

Newcastle rediscover themselves

So much for the concern about Newcastle losing their edge.

Matthias Jaissle has walked in and, on early evidence, simply kept the machine humming. Four points taken from Liverpool and Tottenham is an impressive way to open a season, whatever state those two giants are in.

The nagging doubt is obvious. Have those results told us more about Newcastle’s resilience or about the fragility of Liverpool and Spurs? The answer will become clearer once Newcastle face a side without an existential subplot.

Bournemouth away this weekend should strip away some of the drama and tell us a little more about what Jaissle actually has.

Fulham’s uneasy reset

Alvaro Arbeloa, dubbed the Temu version of Xabi Alonso, is already leading the early-season Sack Race. That takes some doing when Tottenham are misfiring and Evangelos Marinakis hasn’t pulled his trigger in weeks.

Fulham and Marco Silva always felt like a rare alignment: right man, right club, right moment. Both parties had reasons to move on, but breaking that chemistry was a risk.

Arbeloa’s appointment has never quite shaken off the sense of flimsiness. Among a crop of intriguing new Premier League managers, he looks the one with the weakest hand and the thinnest margin for error. The clock is already ticking loudly at Craven Cottage.

Coventry’s stubborn Championship smell

Coventry still reek of Sky Bet. The branding might be gone, but the vibe lingers.

Defeat to Hull has only sharpened the sense of danger. The upcoming fixture list is brutal: Manchester City, Brighton, Nottingham Forest and Newcastle in the next month or so. That is the kind of run that can leave a promoted side cut adrift before autumn has even settled in.

The most telling detail of all might be the money. Coventry have spent £150 million just to assemble a squad that, at best, looks like Championship Deluxe. Stripped of the romance, that’s the clearest sign of how warped the market has become for anyone trying to climb out of the second tier.

There is, at least, the traditional late-October respite: a visit to Dr Tottenham.

Crystal Palace and the Chelsea carousel

The fear around Crystal Palace hasn’t gone away.

Two games, two defeats, including a chastening night against a Manchester City side still very much finding its rhythm. Palace looked a level below, and then some.

The response has been to raid the Chelsea ecosystem, like so many others. Axel Disasi arrives on loan from Stamford Bridge, as he seems contractually obliged to do for half the league at this point. There’s a rota. Everyone gets a turn.

Honest Ahanor is in too, on loan from Atalanta in the technical sense, but with a move to Chelsea already agreed for next summer. The whole thing feels queasy: a deal that openly sprints through a loophole while smirking at the rulebook. The fact the player is literally called “Honest” only underlines the absurdity.

Then comes Ben Chilwell, back at Selhurst Park after a previous loan spell, this time via Strasbourg and with another injury in tow. Years of transfer-window experience tell you one thing: clubs only sign an injured Ben Chilwell on deadline day when they are very, very worried.

And that, more than any nine-figure fee or amortisation trick, might be the most telling image of this window. Not the superclubs flexing, but the ones beneath them scrambling, patching, hoping they’ve done just enough to survive the madness they’re now trapped inside.