Chelsea inevitably lead the way with Liverpool and Newcastle also among transfer window losers

The growing insanity at Chelsea takes some beating, but they were far from the only Premier League club to have a transfer window that was either outright disappointing or merely distinctly lacking in whelm. After you’ve read about the losers, your winners are here.

Chelsea

Yes, we know it’s actually that they are very clever and the rest of us are idiots and we’ll see, but it really does just look like crazy people doing crazy things and flinging so much sh*t at the wall that some of it has to stick.

Beyond just relentlessly exploiting loopholes because you need to show everyone how brilliant and smart you are, there really is just no evidence of a plan here. Absolutely no discernible attempt to build a functioning squad of footballers to deliver on-pitch success.

Sure, there will be some good signings in the latest glut of incomings. There almost has to be. Maybe there’s another Cole Palmer in there. But if there is it’s a fluke and is barely even the point.

There are other clubs who’ve had disappointing windows, but at those clubs you can generally at least see the plan. You can see what was being attempted to improve the on-field outcomes even if the disappointment is that it hasn’t quite materialised.

What’s the plan here? What’s the thinking at a club that brings in Pedro Neto and Joao Felix for close to a hundred million quid all in and then on deadline day grabs itself a Jadon Sancho on loan with an obligation to buy?

Why have they spent £30m on Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall? Why did they wait until the season was actually starting to tell Raheem Sterling to f*** off after picking him throughout pre-season? Why have they got so very many goalkeepers on their books?

Conor Gallagher has been forced out, we don’t currently know for sure what’s become of attempts to do likewise with Trevoh Chalobah and we really aren’t at all sure where it all ends up.

Maybe it is genius. It’s certainly something.

Liverpool

Not because anything they’ve done is bad, but because there just isn’t quite enough of it to convince us they haven’t risked leaving themselves slightly short.

There’s a hint of desperation about seeing if they can unearth the player buried deep within Federico Chiesa, but it’s also fair to suggest at the price they’ve paid it’s a low-risk gamble. The greater desperation is clearly on the Juventus side of that particular transfer.

But a £10m punt on seeing whether a player can recapture his beguiling form of three years ago is fine as a little treat on top of a summer’s work. It shouldn’t really be the centrepiece of it.

Chiesa is the only new arrival in the Liverpool squad this summer as the club aims to close on the top two while keeping all those below them in check.

We generally err on the side of not doing business being better than doing bad business, but it does look like Liverpool have taken it to extremes.

There’s no panic here. The most important summer arrival this year was always going to be the manager, and the early evidence there is enormously encouraging. The squad was already in decent shape – Jurgen Klopp was pretty clear he didn’t want to leave the place in a mess when he departed and he evidently has not – and their current hybrid of Klopp and Slot football is working pretty well.

But equally there’s no point pretending bringing in just one player for the here and now – and that player being a speculative if low-risk gamble – was the extent of any fan’s wishlist.

The absence of any panic-buying does suggest a club at peace with itself and that’s a positive, but there is little escaping the fact now that an awful lot of time and energy was wasted on trying to sign a player who really had no great intention or desire to leave the only club he’s ever known. And if there’s any club that should have known and understood that kind of loyalty, it is surely This Means More FC.

That lengthy Martin Zubimendi pursuit was a misstep and the nagging doubt is that other more feasible avenues were left unexplored as a result and that come season’s end it looks like a missed opportunity.

READ MORE: Every Premier League transfer completed in the summer of 2024

Newcastle

The genuinely significant caveat here is that keeping hold of Anthony Gordon, Alexander Isak and Bruno Guimaraes was always priority one for Newcastle this summer and that has been achieved in the end without undue stress.

But it’s a deeply underwhelming slate of incomings for a club that didn’t sell its soul to stand still. There is undeniably mounting frustration at the inability to flex their financial muscle and there are two pretty conspicuous weak points that have been left unaddressed.

It’s no secret Marc Guehi was the top target for one of those two weak points, but the fact he appears to have been number one on a list of one doesn’t look great, and Palace – having already sold Michael Olise for big money early in the summer – never ever looked like caving in on that one.

The right side of the attack is also vastly and potentially very damagingly weaker than the rest for Newcastle. Jacob Murphy and Miguel Almiron is not a pair that screams  ‘Champions League challenge’ in big 2024.

The core components may have been retained, but Newcastle had ground to make up after last season and it’s very hard to make any kind of case that they’ve done so.

Wolves

Even easier now to see what was pushing Julen Lopetegui away a year ago. Two key players have been lost this summer in Pedro Neto and Max Kilman and there’s really nothing in an underwhelming slew of cut-price incomings that hints at anything other than a pretty large backwards step here.

Everyone tipped them for big trouble last year, and it does rather look like everyone might have just in fact been out by a year.

Ivan Toney

He’s the richest loser in town, of course, after his £40m move to Al-Ahli but it’s hard to escape the sheer sadness of it all. It wasn’t meant to be like this, was it? When Toney left Brentford it was supposed to be for another step up the ladder in a career that has required hard work at every stage for every reward.

Before his eight-month ban it wasn’t remotely outlandish to assume Toney’s next move when it came would be to the Big Six, and it wasn’t remotely hard to make a case for pretty much any of them as a potential destination. Maybe not City, but apart from that, any of them. He was always going to have options. There was surely no way none of them would be up for it.

Yet now, at 28, having never made that step to one of the biggest clubs in the land, he trundles off to enormously lucrative yet surely creatively unfulfilling semi-retirement in a low-quality, low-energy league.

Hard to see a route back to the big leagues now, while it’s also surely the end of his international career. We’ll always have that no-look penalty and the #content that ensued.

Everton

Our expectations for you were low but holy f*ck.

Signing an injured Armando Broja at the last moment of the transfer window is something football clubs only do when they are very distressed.

Aaron Ramsdale

We said you needed a move, but not just any move. His dad’s gone very quiet, hasn’t he?

Every player and club involved in those back-scratching late June transfers among themselves

Just an undignified intelligence-insulting spectacle all round.

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