Liverpool, Man Utd sales among ten Premier League transfer regrets in summer of 2024

Obviously there are many players that clubs have little choice but to sell. For instance, Bournemouth weren’t about to stop Dominic Solanke going to Tottenham, Julian Alvarez would currently be throwing a big ol’ strop if Pep Guardiola had prevented his move to Atletico Madrid and Joao Palhinha has been destined for Bayern Munich for over 12 months.

This isn’t a list of that sort of player, but those the selling clubs could have kept and we predict they will regret allowing to leave. Maybe this season, maybe the season after that or even further down the line.

And yes, we know the transfer window’s not closed yet so these may not still be valid regrets in a couple of days’ time.

Sepp van den Berg (Liverpool to Brentford, £25m)

Selling a player who’s played 271 minutes of senior football for you for £25m is almost Manchester City levels of transfer wizardry, and we would be applauding Richard Hughes (someone has to) for his negotiating skills if it weren’t for one key difference between Liverpool and the champions: Manchester City don’t sell players they need.

If we had been told at the start of the window that Liverpool would sign a goalkeeper who’s not going to play this season and a £10m injury-prone winger as a back-up for Mohamed Salah we would have assumed that those superfluous deals would have been completed after the priorities: a No.6 and at least one centre-back.

Rather than signing a centre-back, they’ve sold one who earned rave reviews for his displays in the Bundesliga with Mainz last season, leaving them with a guy who was taken off at half-time in the opening game, another who’s set to leave for free at the end of the season, someone who’s been angling to leave the club for most of the summer and Ibrahima Konate.

READ MORE: Federico Chiesa to Liverpool is a desperate transfer for everyone involved

Sergio Gomez (Manchester City to Real Sociedad, £7.5m)

He’s started 14 games in two seasons under a manager who doesn’t play full-backs whenever possible, so we understand that Gomez had to leave. And Manchester City have rarely, if ever, regretted selling a footballer while Pep Guardiola’s been in charge. They sold a guy who went on to be the Young Player of the Season last summer and still won the title.

But Guardiola’s not going to be there forever, and may well be off at the end of the season when his contract runs out, particularly if the Premier League throws the book at City, because although he said he would manage them in League One, he really won’t.

His successor may well like a proper full-back, and although we haven’t seen enough of Gomez in a City shirt to make a reasoned judgement on his ability, we would argue that’s also the case for the club.

Joachim Andersen (Crystal Palace to Fulham, £30m)

Appeared to be one of the weirdest transfers of the summer before it became apparent that Andersen is some sort of footballing soothsayer. We wondered why Andersen was leaving a club on the up to quite literally take a step backwards, why Palace decided to sell him amid all the Marc Guehi speculation and how Fulham had £30m to spend on a centre-back.

But two games into the Premier League season, on the back of defeats for Palace to Brentford and West Ham, and a win for Fulham over Leicester after an impressive showing against Manchester United, we’ve knee-jerked into thinking it may well be a wise choice from Andersen.

It will have been a particularly disastrous decision if Newcastle put a late offer on the table for Guehi that Palace can’t refuse, but even so it seems like an odd call from Steve Parish to sanction the Denmark international’s exit, exacerbated by new signing Chad Riad’s injury in the Carabao Cup win over Norwich. Maxence Lacroix may well prove to be an excellent signing, but why rock the boat when things were going so well?

Pascal Gross (Brighton to Borussia Dortmund, £6m)

Signed from FC Ingolstadt for £2.5m in the summer of 2017, Gross is widely considered to be Brighton’s best ever buy. He claimed 32 goals and 52 assists in 261 appearances as a persistently underrated Premier League player who managed four goals and ten assists in his final season as a 32-year-old, creating more chances in the top flight (103) than everyone but Bruno Fernandes (114) last term.

The wins over Everton and Manchester United thus far in the Fabian Hurzeler reign don’t suggest they’re missing him as yet, but they don’t appear to have replaced Gross with a like-for-like signing. They’re hard to come by.

Ian Maatsen (Chelsea to Aston Villa, £37.5m)

Not even a pivotal role in Borussia Dortmund’s run to the Champions League final was enough to persuade Chelsea to hang on to their pure profit, sorry, academy graduate.

£37.5m is a fair whack, even if £19m of that was immediately spunked on a Villa teenager as part of the grubby PSR handshakes, and as Ben Chilwell is currently finding out to his cost in the Chelsea bomb squad, there’s no place for one-dimensional full-backs, otherwise known simply as full-backs, in Enzo Maresca’s team.

There might be in Ruben Amorim’s though, or Kieran McKenna’s, or Cesc Fabregas’.

Emile Smith Rowe (Arsenal to Fulham, £27m)

It was the sort of transfer that everyone at Arsenal, Smith Rowe and Mikel Arteta included, wished didn’t have to happen but knew was for the best. He just wasn’t going to play enough to make staying worthwhile and at 24 he needed to play football.

If humanity and wellbeing played no part in such decisions, Arsenal surely would have wanted to keep him and there’s every chance given the quality he’s already shown for his new club with that well-taken goal against Leicester that there will be times this season, particularly against stubborn defences and low blocks, when Arteta will look at his bench and wish he had Smith Rowe to call upon over Reiss Nelson or even Gabriel Martinelli, who’s started this season with the same lack of oomph we saw for the majority of last.

Yankuba Minteh (Newcastle to Brighton, £30m)

They had to sell someone to comply with PSR but clubs should always be wary if it’s Brighton who come calling and there were other assets – Sean Longstaff, Miguel Almiron, Jacob Murphy, Joe Willock – that they should have been pimping out before letting Minteh leave.

He got ten goals and six assists in the Eredivisie for Feyenoord last season and already looks well worth the outlay from the Seagulls. Incredibly quick and wonderfully direct, he’s the ideal Eddie Howe winger.

MORE ON THE SUMMER TRANSFER WINDOW ON F365

👉 Every Premier League transfer completed in the summer of 2024

👉 Twenty biggest transfers in the world in 2024 summer transfer window

👉 Leeds above Chelsea in ranking of biggest sellers in 2024 summer transfer window

Alvaro Fernandez (Manchester United to Benfica, £5m)

Manchester United have finally landed Manuel Ugarte having bent to Paris Saint-Germain’s demands for the full asking price (including add-ons) of £51m. Reports suggest that means the coffers are dry at Old Trafford and they’ll be unable to make further additions unless they get rid of some deadwood in the final hours of the transfer window.

One key area of concern remains at left-back, where Diogo Dalot has played out of position (reasonably well, to be fair) in the perpetual absence of Luke Shaw and Tyrell Malacia.

They were reportedly looking at scorned Chelsea star Ben Chilwell but more recent claims suggest that interest has waned, possibly with their lack of funds in mind, and we wonder whether they may already be regretting allowing Fernandez – who failed to make a senior appearance for United – to leave for Benfica.

The fact that the Portuguese club made his loan deal permanent should perhaps have provided enough doubt for the Red Devils to give him an opportunity, as they will presumably be selling him back to the Premier League for ten times the fee in a couple of seasons.

READ MORE: Man Utd are signing a man to fill the doughnut; Ugarte is not a red Rodri

Conor Gallagher (Chelsea to Atletico Madrid, £35.7m)

It will be difficult to judge just how much Chelsea miss him given Gallagher didn’t create a huge number of chances, contribute many goals or assists, or play in a No.6 role that now gets almost as much attention as a midfield playmaker.

Gallagher did all the cliches: the dirty work; the hard yards; the work of a terrier. The stuff that’s hard to quantify.

And when Chelsea come unstuck, as they’re bound to do frequently during an ever-stuttering project, more likely blame for their undoing will be placed on the lack of a reliable goalscorer, the manager being overburdened by the number of players at his disposal, inevitable injuries, price tag pressures and many more culpable factors before someone whispers: ‘Do you think they might be missing Conor Gallagher?’

Deniz Undav (Brighton to Stuttgart, £28m)

Definitely setting ourselves up for a fall by putting two Brighton players on this list given their general brilliance in the transfer market and their start under Hurzeler, but it was a bold call to allow a player who got 19 goals and ten assists for Stuttgart on loan last season to join the Bundesliga side on a permanent basis.

It’s perhaps just a sign of how far Brighton have come that they can do without a player of such repute, as is their near-£200m spend this summer.

And they have used £40m of that to sign Georginio Rutter from Leeds, but he’s by no means an out and out goalscorer and although Danny Welbeck’s off to a flyer this season he’s never been prolific, while no one seems to know quite what’s going on with Evan Ferguson, who’s promised much but delivered little.