Arsenal know their calculated gamble could backfire and Manchester United inspire no confidence in their decisions as they copy the Gunners’ blueprint.
Here are the January transfer window winners.
Leicester
INS: Woyo Coulibaly (£3m, Parma)
OUTS: Tom Cannon (£10m, Sheffield United), Hamza Choudhury (loan, Sheffield United), Will Alves (loan, Cardiff)
Rarely has a club accepted its fate so readily. Three of the four sides detached at the bottom of the Premier League table signed at least three players and spent comfortably more than they recouped. Leicester found some poor sap gullible enough to rescue James Justin at right-back then locked themselves in hopefully sandwich-free negotiations with Chris Wilder for a month.
It was difficult to lower the bar from the summer and really this is the direct consequence of spending nearly £40m on Michael Golding, Caleb Okoli, Oliver Skipp and their combined 16 starts, as well as the years of careful mismanagement which preceded that disaster of a window. But even then gems were found in Abdul Fatawu and Bilal El Khannouss.
No such attempts were even made in a winter characterised by understandable fan frustration aimed at the owners and boardroom. Leicester have once more systematically weakened an already debilitated hand, failed yet again to either move on players they don’t want or identify good enough ones they do, and compounded those mistakes with a lack of communication or accountability.
Ruud van Nistelrooy must be interrogated as to why he accepted this role so freely because if this is indicative of how Leicester handle their budgetary restrictions, they are entirely and irrevocably doomed. The only uncertainty at this stage is how far they will fall.
Newcastle
INS:
OUTS: Isaac Hayden (loan, Portsmouth), Alex Murphy (loan, Bolton), Charlie McArthur (loan, Carlisle), Miguel Almiron (£8m, Atlanta), Lloyd Kelly (loan, Juventus)
It says plenty when disaster is averted by tying up around £30m in the sales of two peripheral squad players. Genuinely excellent pieces of business for a pair with 451 Premier League minutes this season they may be, shifting out Almiron and Kelly should be neither the biggest nor only positive from a month’s worth of transfer negotiations.
Outside the Champions League qualification places on goal difference and on the brink of a cup final, Eddie Howe has toed the party line about no signings but could have done with some immediate help.
Attention will turn to the summer when PSR overheads have surely already been calculated and the transfer war chest assembled but there will be undue pressure on getting absolutely everything right when a start could have been made in January.
“Newcastle were very close to a deal,” said the agent of Manchester City signing Abdukodir Khusanov, who added earlier this month: “Perhaps, if they had made an offer earlier, they would have managed to reach an agreement.” So the money and intent was there but their inherent reluctance won out.
The Marc Guehi and Anthony Elanga delays inspire little confidence but a third consecutive transfer window without any first-team upgrades is the absolute maximum Newcastle will be able to kick the can down the road. The shift from no wiggle room to no room for error in the summer will be whiplash-inducing.
Manchester United
INS: Patrick Dorgu (£25m, Lecce)
OUTS: Ethan Ennis (loan, Doncaster), Joe Hugill (loan, Carlisle), Ethan Williams (loan, Cheltenham), Antony (loan, Real Betis), Ethan Wheatley (loan, Walsall), Daniel Gore (loan, Rotherham United), Marcus Rashford (loan, Aston Villa)
The line being parroted is that Manchester United had their hands tied by years of wasteful, indulgent spending under the previous regime.
They are pleased with relatively modest signings which underline their new-found commitment to youth in Patrick Dorgu (20), Ayden Heaven (18) and Diego Leon (17), while avoiding the sort of late panic which gave Odion Ighalo and Wout Weghorst brief Manchester United careers.
And the wage bill is at least temporarily easier to stomach with the loan exits of Marcus Rashford, Antony and Tyrell Malacia, although their established history as awful sellers does suggest far tougher negotiations will come.
But Dorgu is the only first-team addition and INEOS spent about as much to pay off Dan Ashworth and swap Erik ten Hag for Ruben Amorim, only after granting the former one more window of weird Eredivisie transfer nepotism for the road. The Glazers are culpable as ever but the blame is far from theirs alone this time.
Amorim always foretold of administering short-term pain in the hope of achieving long-term gains and those who mistakenly assumed that was solely in relation to matters on the pitch grossly underestimated Manchester United’s appetite for incompetence off it. They are left with two centre-forwards the manager does not trust, injury issues at centre-half and a left-winger they openly tried to sell.
Manchester United are happy to defer the biggest decisions until the summer, when a more suitable striker can be identified and signed. The problem is that when they last had such an opportunity, Joshua Zirkzee happened.
This window might have been the painstaking and long overdue start of an Arsenal-style shedding of high earners to reset the culture and correct “the same mistakes of the past”, as Amorim put it. But when the loanees return and they are presented with precisely the same squad-building issues in the summer, they will be back to square one.
Over a year after taking over control of football matters, the Manchester United hierarchy has earned precisely zero faith they know what they’re doing.
Arsenal
INS:
OUTS: Josh Robinson (undisclosed, Wigan), Marquinhos (loan, Cruzeiro), Maldini Kacurri (loan, Bromley)
First, an exhaustive list of January signings made by teams who won the Premier League title that season since the winter window properly became A Thing in 2003:
Claudio Echeverri (joined a year later), Maximo Perrone, Julian Alvarez (joined in the summer), Filip Stevanovic, Takumi Minamino, Ko Itakura, Ante Palaversa, Aymeric Laporte, Erik Palmer-Brown, Jack Harrison, Daniel Amartey, Demarai Gray, Juan Cuadrado, Wilfried Zaha, Anders Lindegaard, Zoran Tosic, Ritchie De Laet, Manucho, Henrik Larsson, Jiri Jarosik, Jose Antonio Reyes and Kolo Toure.
The rule is that soon-to-be-elected champions are generally not those who feel compelled to make mid-season additions. Even the precious few exceptions prove it: Manchester City were 12 points clear when they signed Laporte; Arsenal supporters could fuel planets with the energy generated by their fume if they loaned the modern equivalent of a 35-year-old Larsson from the Allsvenskan; Toure did not play in the season he joined.
Perhaps the frustration at Arsenal stems from fond memories of what Reyes brought to the race more than two decades ago; he is the only actual precedent of a signing who really helped push a challenger over the title line.
But Mikel Arteta might not be best advised to go full Rafa Benitez in producing that list at his next press conference. As rare as it is for January deals to be decisive when trophies are handed out, Arsenal’s specific circumstances did require action and the lack thereof has left them noticeably short.
It feels redundant in the aftermath of a thrashing of Manchester City but Arsenal have five fit forwards available for most of the rest of the season, one of whom is a brilliant but inexperienced teenager, another a horribly out-of-form loanee and the other three a great many things, none of which are particularly prolific.
If there is anger in the fanbase, the club invited it. Bukayo Saka was sidelined long ago and Gabriel Jesus suffered his injury with ample time left of the window, Arteta spoke frequently throughout the month of needing more options and the Ollie Watkins bid never felt like anything other than lazily planted proof that they tried to do something.
While it can all be played out to a backdrop provided by the world’s smallest violin when critiquing the transfer approach of a side still in four competitions after spending almost £300m over the past 18 months, Arsenal know that acknowledging but not addressing the ticking timebomb next to their season is, at best, a calculated gamble.
Aston Villa
INS: Donyell Malen (£21.1m, Borussia Dortmund), Andres Garcia (£5.9m, Levante), Marcus Rashford (loan, Manchester United), Marco Asensio (loan, Paris Saint-Germain), Axel Disasi (loan, Chelsea)
OUTS: Lewis Dobbin (loan, Norwich), Jaden Philogene (£20m, Ipswich), Diego Carlos (£8.45m, Fenerbahce), Tommi O’Reilly (loan, MK Dons), Emiliano Buendia (loan, Bayer Leverkusen), Louie Barry (loan, Hull City), Joe Gauci (loan, Barnsley), Jhon Duran (£64m, Al Nassr), Kosta Nedeljkovic (loan, RB Leipzig), Sil Swinkels (loan, Bristol Rovers), Samuel Iling-Junior (loan, Middlesbrough)
It is a weird world in which Aston Villa can sign someone from Borussia Dortmund, borrow a three-time Champions League winner who scored in one of those finals and lend Manchester United’s highest earner but still be left with a fanbase ignoring all the shiny new things and pointing angrily at the gaping chasm where at least one more centre-half probably ought to be.
Throw in a 337% mark-up in two years on a phenomenal player who had increasingly become not quite worth the hassle when silly money was introduced to the equation, and fans can even indulge in the sort of net spend chat which has kept the football world revolving for decades.
They are undeniably exciting signings and there was plenty of value in refreshing the lowest-scoring attack in the top half of the current Premier League table.
But Aston Villa’s defensive record is worse and in need of far more work, so quite why they decided to weaken that hand even further in January is a mystery.
The Diego Carlos sale could surely only be sanctioned with requisite incomings, yet Unai Emery’s perfectionism seemingly perennially prevents Villa from signing anyone but the best in class in that particular position, at least up until a £5m loan fee is sanctioned to inherit a problem Chelsea could not rid themselves of quickly enough.
Ezri Konsa might be thankful for the help provided by Disasi but Villa are still chillingly light in defence. Kortney Hause is dangerously close to making a Champions League matchday squad.
And that is the good news, considering Villa’s wage to revenue ratio before taking on a generous portion of Asensio and Rashford’s pay was 96%. They pretty much have to qualify for the Champions League not to financially collapse in on themselves and those deals don’t feel like being enough to push them over the line.
Chelsea
INS:
OUTS: Alex Matos (loan, Oxford), Kai Crampton (free, Bournemouth), Zain Silcott-Duberry (free, Bournemouth), Max Merrick (loan, Hampton & Richmond Borough), Renato Veiga (loan, Juventus), Cesare Casadei (£10.8m, Torino), Caleb Wiley (loan, Watford),
Carney Chukwuemeka (loan, Borussia Dortmund), Ben Chilwell (loan, Crystal Palace), Joao Felix (loan, AC Milan), Axel Disasi (loan, Aston Villa)
When the transfer dopamine is allowed to wear off fully, the gaps in this Chelsea squad after a spend of well over £1bn are stark. They have more goalkeepers than centre-forwards and neither position is blessed with anything approaching the best in class despite considerable expenditure.
Chelsea needed cover at left-back and in midfield and delivered neither, while bolstering their loan army by sending players out to four different Champions League clubs in AC Milan, Aston Villa, Borussia Dortmund and Juventus. It is difficult to know what Conference League behaviour is so soon into its existence but this can’t be it.
Ultimately the lack of joined-up thinking or forward planning is exposed when four of Chelsea’s 11 permanent first-team signings in summer 2024 are out on loan by February 2025 and another in Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall was put up for sale. Is throwing so much shit at the wall some inevitably has to stick really still the masterplan here a few years in?
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Brighton
INS: Diego Gomez (£11m, Inter Miami), Eiran Cashin (£9m, Derby County), Stefanos Tzimas (undisclosed, Nurnberg)
OUTS: Louis Flower (loan, Gateshead), Jakub Moder (£1.2m, Feyenoord), Julio Enciso (loan, Ipswich Town), Valentin Barco (loan, Strasbourg), Benicio Baker-Boaitey (undisclosed, Millwall), Stefanos Tzimas (loan, Nurnberg), Evan Ferguson (loan, West Ham)
The situation is obviously far more nuanced and the belief is the player himself didn’t entertain the interest but sometimes you do just have to accept a £61m offer for Kauro Mitoma.
Brighton’s plan and process is to be admired but such rigidity and a particular aversion to winter sales just seems curious when that sort of opportunity presents itself. A very good player he might be, the Seagulls are well-stocked in wide positions and that money could be reinvested.
It was, of course, on Tzimas with Ferguson loaned out. Except Tzimas was loaned straight back from whence he came, leaving Adam Webster as one of the early cabs off the centre-forward rank when needed.
That also is not how anyone foresaw Valentin Barco’s first year in England going after rejecting Barcelona.
Liverpool fans
INS:
OUTS: Rhys Williams (loan, Morecambe), Marcelo Pitaluga (free, Fluminense), Calvin Ramsay (loan, Kilmarnock), Thomas Hill (free, Harrogate Town), Stefan Bajcetic (loan, Las Palmas), Kaide Gordon (loan, Portsmouth)
But specifically supporters of the club top of the Premier League, through to the Champions League knockout stage with the best record of any team, and still in both domestic cups.
It doesn’t count for anything when there are no new signings to celebrate. Although at some point Richard Hughes should probably contemplate doing something other than automatically valuing every academy graduate at at least £20m. Hand out a couple of new contracts and call it a day until the summer, fella.
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