Hindsight is 20:20 and we can’t pretend we saw all these problems coming, but there are a few summer sales Premier League clubs and/or the players involved might now be regretting.
Manchester City really could do with Julian Alvarez right now. Or at the very least they could do with having spent some of that lovely, lovely money they got for him on another competent back-up striker.
Julian Alvarez (Manchester City)
As we move through this list it will become clearer and clearer that it’s generally not so much the selling of a player that proves problematic, but the inadequate replacing of said player’s role within the squad.
That is very much the case with Manchester City and Julian Alvarez. Clearly, they would currently very much be able to call on a player who was involved far more than you might remember and contributed far more than anyone gave him credit for.
Nobody made more appearances for City last year than Alvarez’s 54, and even allowing for plenty of those being relatively brief substitute cameos he was still well inside the top 10 for total minutes on the pitch. Only Erling Haaland and Phil Foden scored more goals for City than Alvarez’s 19; only Rodri contributed more assists than his 13.
He was the perfect example of a vital squad player. He might not be in the first-choice starting XI, but he was absolutely in the first-choice finishing XI and was hardly the sort of spare part player Pep Guardiola is talking about in his ‘long squad’ talk.
All of that being said, £80m is a lot of money for a player who isn’t going to start every week and City’s willingness to do business at that price makes perfect sense.
But only, surely, if a decent chunk of it is then reinvested in someone to do the really quite important job Alvarez had been doing.
Guardiola’s citing of Oscar Bobb and James McAtee as possible Alvarez alternatives already within the squad always felt wildly optimistic. Alvarez is not a hugely promising youngster but a seasoned international. And even if City were looking to replace Alvarez from within, there is already enough evidence from this season that Liam Delap was the best option they had and they sold him too.
There has been misfortune, too, along the way: Bobb’s horrific injury, Foden’s total and catastrophic loss of goalscoring form. But Guardiola’s claims back in August that not replacing Alvarez ‘might’ be a mistake and not wanting a player who wouldn’t be involved for 10 months always felt like flimsy reasoning.
Alvarez made 54 appearances and racked up almost 3500 minutes on the pitch last season. The idea that any halfway adequate replacement would risk not being involved for 10 months is absurd.
Scott McTominay (Manchester United)
This one’s a bit different. It might not have been as specifically obvious that selling McTominay was an error, but the whole way United went about their summer 2024 business as if Erik Ten Hag had a realistic chance of remaining their manager in the long term always appeared to be an act of wilful delusion to the point of self-sabotage.
As none of us at that time knew who would be the manager to lead United into 2025 beyond the near-certainty that it wouldn’t be Ten Hag, it was hard to know at the time which particular bits of work would appear most misjudged when looking back a few months down the line. But it did seem likely there would be some mis-steps that could perhaps have been avoided had some proper decision-making been applied in the summer.
Had, for instance, United known that Ruben Amorim would be their manager by now, would McTominay have been so readily discarded? Not sure. He isn’t perfect, and it probably is true that a team with aspirations at United’s level should be looking beyond players of McTominay’s limited ability, but he is also a far closer facsimile of the agile and mobile and energetic midfielders that have been at the core of Amorim’s Sporting blueprint.
He perhaps lacks the technical ability to be the ideal man for the task, but is a far rounder peg for that particular hole than either Casemiro or Christian Eriksen can ever hope to be at this stage of their careers.
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Michael Olise (Crystal Palace)
Alvarez with knobs on, basically. It’s not that selling him that is the regret. It’s not like Palace are only now going “Oh, he was quite good, wasn’t he? Who knew?”
It is a fact of life for those outside the gilded elite that sometimes you have to cash in on a prize asset. It’s not pleasant and is often extremely painful, but it’s how you survive. What you must do, though, is replace that lost contribution in the round. Brighton, of course, are the absolute masters of this. Another fine example this summer came with Bournemouth replacing Dominic Solanke’s all-round contribution remarkably well with Evanilson.
Palace did not pull off that trick with Olise. And then the problem escalates. Because Olise is one of those gem players whose contributions are immense in and of themselves but also for the way they elevate others.
Not only have Palace lost Olise, but they are left with players like Eberechi Eze who are shadows of themselves in his absence.
None of this is on Palace, really. It’s harsh. Olise is so good – and has proved it at Bayern – that he is an outlying example of this phenomenon and in truth probably nothing that was in Palace’s power to do could have made it whole. But you do wonder if they might have done better than they did.
Douglas Luiz (Aston Villa)
A miserable transfer, this. Rushed out of the door with indecent haste at the start of the summer as Villa battled desperately to stay above the PSR waterline and the result is a £50m transfer that has worked out for absolutely nobody.
Villa managed to escape punishment, sure, but have been a noticeably weaker and softer proposition this season than last in the absence of a player who might not have quite had Rodri-level importance to his team’s overall play but was close enough for it to be the go-to comparison.
But what makes this one so dispiriting is that while Alvarez and Olise have at least themselves thrived, it appears to he is having regrets. His Juventus move has been a nightmare for him, with injuries and an almost pathological habit of conceding penalties looking like they might end his career in Turin almost before it has begun.
He has started only two Serie A games this season and completed a full 90 just once. His three appearances in the Champions League have amounted to 49 minutes in total, with a muscle injury denying him the chance of returning to Villa Park to play against his old club in a place with some happier memories.
READ: Danny Welbeck, Douglas Luiz among five stars who could re-sign for former PL clubs in January
