Christian Norgaard to Arsenal appears very much like it might well be A Thing.
Now we like Norgaard rather a lot. In our view, his has been an under-rated contribution to Brentford’s post-Toney attacking success, with his lower-key creative input significantly and understandably overshadowed by the more eye-catching Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa.
Point is, he’s a very good player available at a very good price and he might be just the thing. But…bit underwhelming, isn’t it? One thing Norgaard is not and never can be is the big-name striker Arsenal fans crave so desperately.
But sometimes this precise kind of initially underwhelming transfer can obtain enormous significance come the final reckoning, like these five lads whose eventual contribution to title glory in their first season was far greater than the excitement that greeted their arrival.
We’re talking specifically players who actually helped win their teams the title, not Ralph Wiggum-style helping. So no Federico Chiesa here, unfortunately.
Manuel Akanji (Man City, 2022)
One of the problems with a feature like this is the fact that a vast number of Premier League titles have been won by Manchester United ages ago and Manchester City more recently, meaning any new signings – underwhelming, overwhelming or those that merely adequately whelm – are coming into teams already well used to winning titles by the sh*tload and thus making it harder to make decisive contributions.
But if we try to do this feature without any contribution from Manchester we’re in very deep trouble, so we will have to make the best of it.
And thus, Manuel Akanji is our man. There was little fanfare when he arrived right at the end of the 2022 summer transfer window to join two-time defending champions for whom Aymeric Laporte and Ruben Dias had formed an estimable first-choice defensive pairing with top-tier reinforcements in the shape of John Stones and Nathan Ake.
At the very least it would be fair to say that of City’s two signings from Borussia Dortmund that summer, Akanji’s (for less than a third of the fee City threw Leeds’ way for Kalvin Phillips) was the lower profile.
And while, yes, the very much not underwhelming signing of Erling Haaland certainly played its part in City’s continued success, so too did Akanji. He would end the season with more Premier League appearances than any of Ake, Dias, Stones or Laporte despite not making his debut in the competition until mid-September, as well as playing every minute of the Champions League knockouts and in every round of the FA Cup for the treble winners.
Now Manchester City need an upgrade, but then he was an underrated revelation.
Marcos Alonso (Chelsea, 2016)
Chelsea’s rollercoaster journey from 2014 to 2017 will always be one of the Premier League’s very best bits, with a pair of hugely impressive title wins under Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte sandwiching a comically disastrous season that ended Mourinho’s second spell and resulted in a 10th-place finish.
As well as appointing Conte, something else Chelsea did in the summer of 2016 was sign Marcos Alonso from Fiorentina.
Now he had proved himself a very capable player for La Viola in Serie A, but here in England we have very correctly never really placed much stock in what a player might achieve in daft little foreign leagues like that one. It only matters what you’ve done here. And in Alonso’s case, that was ‘be a bit-part player in a relegated Bolton team and half-a-season of relegation-battling with Gus Poyet’s Sunderland’. In other words, nothing very interesting at all.
Yet he was absolutely crucial to Chelsea’s success under Conte. We’ve all enjoyed the banters about the sorcery of Conte’s ability to win the league with Victor Actual Moses as his RWB – a magic trick matched only by Conte’s ability to regrow his own hair – but it’s easily overlooked now just how brilliant and integral Alonso was on the other side, and how that really was not something everyone knew would be the case at the time.
As well as his defensive work, Alonso became a key progressive component of Chelsea’s dominant title-winners, more than doubling his career tally of top-flight goals in that one season.
N’Golo Kante (Leicester, 2015)
Feels like it’s a bit of a cheat to include anything at all from Leicester’s 2015/16 miracle, because for very, very understandable reasons not one soul on earth was talking about any Leicester signing of any xW (expected whelm) as being the one that might just propel them to the title after their escape from relegation in 2015.
But equally it feels like you just can’t have this list without Kante given the sheer gulf between the lack of fanfare that greeted the arrival of a player on the back of one mid-table season in Ligue 1 with Caen and the mammoth significance of his contribution to Leicester pulling off the Premier League’s greatest ever madness.
Such was his impact that he moved on to Chelsea after just one season – duly winning the season again as a signing that was in no way underwhelming – and his name remains to this day an instantly understood shorthand for a very specific and very special type of player.
Michael Carrick (Man United, 2006)
It’s one of those things that’s been largely memory-holed now by all involved, but at the time of Carrick’s move from Tottenham to Manchester United there were plenty of United fans who felt they’d been sold an overpriced pup by those wily southern chancers.
The mood was febrile enough around Old Trafford back in the summer of 2006 on the back of a truly unthinkable three-year Premier League title drought. It seems hilarious to think of that now – largely because it is hilarious – but at the time United had never previously gone even two seasons of Barclays without winning the thing.
Jose Mourinho had come along and ruined everything, the great Special prick that he was, and there was widely held suspicion about the idea a pretty-passing midfielder of such conspicuous pretty loser stock as West Ham and Tottenham could significantly change matters.
Five Premier League titles and 316 Premier League appearances later, opinions had altered a bit.
Jens Lehmann (Arsenal, 2003)
Got to have a bit of Arsenal in here, haven’t we? And there really is only one contender when you look through the names.
Now it’s not like Arsenal fans thought they’d signed a dud when Lehmann arrived, but he was a goalkeeper with a reputation for being something of a loon.
As the man to replace the very safest of English goalkeeping hands in David Seaman, it was undoubtedly a bit of a punt. Yet a punt that led to Lehmann being an ever-present member of the first and still very much only unbeaten English league champions since the Victorian era.
Look, fair play.
