Premier League Transfer Window Insights: Who Won and Who Lost?

Two days on from the most deranged Premier League transfer window yet, the dust hasn’t so much settled as rearranged itself into ever more bewildering patterns.

Who won? Who lost? Does that even mean anything in a market that now feels less like football and more like a late-stage housing bubble, where value is a vibe and logic is optional? Spend £100m on the wrong player and don’t worry – someone will be along shortly with £80m and a shrug.

This was the summer the Chelseafication of the market felt complete. Fees detached from reality, amortisation spreadsheets doing more heavy lifting than most midfields, and a general sense that nothing really matters because the carousel never stops.

So, back we go to those calmer, more innocent days of three weeks ago, when we picked out 10 glaring problems across the league and wondered who might fix what. The season has started, the money has gone, the panic has subsided.

What, if anything, actually got solved?

Tottenham’s striker problem

This is where the story had to start. It still doesn’t have a clear ending.

Tottenham wanted goals. They got Savio, Omar Marmoush and Mykhailo Mudryk. They did not, crucially, get a proper, old-fashioned No 9. Dominic Solanke and Richarlison are still there, still bristling, still not quite in harmony with Roberto De Zerbi.

De Zerbi has already set Savio a double-figure target, a neat way of signalling that Spurs will attack by committee rather than crown a new centre-forward king. Marmoush looks a clever signing, another striker who decided life behind Erling Haaland at Manchester City was a cul-de-sac. He should help. He’s not that penalty-box monster Spurs fans imagined.

The absence of serious links to a traditional nine – Cody Gakpo and Iliman Ndiaye were the attacking pursuits that slipped away – tells its own story. De Zerbi got almost everything he asked for. A classic striker was never really on his shopping list.

Two league games in, Spurs haven’t scored. They haven’t really looked like scoring. The new-look front line needs to stop being a theory and start being a threat, quickly. A club finally flexing its transfer muscles cannot afford to turn this into another year of existential angst and gallows humour.

Manchester City’s midfield reset

The Community Shield is usually a bad place to form opinions. This year, it was irresistible.

In Cardiff, a midfield of Elliott Anderson and Mateo Kovacic looked flimsy by City’s standards. Pep Guardiola’s response was entirely in character: identify a weakness, throw nine figures at it, sign Enzo Fernandez from Chelsea.

Fernandez was already cast as the pantomime villain of this era after his World Cup antics and eye-watering move to Stamford Bridge. Now he has doubled down, shifting from one financial superpower to the other and becoming the face of a summer that felt unmoored from reality.

He arrives as the solution, but also as a lightning rod. Plenty of people will relish the idea of him – and City – falling flat. Anderson, once the story of City’s evolution, risks becoming collateral, the promising academy midfielder nudged aside by the next mega-deal.

City saw a wobble in August and did what City do. They bought certainty.

Manchester United’s defence creaks on

Manchester United fixed their midfield. They did not fix their defence.

The warning signs were there. An ageing, creaking back line, patched up rather than rebuilt. Two games into the season, promoted sides have already helped themselves to four goals, a grim echo of that infamous afternoon at Brentford four years ago.

The calendar will soon turn brutal. Two games a week, every week, and a back four that looks one hamstring strain away from full-blown crisis. So much now rests on Luke Shaw staying fit and flawless for months at a time.

United gambled that they could get away with it at the back. The early evidence is not kind.

Liverpool’s fitness and the cost of standing still

While City, Chelsea and Spurs hogged the headlines, Liverpool quietly ended up with the biggest net spend of the lot. When the music stopped, they had thrown more money at the market than anyone else.

And yet the squad doesn’t obviously look better.

Bradley Barcola is a thrilling, high-ceiling signing, but also an extremely expensive one. Liverpool already had a collection of thrilling, extremely expensive forwards who have yet to fully justify the billing. At some point, one or two of last summer’s marquee attackers have to catch fire, or this is just churn for the sake of it.

On the specific question of fitness, the early signs are ambiguous. Two games, two 2-2 draws, two late equalisers. You can spin that as resilience, legs still running in the final minutes. Or you can hear an echo of last season, when late winners papered over structural cracks.

Are Liverpool fitter? Stronger? Or just living through another run of wild, chaotic scorelines? Right now, it feels like a bunch of things happening, not a clear pattern.

Chelsea’s goalkeeper – finally, a straight answer

At last, a problem that was identified, confirmed and actually solved.

Chelsea’s goalkeeping situation was a concern before a ball was kicked. Robert Sanchez’s opening-day display turned concern into alarm. The club acted, and they acted decisively: Emi Martinez walked through the door.

On this, there is rare consensus. Emi Martinez is better than Robert Sanchez. No spreadsheets, no debates, no tortured think pieces required.

Of course, this being Chelsea 2026, one fire out, another one starts to crackle. Fernandez has gone, nobody has replaced him, and a new anxiety sits in midfield. The absence of European football helps; Chelsea can lean on Moises Caicedo and shuffle Romeo Lavia, Valentin Barco and Reece James around him until January.

If that proves insufficient, there’s always the January chequebook. Or the Free Agent Lucky Dip, which is already winking suggestively in the corner.

Picture it: Yves Bissouma turning up in blue after Spurs decided he was expendable. Or, for pure chaos, Tanguy Ndombele as a short-term warm body in the middle of the park. The narrative writes itself.

Aston Villa’s ripped-out spine

Aston Villa’s summer felt like a controlled demolition of a successful side. Martinez, Konsa, Tielemans, Rogers, Watkins – the spine that carried them has been stripped away, leaving a fanbase trying to reconcile ambition with anxiety.

In the middle of that churn, they did something quietly smart. Leon Goretzka, free from Bayern Munich, slipped in almost unnoticed at the end of August. It might turn out to be one of the sharpest deals of the window.

Villa have changed more than any manager would ideally like. Yet there is a logic to most of what they have done, and quality in most of what they have bought. Their goalless, pointless start feels more like turbulence than a nosedive.

There are other clubs, in similar positions, where you wouldn’t be so generous.

Newcastle’s Newcastle problem that never was

So much for the existential questions around Newcastle’s identity post-Eddie Howe. Matthias Jaissle has arrived and, so far, simply kept the machine humming.

Four points from Liverpool and Tottenham to open the season reads well on paper. It might say more about Liverpool and Tottenham than about Newcastle, but you can only beat – or draw with – what’s in front of you.

The real test comes when the opposition are less chaotic, less self-absorbed. Bournemouth this weekend is exactly the kind of fixture that reveals whether this is the real thing or just a strong start in a weird league.

For now, the “Newcastle’s Newcastle” issue can go back in the drawer.

Fulham and the Temu Xabi Alonso

Fulham and Marco Silva felt right. Club and coach in sync, timing perfect, ambitions aligned. That’s gone now, and the replacement already looks like the flimsiest appointment of the summer.

Alvaro Arbeloa, the Temu version of Xabi Alonso, has walked straight into the Sack Race favourite slot. Spurs are struggling, Evangelos Marinakis has uncharacteristically kept his trigger finger still for weeks, and yet it is Arbeloa whose position already feels precarious.

The unease isn’t just about results. It’s about fit. Silva and Fulham made sense. Arbeloa and Fulham looks like an experiment everyone is watching with one eyebrow raised.

If it goes wrong, nobody will be surprised. The only question is how quickly the board blinks.

Coventry and the Sky Bet smell

Coventry came up reeking of Sky Bet and, for now, they still do.

Defeat to Hull has turned their upcoming fixture list into something ominous. Manchester City, Brighton, Forest, Newcastle. It’s the sort of run that can turn a difficult start into a full-blown survival scrap before the clocks go back.

The irony is brutal. Coventry have spent £150m trying to scrub the Championship off their boots, only to end up with a squad that looks, at best, like Championship Deluxe. In a market this inflated, de-Championshiping a promoted side is no longer a project. It’s an arms race.

The supposed reward for promotion is starting to look like a trap.

Crystal Palace and the Chelsea carousel

Crystal Palace remain firmly in the “worry about them” category. Two defeats, one of them a mauling by a Manchester City side still clearly under construction, have exposed a defence that already looked fragile on paper.

Their solution? Chelsea. Of course.

Axel Disasi has arrived on loan, as he must, because it now appears to be Premier League law that every club takes a turn borrowing him. Honest Ahanor is also in, but only technically from Atalanta, because he doesn’t actually become a Chelsea player until next summer. The whole thing feels like a legal puzzle with boots on.

Then there’s Ben Chilwell, back at Selhurst Park after a previous loan spell, this time via Strasbourg. Another Chelsea-adjacent body, another short-term fix.

You can roll your eyes at the web of multi-club ownerships and creative loan routes, but one detail cuts through the noise. Clubs only sign an injured Ben Chilwell on deadline day when they are desperate.

Palace look desperate.

The window is closed now. The money is gone, the loopholes exploited, the squads locked in until January. Some problems have been patched, some kicked down the road, some simply ignored.

The absurdity remains. The question is which clubs can still see clearly through the fog of it all when the games start to bite.