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Ryan O’Hanlon
For every transfer fit, there is an equal and opposite transfer flop. This is the law of the market.
From 1992 through 2021, just 54% of all the players brought in for €10 million or more by Premier League clubs started at least 50% of the matches in their first two seasons. Raise the fee threshold up to €20 million, and it doesn’t get much better: More than 40% of the players still fail to reach that 50% mark.
Per a recent analysis from The Times of London, Premier League clubs made 370 signings for the past season. Just 47 of those players played at least 50% of the available league minutes, and only 25 were on the field for 70%. Now, a lot of these signings involved youngsters, accounting tricks and squad players, but still. If we say that 70% of the minutes makes you a “starter,” then the 18 Premier League teams identified a whopping 25 new starters over the past season. And that’s from a combined €2.8 billion on fees alone! We’re not even counting salaries.
Yet we seem to forget this every summer. Every new signing is going to be the one who pushes Arsenal to the title, or turns West Ham into a genuine Champions League contender … and then Liverpool win the league while spending less on transfer fees than anyone else in England’s top flight.
As the transfer market opens and the clubs start spending billions of dollars on coin flips again, let’s take a look back at last summer. One year in, how have the 15 biggest signings panned out? We’ve regraded each one.
Position: Forward
Age: 25
Percentage of league minutes: 73.4%
The way this one has played out really makes me wonder how complex soccer actually is.
If you had to pick the two managers in European soccer who are the least similar, you would probably go with Pep Guardiola and Diego Simeone. The former wants to kill you with the ball. The latter? Well, he wants to just kill you. Guardiola’s teams have won everything while redefining what possession dominance looks like, while Simeone’s teams have found success by being comfortable without the ball and then attacking with brute force. City are the slowest team in the world with the ball, while Atlético almost always attack with pace.
Presumably, playing as a forward for City would be a lot different from playing as a forward for Atléti. If you switched from City’s field-tilting to Atléti’s counterattacking, it would presumably have some kind of effect on your output.
While the balance between goals and assists has shifted for Álvarez, he finished his first season with Atlético Madrid with 17 non-penalty goals+assists. In his final season with Manchester City, he finished with 17 non-penalty goals+assists. Flip them into a per-90 number, and they’re still almost exactly the same. Drop down into expected goals and assists and, once again, the output is almost exactly the same.
A very good attacker continued to be very good in very different circumstances.
Grade: B
Position: Forward
Age: 27
Percentage of league minutes: 64.4%
In keeping with the established theme, Solanke’s non-penalty expected goals+assists rate across 90 minutes with Tottenham was 0.54. The season before, with Bournemouth? It was 0.55.
Solanke’s actual goal output dipped, as did his playing time — by nearly 1,000 minutes. That led to a drop from 17 non-penalty goals with Bournemouth to eight with Tottenham, in what was one of Solanke’s final peak-age seasons. He was a really good presser and still managed to feature in about two-thirds of the league minutes, so that saves him from a worse grade.
Grade: C-
1:09
Did Manchester United overpay for Cunha?
The “ESPN FC” crew discuss their thoughts on Matheus Cunha joining Manchester United for 62.5 million pounds.
Position: Center back
Age: 19
Percentage of league minutes: 34.1%
On one hand, United nabbed a young player in whom a bunch of other big clubs were theoretically interested. That’s progress from how they used to do things: nabbing an old player other big clubs were actively looking to get rid of.
On the other hand, they paid a ton of money for Yoro, and neither his lack of playing time nor his performance when he actually played makes the move look any better in retrospect. He could still end up being great, but Year 1 was a wash — at best.
Grade: C
Position: Winger
Age: 25
Percentage of league minutes: 66.3%
The good: He played. In fact, he played more than he had in all but one of his previous five Premier League seasons.
The bad: everything else. While Neto is a fun player, he has never really been an effective player. Last season with Wolves, he produced 0.47 non-penalty expected goals+assists per 90 — a roughly league-average rate. With Chelsea, that dropped down to 0.40, and that matched up exactly with his per-minute production: four non-penalty goals and six assists.
If you were going to defend the Neto signing last summer, you would’ve said that his production would get a boost from playing on a better team with better teammates and more of the ball. Only that never happened, and if anything, he struggled without the space that Wolves would frequently enjoy on the counterattack. Like Solanke, his playing time saves him from an even worse grade.
Grade: C
Position: Midfielder
Age: 20
Percentage of league minutes: 60.3%
The percentage of league minutes isn’t quite as important here as with the others since PSG had Ligue 1 wrapped up, technically, in early April. Spiritually, they had already won the league come last August.
More importantly, João Neves played 92% of the minutes en route to PSG’s first Champions League title. He’s a superstar midfielder already, at one of the most in-demand positions in the sport over the past few transfer windows, and his transfer fee was less than Neto’s.
I’m not totally buying this whole idea that PSG suddenly got “smart,” but they’re certainly less silly than they used to be. Combine that with comparatively unlimited funds and, well, you get a team that mopped the floor with the best Premier League teams and then won the Champions League final 5-0 against an Inter Milan team that had just knocked out the champions of Spain and Germany.
There are only a couple of midfielders in the entire world whom I’d take over Neves right now — and he’s still four years away from hitting his prime.
Grade: A+
Position: Midfielder
Age: 23
Percentage of league minutes: 47.3%
One of my favorite transfer nuggets — and one in keeping with everything I said in the intro — is that club-record signings end up playing only about half of the available minutes for their new team. Well, Onana became Villa’s club-record signing last summer, and then he played just under 50% of the available minutes in the Premier League, mainly due to injury.
Across Villa’s run to the Champions League quarters, Onana featured in only 25.1% of the available minutes. He’s still young, but this wasn’t a great start.
Grade: C-
Position: Midfielder
Age: 27
Percentage of league minutes: 58.3%
There were two reasons I didn’t like this move last summer: (1) Koopmeiners was already halfway through his peak years, and (2) playing for Gian Piero Gasperini’s Atalanta has inflated the attacking production of so many players.
Koopmeiners stretches the concept of “midfielder” close to its breaking point; he’s really an attacker who happens to play in the midfield. Over his final two seasons in Bergamo, he put up 18 non-penalty goals and nine assists. In his first season in Turin: just three goals and three assists. And he didn’t do much to aid in anything that comes before the shot or the pass that creates the shot, either.
He did, at least, get on the field a decent amount. In the Champions League, his minutes share rose to 70.3%.
Grade: C-
Position: Attacking midfielder
Age: 27
Percentage of league minutes: 35.4%
I don’t think much really needs to be said here. For a team that is theoretically cash-strapped, spending a ton of money to sign a middle-of-his-prime player who featured in only about a third of the available minutes across LaLiga and the Champions League is a disaster.
In case you can’t tell from the tone of the previous paragraph, I didn’t see Barcelona’s title-winning season as vindication of all of president Joan Laporta’s lever-pulling. No: I think the major explanation for their success lies in this chart of the top 10 players in LaLiga for creating possession value for their teams:
Pedri is 22, and Yamal is 17. When you have both of them, it turns out you can survive a bunch of terrible financial decisions.
Grade: D
Position: Winger
Age: 23
Percentage of league minutes: 76.3%
We did it!
Finally, someone who played at least 70% of the available minutes in the league.
Olise was world-class in half a season for Palace last year. The big question about this move to Bayern was whether it was just a hot run or something he’d be able to sustain over the long haul. Given he was only 22 at the time of the signing, a €53 million fee was worth the risk to find out.
It turns out Olise really is that good, and he would probably transfer for at least double that fee if he was available this summer. Given that all of Bayern’s other wingers are aging and injury-prone, Olise also filled an immediate need.
Grade: A+
João Félix: €52m from Atlético Madrid to Chelsea
Position: Winger
Age: 25
Percentage of team minutes: 10.8%
He played 369 Premier League minutes and was then loaned out to AC Milan for the second half of the season. If only Chelsea could have, I don’t know, previously employed this player and gathered some intel on why this probably wasn’t going to work out.
Grade: F
Douglas Luiz: €51.5m from Aston Villa to Juventus
Position: Midfielder
Age: 27
Percentage of team minutes: 15.5%
Hey, at least he played more often than João Félix!
Grade: D-
Position: Midfielder
Age: 29
Percentage of team minutes: 22%
I thought this signing was a terrible idea for Bayern back when Thomas Tuchel was the coach in summer 2023.
For Fulham, Palhinha ran around a lot, racked up a ton of defensive stats, had no positional discipline, struggled to move the ball forward and was shaky under pressure. This player has no role on a possession-dominant team like Bayern. Top clubs can’t carry anyone when they have the ball anymore, and Palhinha’s defensive impact was vastly overrated by the limited statistical measures we have to define it. Plus, he would have been 28 at the start of the season; he wasn’t going to get better or develop new skills.
So, it seemed like Bayern had dodged a bullet when the deal fell through at the last minute two years ago. Last summer, they replaced Tuchel with Vincent Kompany, who might be the most possession-obsessed, least defensively curious manager in the world. And then … they still paid a ton of money to sign Palhinha a year later!
He’ll be 30 at the start of the upcoming season. This was as bad as the Olise move was good.
Grade: D-
Position: Winger/midfielder
Age: 19
Percentage of team minutes: 56.5%
Unlike Neves, Doué actually played even less in the Champions League: 47.4% of the minutes. But he also scored the winning penalty against Liverpool, the first goal against Aston Villa, and then won the man of the match award in the Champions League final.
I have some minor reservations about Doué’s game, but he’s so young and so talented. Plus, the whole point of this thing for PSG was to win the Champions League. Doué could retire tomorrow, and I’d still give this deal a positive grade.
Grade: A
Manuel Ugarte: €50m from PSG to Manchester United
Position: Midfielder
Age: 24
Percentage of team minutes: 52.2%
He’s only just entering his prime, and he does play one of the premium positions on the transfer market over the past few seasons. He’s one of the better ball winners in the Premier League, too. But he’s, at best, a net-zero for United when they have the ball.
It’s really hard to judge anyone within the general chaos of United this season and the more specific jamming of three-dimensional shapes into the two-dimensional holes of Ruben Amorim’s tactics. But this really just feels like the most “average” transfer possible. He played about half of the time and had no discernible impact, good or bad, on his team’s ability to win games.
Grade: C
Position: Forward
Age: 18
Percentage of team minutes: 10.6%
He has a lot of admirers, he’s really young, and his stats in limited minutes are quite good — for a player of any age, not just an 18-year-old. That said, I just don’t see it right now. Endrick looks like a kid playing against grown men. That could — and probably will — change at some point, but it makes it really hard for me to envision what the fully functional version of him might be. At least a lot of the fee is reliant on add-ons.
Grade: C
