If you support a Premier League club and are looking at your newly put-together squad this weekend wondering who some of these players are and how they are supposed to fit together, you are far from the only one. Tottenham and Crystal Palace each signed 10 new players. Chelsea, Aston Villa, Brighton and Coventry all brought in an entire XI. Ipswich added 14, while Hull signed 18, which is almost a whole squad.
A lot has already been said about the staggering sums Premier League clubs traded this summer. Once Manchester City set the market at £116m for Elliot Anderson, everyone else had little option but to keep pace. Even so, it was still startling to see Tottenham pay £85m for a winger who scored one goal a season at the Etihad, Liverpool agree £123m for Paris Saint-Germain’s impact substitute, and City spend £125m on the player who got himself sent off in a World Cup final.
But there is another side to this ridiculous window, created by the sheer number of players on the move. You can see it in the almost offhand manner in which footballers are bought and sold, in the way whole teams are remade within a few weeks, in how few coaches now work wonders with the players already at their disposal, and in how supporters are becoming increasingly detached from the revolving door of arrivals and departures.
That final point may be the one most often missed. The connection between Premier League fans and their clubs has rarely felt more fragile. Fewer players than ever are beginning the season carrying any deep meaning for the people in the stands. Chelsea sold Trevoh Chalobah after 20 years at the club. Liverpool sold Curtis Jones, their last Liverpudlian, to Inter Milan. Lewis Dunk, Bukayo Saka and Phil Foden are now unusual examples of one-club players in a broken-up era.
Manchester City have spent £326m this summer rebuilding their midfield, with Elliot Anderson joining Fernandez and Ayyoub Bouaddi at the club.
Some rebuilds are more justified than others. But the truth is that roughly half of all new signings fail. They arrive amid huge excitement, complete with polished unveilings and a pre-match presentation, only to be moved on at the first sign of trouble. Just when supporters begin to get to know a player, he is discarded and someone else takes the shirt.
Take Nick Woltemade, signed for £69m, who was given 24 Premier League starts to prove himself at Newcastle United. Or Tijjani Reijnders, bought for £43m, who received 19 starts at City. Both were moved on after only one season. Maybe they were not good enough, maybe they did not quite suit the new coach. But the reality is that we never really got the chance to know for certain.
This is elite football, of course, and it is a ruthless business with very little space for sentiment. But beyond the flawed idea of replacing players with new ones in the hope of fast-tracking improvement, this habit has a slow and harmful effect. Where players once embodied something about their clubs, those bonds are being worn away with every passing summer.
The Premier League has spent heavily on transfers this summer.
Is there much point in Tottenham fans becoming excited about, say, Savio, when it is easy to picture him on loan in the Turkish Super Lig, or at Fulham, 18 months from now? Is it really worth Manchester United fans investing emotional energy in the future of Andrey Santos, when he may well leave in search of regular first-team football before long?
Naturally, a degree of transfer fatigue has set in. This summer even produced a new kind of story amid the endless churn: the player who did not move. Cody Gakpo was linked with Tottenham for weeks and nothing came of it. Then, for around three days, he was said to be on his way to Manchester City in an £85m deal. That failed to happen as well, leading Fabrizio Romano to post a picture of Gakpo with the giant caption “STAYING”, as though that itself were major news. Liverpool are now holding on to a player supporters know would rather play for their biggest modern rivals.
Selling players has become just as big a talking point as buying them, and Chelsea have been praised after generating £1bn in sales since BlueCo bought the club four years ago. They have achieved that largely by hoarding young talent with the clear intention of selling it on for profit, treating players like tradable assets. Is that enjoyable to support? Is that really what a healthy football ecosystem is supposed to look like?
Enzo Fernandez moved from Chelsea to Manchester City for £125m.
And amid all this churn, the coaching skill of building a team from the players already there is becoming harder to find. Enzo Maresca presumably did not want to work with Jack Grealish, Reijnders, Savio, Omar Marmoush or Nico Gonzalez, who spent two years preparing as Rodri’s understudy only to be shown the door when Rodri left. Could Maresca have found a way to use what he inherited? Could he and his staff have built something out of those players? Is that not supposed to be part of the job?
It is now September, and the frenzy has finally ended. Premier League clubs spent £3.5bn in two months, the equivalent of the GDP of a small country. And when everything settles, what remains is a collection of new teams built less on meaningful connection and more on contractual obligation, with players increasingly detached from clubs and supporters, like freelance athletes drifting from one job to the next.
Some of those players will build genuine bonds with their clubs, but only if they are given enough time. January will come around soon enough. More signings will follow. Flops will be loaned out or sold. Players who are leaving and then staying will become transfer sagas nobody needed. Here we go again.
