Premier League Transfer Window Review: Key Issues and Changes

Two days on from the window slamming shut and the Premier League still looks like it’s coming down from a three–month sugar rush. The numbers stopped making sense weeks ago. The logic disappeared even earlier than that.

This was the summer when the Chelseafication of the market felt complete. Fees ballooned, contracts stretched, amortisation spreadsheets glowed white‑hot – and yet the whole thing carried the strange calm of a housing bubble. Buy badly? Doesn’t matter. Someone else will pay a fortune for your mistake in 12 months’ time.

Clubs hurled £100m at players, watched them flop, and still strutted away convinced the market would bail them out. Chelsea spent £60m on Mykhailo Mudryk, saw him struggle, then sit out a ban, and now somehow have a route to potentially making a profit on him this time next year. Try applying reason to that.

You can’t. But we’re going to prod at it anyway.

Before the season kicked off, we picked out 10 glaring problems across the league. The window is closed now, the football has started, and the question is simple: did anyone actually fix anything – or does none of this matter in the slightest?

Tottenham’s missing striker

This felt like the clearest issue in the division. It still kind of is.

Tottenham have brought in Savio, Omar Marmoush and, yes, Mudryk. Dominic Solanke and Richarlison are still there, still bristling under Roberto De Zerbi, a manager who doesn’t exactly specialise in soothing egos.

De Zerbi has already set Savio a double‑figure goal target. The message is obvious: Spurs will share the load rather than lean on one classic number nine. Marmoush looks a sharp piece of business, a forward who decided that trying to pinch minutes from Erling Haaland at Manchester City was a fast track to nowhere.

But he’s not a traditional centre-forward either. The bigger hint comes from who Spurs didn’t sign. The other big attacking targets that slipped away – Cody Gakpo and Iliman Ndiaye – suggest De Zerbi never really wanted an old‑fashioned striker. He largely got what he asked for.

The problem? Two league games, zero goals, and not much sign of one. The new attack needs to click quickly. Otherwise this grand new era of Spurs throwing their weight around in the market risks turning into yet another season of angst and eye‑rolling.

Manchester City’s midfield panic

This one started with a Community Shield wobble and spiralled from there. Cardiff showed us a midfield pairing of Elliott Anderson and Mateo Kovacic that looked flimsy by City standards, and the alarm bells rang loudly enough for the champions to do what they always do now: drop another nine‑figure solution on the table.

Enter Enzo Fernandez from Chelsea.

Fernandez was already a Premier League villain-in-waiting after his World Cup theatrics with Argentina. Now he’s the face of the league’s wildest spending spree, hopping from one financial superpower to the other. He becomes the lightning rod for everyone tired of the money and the madness, the player people will want to see fail just to feel like the universe still has rules.

If he thrives, Anderson risks becoming collateral damage. If he doesn’t, the schadenfreude will be loud.

Manchester United’s creaking back line

Manchester United did the hard midfield surgery in previous windows. The defence, though, remains the same fragile structure held together by hope and tape.

Two games against promoted teams, four goals conceded. It’s a grim echo of the side that shipped four at Brentford four years ago. The speed and intensity of the league have gone up again; the back line hasn’t.

The real strain will show when the two‑games‑a‑week grind starts. So much now rests on Luke Shaw staying fit and in form for months on end. That’s a huge gamble for a club that has already seen how quickly this defence can collapse under pressure.

Liverpool’s fitness – and their spend

While the circus swirled around City, Chelsea and Spurs, Liverpool quietly ended up with the biggest net spend of the summer. And yet their squad doesn’t obviously look much better than last season’s.

Bradley Barcola is the headline arrival: thrilling, direct, expensive. But Liverpool already had a collection of thrilling, expensive forwards who haven’t consistently delivered. At some point, last summer’s big buys have to erupt properly or this window’s outlay becomes just another layer of gloss on the same old cracks.

On the specific question of fitness, the evidence is murky. Two games, two 2-2 draws, two late equalisers. On one hand, that suggests legs and lungs are fine. On the other, this time last year they were scoring late winners that disguised deeper structural problems.

Is this another illusion? Or just football chaos with no deeper meaning at all?

Chelsea’s goalkeeper – one problem solved, another created

At least one club tackled an obvious weakness head‑on.

Chelsea’s goalkeeping situation was a glaring issue before a ball was kicked. Robert Sanchez made it even clearer in the opening game. The response: sign Emi Martinez. No arguments there. Everyone can agree Martinez is an upgrade. In a summer of noise and division, that counts as rare consensus.

Of course, this is Chelsea 2026, so fixing one area simply exposes another. Enzo Fernandez has gone and there is no direct replacement. With no European football, Chelsea can probably muddle through until January with Moises Caicedo holding things together and a rotating cast of Romeo Lavia, Valentin Barco and Reece James filling in around him.

If that doesn’t work, there’s always the January fix: another £80m solution. Or the more chaotic route – dipping into the free-agent market.

Given Spurs’ fondness for Chelsea cast‑offs, the idea of Chelsea plugging a midfield gap with someone like Yves Bissouma, or even Tanguy Ndombele, has a certain grim comedy. Warm bodies, short‑term deals, long‑term headaches.

Aston Villa’s torn‑up spine

Villa’s summer has been messy, unsettling, and oddly impressive all at once.

The arrival of Leon Goretzka on a free after his Bayern Munich exit barely made a ripple on deadline day. It might end up being one of the smartest moves of the window. He brings experience and control to a midfield that has been ripped apart and rebuilt on the fly.

Villa have seen huge chunks of the spine that underpinned their rise – Martinez, Konsa, Tielemans, Rogers, Watkins – taken out or disrupted. That kind of churn usually spells trouble. Yet the recruitment has been sharp across the pitch.

They’ve started the season goalless and pointless, but there’s a sense this is a wobble rather than a warning. Compared to some other slow starters, Villa look more like a team adjusting than one unravelling.

Newcastle’s Newcastle problem

This concern might already be redundant.

Matthias Jaissle has walked into Newcastle and made them look, well, fine. Better than fine, actually. Four points from games against Liverpool and Tottenham is a serious start on paper.

The nagging doubt? Those results might say more about Liverpool and Spurs than they do about Newcastle. The real measure comes when they face a less chaotic opponent. Bournemouth away this weekend is a different kind of exam. Grind, not glamour.

If they pass that, the early optimism starts to look a lot more real.

Fulham’s dugout downgrade

Alvaro Arbeloa has already been installed as the favourite in the sack race. That tells its own story.

Fulham and Marco Silva felt like one of those rare Premier League marriages that actually worked for all parties. Right coach, right club, right moment. Both decided it was time to move on, but the fit was so snug that anything that followed was always going to feel flimsy.

Arbeloa, the Temu version of Xabi Alonso, has walked into that void with a thin CV and a heavy weight of comparison. Of all the new managerial appointments in the division, his feels the least convincing on paper.

Fulham needed continuity. They’ve chosen a reset instead. The clock is already ticking.

Coventry and the Sky Bet smell

Coventry still reek of Sky Bet. That’s the brutal truth.

They’ve already lost to Hull and now stare at a fixture list that looks like a bad joke: Manchester City, Brighton, Nottingham Forest and Newcastle in the next few weeks. Before Halloween, they could be staring up at the rest of the league and circling that late‑October trip to Dr Tottenham as their first real chance of relief.

The most telling thing about this window might not be what the superclubs did, but what Coventry had to do just to look vaguely competitive. They’ve spent £150m and still resemble, at best, a Championship Deluxe side.

De‑Championshiping a promoted club has become brutally expensive. And even then, it might not be enough.

Crystal Palace and the Chelsea carousel

Fear remains the dominant emotion around Crystal Palace’s defence. Two defeats, including a comprehensive beating from a Manchester City side still clearly short of top gear, haven’t eased the anxiety.

Their answer has been to raid the Chelsea ecosystem like everyone else.

Axel Disasi arrives on loan, as he seemingly must for every Premier League club at some point. Honest Ahanor also turns up, technically from Atalanta but in reality on a pre‑ordained path to Chelsea next summer. It’s a deal that openly dances through a loophole, the player’s name only adding to the sense of farce.

Ben Chilwell is back too, returning after a previous loan spell and now signed from Strasbourg. The pattern is impossible to ignore: Palace as another outpost in Chelsea’s sprawling network.

You can laugh at the absurdity of it all, but history tells you something stark: clubs only sign an injured Ben Chilwell on deadline day when the panic levels are sky‑high.

The window is closed. The cheques are signed. The squads are set, at least on paper. Now we find out which of these gambles was visionary – and which was just another expensive spin of a wheel that never stops turning.