10. Gylfi Sigurdsson (Swansea to Everton,
£45m)
Good player, horrible deal.
Sigurdsson will make Everton better and, at
worst, provide them with a level of creativity that they didn’t have before.
But that fee? £45m doesn’t buy superstars anymore, but Ronald Koeman could
likely have split that money over several areas of his side and come out
stronger as a result.
Added to which is the player’s age. Sigurdsson
is 28 in September and likely has just a few years left at the top of his game,
so it’s hard to envisage a situation in which this is ever thought of as
anything other than an enormous overspend.
9. Anthony Modeste (Cologne to
Tianjin Quanjian, £30m)
For context, Modeste had the season of his
career at Cologne in 2016/17, scoring 24 times in 35 Bundesliga appearances.
At 29, he was perfectly entitled to explore
the riches of the Chinese Super League and, the chances are, he’ll likely do
very well. However, it’s difficult to reconcile the player’s age, the £30m
Tianjin Quanjian paid for him, and China’s intent to ‘grow the game’ in
their country.
Modeste is not a highly marketable figure, he
doesn’t boast that kind of profile, so this really constitutes the kind of
transfer that the CSL were trying to distance themselves from.
8. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (Arsenal to
Liverpool, £35m)
Not a bad transfer in the sense that
Oxlade-Chamberlain isn’t worth the fee Liverpool have paid for him (although
his confidence in being allowed to play as a central midfielder does seem
misplaced). Instead, it’s the circumstances of what it means for the club he’s
left: his willingness to turn his back on Arsenal’s richer contract offer
and the club’s subsequent inability to find a replacement.
Just over a week ago, Arsene Wenger was
describing Oxlade-Chamberlain as the future of the club and, of course, he
named him in his starting XI at Anfield on August 26. Now, the player has just
unwittingly become another symbol of the dysfunction at the Emirates.
7. Neymar (Barcelona to PSG, £198m)
A brilliant player who is sufficiently gifted
not to have a definitive ‘value’ – but how did this deal make you feel?
We know already that it was driven by factors
beyond football. But given the events which have followed - the shenanigans
over Nice’s Jean Michael Seri (whose mooted move to Barcelona was allegedly
scuppered maliciously by PSG) for instance - it reaffirmed the suspicion
that football is becoming little more than billionaire one-upmanship.
The Brazilian is superb, incontestably one of
the best players in the world, but his transfer constituted a low point for the
game – and its knock-on effects have been significant. The only manageable
response is to shrug sadly, then mutter something inaudible about shirt sales
and social media presence.
6. Joselu (Stoke to Newcastle, £5m)
Newcastle needed goals ahead of this season
and Mike Ashley publicly promised Rafa Benitez “every last penny” for
squad improvement. Look how that worked out; Benitez’s future is now growing
more uncertain by the day.
Joselu is not substandard, but the 27-year-old
won’t guarantee anything like the volume of goals that Benitez was hoping for.
In his entire top-flight career, spanning spells in England, Germany and Spain,
he has never scored more than nine goals in a league season.
The transfer which brought him to St. James’
Park wasn’t a bad deal - naturally, it was extremely thrifty - but the distance
between the improvement he will provide and that which Newcastle needed is
absolutely vast.
5. Danny Drinkwater (Leicester to Chelsea,
£35m)
Way, way too much money. Chelsea suffered
through some unexpected failures on deadline day and clearly would have
preferred to have signed Ross Barkley - either additionally or instead of
Drinkwater.
So, although the club’s interest in the player
was semi-long-term, the fee they ultimately parted with was clearly inflated by
their own desperation. Antonio Conte was public in his dissatisfaction over
Chelsea’s inertia in the market and this seems like an act of appeasement.
Drinkwater is a good player, but is he someone whose form will truly help his
club thrive? Not really – he’s just another body.
This looks a Steve Sidwell/Scott Parker move -
the classic over-reach by a player attracted to the bright lights and the false
promise of a bigger stage. N’Golo Kante and Tiemoue Bakayoko are Conte’s
default starters, Cesc Fabregas is the attacking variation from the bench, and
it’s unclear exactly where Drinkwater’s game time is actually going to come
from.
That doesn’t make him a bad player, just a
good one guilty of a bad decision.
4. Pablo Zabaleta (unattached to West Ham)
Zabaleta has been a terrific player and, by
all accounts, he’s a model professional and thoroughly decent human being.
However, if ever a transfer was
quintessentially West Ham, it’s this one. He’s a name, he’s past his best, and
his wages are likely huge; it’s symptomatic of the short-termism which has
slowly eroded the club’s culture. Zabaleta is a modern Manchester City icon and
the hope, presumably, was that some of his winning intangibles could be
transplanted into the London Stadium dressing room.
Football rarely works like that, though, and
on current evidence this is another misfire from a recruiting department which
has been shooting blanks for a while. It’s not really Zabaleta’s fault, he just
isn’t the magic bullet for West Ham’s myriad issues.
3. Kylian Mbappe (Monaco to PSG, loan)
Ah, well done PSG - good for you. Ligue 1 is
over for the season and any Financial Fair Play concerns have been miraculously
assuaged by the initial absence of a permanent fee.
Mbappe is a fabulous prospect who should have
interested every major club in Europe, but moving to a divisional rival makes
this a particular type of deal - the sort pursued for the sake of weakening a
rival. This is 2017’s version of Gonzalo Higuain moving from Napoli to
Juventus, or Mario Gotze leaving Dortmund for Bayern Munich.
He’s very gifted and will presumably do
extremely well at Parc des Princes, but anything which helps erodes the culture
of a competition to such a degree belongs on this list.
2. Paulinho (Guangzhou Evergrande to
Barcelona, £36,4m)
Forget the preconceptions about Paulinho based
on his disappointing time in England and just consider the raw details: he’s 29
years old, has been playing in the Chinese Super League, and cost Barcelona
over £35m.
It’s perfectly plausible that the Brazilian was
just never suited to the Premier League, although whispers about a
less-than-committed attitude suggests he made it hard for
himself. Still, the chances of him showing his worth in Barcelona
seem equally slender. The size of the Camp Nou and the club’s stratospheric
standards make the task hard enough, but consider the calibre of his
predecessors and also the type of player that the natives
typically warm to in Catalonia.
The missing ingredient is finesse. He’ll be a
tough sell.
1. John Terry (unattached to Aston Villa)
When a player achieves certains things in his
career, he’s afforded privileges - one of which is the opportunity to carry on
well beyond his expiration date.
What did Steve Bruce see in Terry? It’s obvious: a serial winner with the full collection of club medals who, at a lower level, could infect an impressionable group of players with his winning DNA.
Five games into the season, Villa find
themselves towards the foot of the Championship and have conceded the
third-most goals in the division.
That’s the problem: this kind of move
always sounds smart, but rarely do all of those intangibles
stack up as they should. Terry is no Dave Mackay and Bruce is certainly no
Brian Clough.
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