Premier League 'Big Eight' suffers hammer blow as two members endure torrid transfer window

When you’ve already placed yourself so firmly hostage to fortune by announcing the transfer window winners, it’s only right and proper to repeat that by pointing and laughing at the ‘losers’ before they go on and enjoy enormously successful seasons at the far more trivial business of actual football.

You can read all about the winners here if you’re interested in that sort of thing and the full exhaustive club-by-club list of Premier League transfers this summer is here too.

If, like us, you’re far more in your element foretelling misery and despair than happiness and rainbows, then you’re in the right place…

Aston Villa

The problem for any club that gatecrashes the elite is that the efforts of a few years can all so quickly fall apart in a few weeks of poor decisions and mild panic.

Even when that club is one of the size of Aston Villa. The last few years under Unai Emery have produced rapid and exciting progress, but also delivered that progress in a way that – on the field at least – has felt incredibly and now worryingly perhaps deceptively sustainable.

Good players working hard for an excellent manager with a clear plan shouldn’t be revelatory but it has been for Villa.

Until now. This feels like a summer that has seen the sands shift beneath Villa’s feet. Even those members of the old Big Six who’ve had questionable summers have had demonstrably better ones than Villa, whose deadline day panic buying spree is all the worse in many ways for feeling so much like a planned deadline day panic buying spree.

They simply had no choice but to wait and see what was left on the shelf when everyone else had finished.

It was, inevitably, a mixed bag. We’re genuinely interested to see just what Harvey Elliott can achieve now he’s got the chance to play club football with the kind of responsibility that brought the best out of him for England’s Under-21 side but we’re no longer remotely as sure as we would have been a year – or even six months ago – that Villa represent the right environment for that to happen.

What little else they’ve managed to achieve is either underwhelming at best or just so absurdly on brand it feels like a joke. If you’re a club with an infamously unsustainable wage bill you simply cannot go around on deadline day signing Jadon Sancho on loan and expect to be taken seriously.

And on top of the uninspiring ins comes the failure to get Emi Martinez out the door. A club in Villa’s financial position simply cannot afford to have a player like that hanging around on the outside p*ssing into the tent before we even consider the potential impact on such vagaries as team spirit and morale.

Not for the first time a Premier League club finds itself in the position of hoping a Turkish team might come along and solve their problems.

Emi Martinez

Villa’s d*ckhead is now just a d*ckhead.

Newcastle

It’s not quite been as gloomy as it might have been on the incomings, in the end, and had Newcastle managed to get the £30m fee that was being thrown around as possible for William Osula on deadline day then it might even have been possible to argue Newcastle had actually ended up with an okay transfer window. As long as you kind of ignored the acrimony and order of how things all panned out.

But really it’s been a summer that has served as a gloomy reminder for Newcastle that even Champions League football doesn’t give them enough pull to consistently beat even the smallest or stupidest members of the Big Six on transfer matters and that stings.

Time and again this summer Newcastle have been beaten to key targets by clubs they consider direct rivals, while another was able to eventually bully them into selling their prized asset, one they had spent all summer briefing to anyone who’d listen would not be sold.

Newcastle fans are entitled to feel hurt at the way Alexander Isak went about getting his move, but no more so than Brentford fans are about the way Yoane Wissa went about getting his.

And there will be less sympathy from the wider football community for the real reason this summer of regression feels so pointedly painful at Newcastle; that they believed so certainly when selling the very soul of the club to Saudi Arabia they were leaving all this kind of frustration behind.

Leeds

Spent the first half of the summer signing a load of big lads for the defence and midfield and that’s fine, but then spent the second half of the summer very much not signing any of the attacking players Leeds so desperately need.

We like Dominic Calvert-Lewin a great deal, but if you’re a Premier League club signing him to solve your dismal lack of goalpower in big 2025 then you are profoundly unserious.

Daniel Farke and his squad and the fans have been let down by owners who promised the earth and have failed to deliver the surely attainable tools that Leeds needed to launch a viable survival bid in a Premier League that suddenly looks distinctly survivable.

Leeds have already shown plenty in the win over Everton and goalless draw with Newcastle that they can go toe-to-toe with established Premier League sides – even if the hammering at Arsenal shows they’re way short against the very best. But they have also scored one goal – a penalty – in three games and barely looked like scoring at all in those last two.

Leeds are not your regular promoted club and while nobody expects them to be competing for top talent with the Big Six/Seven/Eight the fact the’ve entered September appearing to have been outmanoeuvred by the other promoted clubs feels like an enormously avoidable error.

The late collapse of an attempted deal for Harry Wilson is unfortunate, but also precisely the kind of misfortune you risk falling victim to when you leave something that has been in obvious need of attention all summer until the very last minute.

Crystal Palace

Just not in any way the summer Palace would have planned and hoped for when lifting the FA Cup at the start of it.

A Europa League place became a Europa Conference League place with an underwhelming slate of incomings coming nowhere near covering for the predictable, understandable and long-feared departure of Eberechi Eze for Arsenal.

Palace were at least able to pull the plug on Marc Guehi’s move to Liverpool when their own hunt for a replacement turned up nothing suitable after a move for Igor collapsed. And there’s little doubt that Palace are stronger with Guehi than they would have been with Igor or anyone else they’d managed to land at such short notice.

Guehi has also been a complete pro throughout a protracted transfer saga, playing a full – and spectacular goalscoring – part for Palace throughout. There will be disappointment there for sure, but no need for awkward and potentially destabilising reintegration of a player who had shown his hand.

But when the big positive of your transfer window is that you’ve had to deny one of your best players a move they clearly wanted because everything else fell through at your end, then you’ve not come out of it looking great.

The biggest fear for Palace now may be what happens if and when (far more likely the latter) some bigger club or other comes sniffing around the elite manager who has taken Palace further than any manager before yet not been given anything like the help he needs to go further still.

Marc Guehi

Absolutely shouldn’t feel too gloomy when the initial pangs of regret fade. He’s still in the final year of his contract, he will have far greater control over his future in January and then total control of it next summer.

He has burned no bridges at Selhurst Park and is still odds-on to end the season as England’s starting centre-back. There are worse ways that things can go wrong.

Still, though. It’s just got to sting, hasn’t it? To have a move to the reigning champions and favourites to win it again this season agreed to the point of passing a medical only for it all to be snatched away at the last moment?

Brentford

Let’s start with the positives. Getting Caoimhin Kelleher was smart business, wasn’t it? The best number two in the Premier League now gets the chance to establish himself as a number one. He’s likely to be busy.

Beyond that, though, this must go down as one of the most brutal ‘know your place’ summers any member of the ‘Other 14’ has suffered. Losing Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa, two players who truly did light up last season, is horrible even without coming on the back of losing the inspirational manager who might just have been the one man making all of what’s happened to Brentford in recent years possible anyway.

It’s the combination that makes you fear so keenly for Brentford. To have the guts of the team ripped out might have been survivable had Thomas Frank still been the manager. But he isn’t, and it really might not be something Brentford can get through with a rookie manager trying to navigate a situation that would test a seasoned firefighter to the very limits.

Bournemouth

We’re already seeing the difference it can make if your team gets picked off by the bigger boys but the manager remains with the example of Bournemouth.

It is frankly absurd that you can lose almost your entire (excellent) defence at a club like Bournemouth and then produce the sort of performance the Cherries turned in at Tottenham at the weekend, when the hosts had simply no answer and created literally nothing against a team that could easily be forgiven for still licking their many wounds.

Andoni Iraola is probably a genius. That’s the good news for Bournemouth. The bad news is that after the loss of Milos Kerkez and Ilya Zabarnyi and Dean Huijsen he pretty much has to be.

Wolves

Really is mad to think of the giddy optimism of that springtime run of six straight wins that lifted Wolves once and for all out of relegation bother. It’s only five months ago, but the mood now is wildly different.

The loss of Matheus Cunha and Rayan Ait-Nouri to Manchester was always going to be tough to ride out, but there just hasn’t been anything like enough subsequent movement the other way to feel like Wolves have a chance.

We’ve been here before. This is a club that is no stranger to disastrous starts and swift course corrections through the second half of the season.

But this particular disastrous start is already feeling like something more for a club that has performed the troubling trick of emerging from the summer having spent more than they’ve recouped yet with a weaker team and squad to show for it.

West Ham

We really do struggle to think of another example of a side spending so much money and having so little to actually show for it. Spending over £70m on Jean-Clair Todibo and Mateus Fernandes is wild behaviour, and only in part countered by getting as much as they did for Mohammed Kudus, a man who had clearly grown disillusioned with life as a Hammer and didn’t really fit with Graham Potter’s plans anyway.

Perhaps our favourite bit about West Ham’s summer business, most of which looks so very, very daft on paper, is that in Callum Wilson and Kyle Walker-Peters they might just have picked up two of the canniest free transfers of anyone along the way.

Luke Edwards

Oh, mate. Look, even Mediawatch at its cynical, snarky, sarcastic worst will always acknowledge that reporting transfer news is hard. Things change all the time. What’s correct one day can be completely and entirely wrong the next.

It’s the nature of the beast. Absolutely nobody – at least nobody acting in any kind of good faith – expects any football journalist to have a 100 per cent accuracy rate on transfers. Nobody really cares or will remember the times you get it ‘wrong’.

Unless, of course, you make the insistence that one particular transfer cannot possibly happen your entire personality, for an entire summer, and then when that transfer duly does happen write a long ‘I’m not owned’ post about how you were right actually and that spending your summer arguing about it in a weirdly confrontational manner with randoms on twitter rather than spending time with your family is something to be proud of.

But beyond the silliness of it all, there is a serious point here. Edwards’ big error, apart from becoming just way more invested in a specific transfer saga than can ever be healthy for anyone, was in fundamentally misunderstanding the journalist’s role. He said ‘I only reported what I was told’ as a boast, when it is in fact a startling admission.

When everyone else tells you it will almost certainly rain but Saudi Arabia tell you it definitely won’t, it’s your job to call everyone on Twitter carrying an umbrella a simpleton.

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