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Ryan O’Hanlon
I say this at the same time every year, but we always seem to forget it: Most January transfers don’t matter.
There has rarely been a signing across the Big Five leagues that genuinely made a difference for an eventual title-winning team. More specifically, via analysis from the consultancy Twenty First Group: „Net transfer spend in January has just a 5% positive correlation with change in points per game, and that €20 million in net spending has delivered on average just a 0.03 increase in points per game in the big five leagues since 2015.“
Of course, this doesn’t mean January transfers can’t make a difference — especially with the current bunched-up state of the Premier League. Over half a season, those 0.03 points per game add up to just over half a point, but that could be the difference between winning the title vs. coming in second or nabbing a Champions League place vs. spending your Thursdays traveling to Helsinki for Europa League matches.
With 20 games remaining, the gap between first and third is just three points, while the gap between fifth and 17th is just 11 points. Theoretically, everyone from Chelsea to Nottingham Forest could qualify for the Champions League next year. (Projections from Opta’s Nils Mackay give the Premier League a 98.2% chance of earning a bonus Champions League place again this season.) But by probabilities, the list is smaller than that.
Simon Tinsley’s projections give eight teams a 10% or better chance at qualifying for the Champions League, while the title race splits to 69% for Arsenal, 30% for Manchester City, and around 1% each for Aston Villa and, somehow, Liverpool.
So, today, we’re going to pick out the most urgent transfer needs for all eight of those teams and then rank them in order of how urgent they actually are.
– Darke’s Premier League Best XI: Rice, Szoboszlai, Haaland
– Which of these midfield transfer targets fit at Man United?
– Who should Arsenal and Man City worry about? Aston Villa
8. Newcastle United: someone who can turn possession into shots
Yes, we’re starting with the team that’s 13th in the table. Brighton & Hove Albion, Everton, Fulham, Brentford and Sunderland fans: You have a right to be angry that your team isn’t on this list. There’s a good chance at least one of you five is challenging for a Champions League place by the end of the season; there’s just not a good chance that it’s you, in particular.
And so, if you want, you can say that No. 9 on this list should be „The Rest: Brighton, Everton, Fulham, Brentford, Sunderland, and even Tottenham,“ but all of their individual chances of finishing top-five are quite slim … so no, these teams need to go fishing in the expensive waters of the January transfer window.
However, Newcastle have the seventh-best expected goal differential in the league. And by adjusted goal differential — 70% goals, 30% expected goals — they’re also seventh. Throw in that they were excellent last season and have been pretty good in the Champions League so far this season, and projection systems are always going to be higher on this team than their place in the table suggests.
At the same time, their place in the table really diminishes the urgency of the January window for Eddie Howe’s team. Tinsley’s model gives them a 13% chance of finishing in the top five. If they were going to make a move, they should try to find someone who can take their quality passing and dangerous possession and actually turn it into attempts on goal. Only Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester City have completed more passes into the penalty area than Newcastle, but 10 teams have created more expected goals.
7. Arsenal: another striker
I get that there has been some consternation over Arsenal’s recent results. Since the 3-1 thumping of Bayern Munich, they’ve dropped four points in six matches, failed to beat a Chelsea team that played down a man for the majority of the match, were genuinely outplayed by an Aston Villa side that never outplays anyone — oh, we’ll get to that — and then could only beat Everton, Wolves and Brighton by a single goal each.
But here’s how they rank, purely by expected-goal differential in the Premier League, since that win over Bayern:
The title race is much more in play than it was a couple of months ago, but that’s more down to City going on a run than Arsenal leaking oil. The Gunners are probably the deepest team in the world, and they’re built to win right now. In fact, they made all of their win-now signings over the summer. Viktor Gyökeres would be the clear player to upgrade, but they invested a lot in him (and Kai Havertz and Gabriel Jesus), so I’m not sure it makes a ton of sense to sign up for another lottery ticket at striker.
For better or worse, this is Arsenal’s team. They’re probably the best team in the world, and they’re definitely good enough to win the title — but that doesn’t mean they will.
1:30
Will Arsenal overcome their ‘blip’ in the title race?
Shaka Hislop explains why Arsenal could still win the Premier League despite going through a ‘blip’ in the title race.
This team has 11 players who’ve started at least 12 Premier League matches, and then nobody else is north of seven. Oliver Glasner has ridden his 11 starters about as hard as you can, and I’m just not sure that’s sustainable. Recent results certainly suggest as much. But on the whole, this team really has been fantastic this season, and the bounce of the ball is the main reason they’re not higher in the table.
It’s just that Palace are also playing in the UEFA Europa Conference League this season, and they haven’t played in Europe since 1998. This isn’t a squad built to compete domestically and abroad. We saw it in how they approached the summer; they replaced Eberechi Eze with Yéremy Pino, and signed 19-year-old center back Jaydee Canvot, presumably, to prepare for Marc Guéhi’s expected departure this upcoming summer, but that’s it.
They didn’t add depth, and while Glasner has rotated in the Conference League, he plays the same 11 guys in the Premier League every week — unless injuries force his hand, which has happened over the past few weeks.
Weirdly, it’s a good problem to have. Palace could sign a competent player — or players — at any position other than goalkeeper, and it would immediately make the team better.
I’m less convinced that signing a new center back will solve any immediate problems for Liverpool. They were hours away from signing Guéhi over the summer, and that was before Ibrahima Konaté developed a chronic case of brain flatulence and Giovanni Leoni tore an ACL while running out of bounds.
If Konaté or Virgil van Dijk gets hurt, then it seems like the plan is to either hope that Joe Gomez is healthy and able to play center back again or hope that Ryan Gravenberch or Wataru Endo can hold down the fort for a significant period of time.
That doesn’t seem like a great plan!
But, as we saw over the summer, even signing players that pretty much everyone likes doesn’t guarantee success. At the very least, there’s something logically incoherent in seeing Liverpool’s season fall apart as they try to integrate six new signings and then thinking that the solution is … even more signings.
So, if Liverpool were to sign a defender, I think it would likely be as depth or as a long-term replacement for Konaté rather than as an immediate upgrade. They’re out of the title race, they have an outside shot at winning the Champions League, and Tinsley’s projections give them an 85% chance of finishing top-five.
Liverpool tried to thread the needle between winning now and building for the future, and their struggles this season have pushed them toward the latter. The January window isn’t quite as urgent as it seems.
4. Chelsea: another midfielder
I have a hard time advocating for Chelsea to sign anyone because they’ve already signed everyone. But they’re currently about a coin flip for finishing in the top five, which is a problem for a team that has pushed the Premier League’s spending rules right up to their breaking point.
They need Champions League revenue to continue with this model of turning a soccer club into an always-churning talent portfolio.
Reece James has suddenly given them elite midfield depth; he’s genuinely one of the best midfielders and fullbacks in the Premier League, and both at the same time. But also: He’s Reece James, the guy who has played 2,000 first-division minutes just once in his career. And Chelsea, on the whole, has played poorly when he has been on the field this season.
Chelsea can still get by with Moisés Caicedo and Enzo Fernández playing behind Cole Palmer in the midfield, but that’s a vulnerable setup, especially with no depth behind it and plenty more Champions League matches still to come. Maybe Andrey Santos or Romeo Lavia can perform at a high enough level if they have to, but I suspect that already would’ve happened were it true.
One area they can stand to upgrade is at center forward. Liam Delap has really struggled whenever he plays, and João Pedro still doesn’t take shots. Both players were signed over the summer, but if there’s any club that’s going to move on from someone after just a few months, it’s the one owned by BlueCo.
0:47
Maresca: Chelsea need to improve reaction to conceding goals
Enzo Maresca reacts to Chelsea’s 2-1 loss to Aston Villa in the Premier League.
3. Manchester City: someone who can provide control
Here’s an image:
One important piece of context for this image is that it’s not minutes adjusted or whittled down to any kind of per-game number. No, Manchester City have created more xG from counterattacks from the first 18 games of this season than they have in any of the 38 games of the previous eight seasons.
This is why Pep Guardiola might be the best ever.
Last season, City’s slow-paced approach finally fell apart. Now, they’re the best counterattacking team in England, and they’re back to challenging for Premier and Champions League titles.
But it still doesn’t really make sense. Rodri has still barely played, and while his replacement, Nico González, can keep the ball, he isn’t close to the defensive presence that the 2024 Ballon d’Or winner is when healthy. Their forward line is Erling Haaland, who barely touches the ball, and then two high-risk winners in Rayan Cherki and Jérémy Doku.
In front of González, in the midfield, are both Phil Foden and Bernardo Silva — two tiny attacker-midfielder hybrids. And City’s two new fullbacks, Nico O’Reilly and Matheus Nunes, are big, ball-carrying types rather than possession players.
They’ve mostly flourished amid the chaos, but even though they won those back-to-back matches against Real Madrid and Crystal Palace a few weeks ago, they looked incredibly vulnerable for long stretches of both games.
It used to be that City had way too many safe possession players who could slow the game down or break up transitions, but right now, they might not have quite enough.
Gradient Sports developed a catch-all metric to measure what they call „athleticism.“ It uses tracking data to monitor a player’s various physical metrics across the entire game. The number is then adjusted based on whether these were starter or sub minutes, what position the player played, and how tall the player is.
It’s meant to capture a combination of stamina and explosiveness, and it’s presented as a 0-100 percentile score. Basically, who can run consistently throughout the game while also constantly changing speeds and sprinting fast?
Among players who’ve made at least 10 midfield appearances this season, the top three are: Bournemouth’s Alex Scott (98.3), Bournemouth’s Tyler Adams (98.1), and Liverpool’s Curtis Jones (97.1).
No other midfielders are above the 95th percentile — especially not any of Manchester United’s midfielders. Manuel Ugarte (37.9), Kobbie Mainoo (32.7), Bruno Fernandes (21.5), and Casemiro (4.9) all rate as well below average by Gradient’s definition of athleticism.
For a team that only plays with two midfielders and theoretically requires more physical output from those players, that’s a big problem. And really, it’s a problem United have been trying to solve for nearly a decade. However, if they do solve it, they could easily be back in the Champions League next season.
And, real quick, while we’re here: James Milner is 39 years old, and he’s still popping up in Gradient’s model with 83rd-percentile athleticism.
1. Aston Villa: attackers, midfielders, defenders
I love doing these little blind-résumé team comparisons, so here’s another one:
Team A is currently on an eight-game win streak, is three points back of first, and has already beaten the teams in both first and second
Team B has attempted 208 shots (13th-most in the league), has conceded 231 shots (eighth-most in the league), has created 19.8 xG (15th-most in the league), and has conceded 25.5 xG (ninth-most in the league)
Team A, of course, is Aston Villa. Team B, however, is … also Aston Villa. And so, we have a team that’s allowing more shots than it attempts, conceding better opportunities to their opponents than they create for themselves, and still winning every game they play.
It’s an amazing run, but c’mon: This isn’t sustainable.
0:51
Is Unai Emery the Premier League manager of the season?
Janusz Michallik explains why he believes Unai Emery is already the Premier league manager of the season after Aston Villa’s eleventh win in a row vs. Chelsea.
We’d all agree that Leicester City are the most unlikely champions in modern Premier League history, right? And even they outshot their opponents across the 2015-16 season. Their expected-goal differential was plus-0.6 per game; Villa’s, currently, is minus-0.32.
Over the course of this season, this Villa team hasn’t been effective in either attacking or defending. Emiliano Martínez has made numerous big saves, and then Morgan Rogers, Emiliano Buendía, Matty Cash and Amadou Onana converted their combined 4.5 expected goals into 16 actual goals. That’s just not a recipe for winning the league — especially with both Arsenal and Manchester City playing at a much higher level than anyone else did during that 2015-16 season.
And yet, Villa have already banked a ton of points. I expected them to challenge for a top-four spot coming into this season, so I’m also not willing to say that they’re going to suddenly fall off a cliff and play at the bottom-half of the table that their expected goals numbers suggest for the rest of the year.
Their finances are tight, but Villa have so many different paths to improving the roster. They’re one of the favorites to finish in the Champions League places despite an attack, a midfield and a defense that haven’t played at a Champions League-quality level at any point this season. That means that they’re likely to regress real soon, but it also means there are plenty of players out there who could make this team better.
