Ranking the 20 biggest PL summer transfers: Sesko above Gyokeres; Wirtz fifth | OneFootball

It’s a little over a month since our last ranking of the 20 most expensive summer signings but February has seen quite the swing in form for big-name Premier League strikers. Viktor Gyokeres, Benjamin Sesko and Joao Pedro are all big movers, as is Nick Woltemade…

Here’s where the players ranked three games into the Premier League season and after nine, then 15 and 22, with their previous positions included in brackets.

20) Alexander Isak (n/a, 19, 19, 20)

The latest reports suggest he could be back by the end of March and we miss him. We admit to being actually quite pleased Isak was having a mare at Liverpool after his summer shenanigans but there’s no joy to be had from him being out injured.

Any hope that the floodgates might open after his first Premier League goal against West Ham – a fine finish it was too – faded dramatically with arguably even worse performances to strengthen claims that Isak might just be the biggest flop in Premier League history before a second goal came with an ankle injury that’s kept him out for the whole of 2026 so far.

Here’s to his speedy recovery as a) injuries are sh*t and b) watching Isak play football is now brilliant no matter how he performs. Back to his best? Great, he’s a wonderful striker. Still terrible? Flopping excellent.

19) Anthony Elanga (11, 17, 18, 19)

We all nodded in agreement with Dave Tickner’s sage assertion that while Elanga might not be worth £55m to any other team, he was to Newcastle because of their excellence in transition on the counter-attack, but are now very much distancing ourselves from that fool of a journalist/man.

He spent much of the first half of the season watching Jacob Murphy or a left winger playing in his position on the right and more recent faith shown in him by Eddie Howe has yielded no tangible results. One goal and two assists in 1600 minutes of football is a shocking return from a winger in a Champions League team.

18) Yoane Wissa (n/a, 18)

A more than cheeky £30m offer from Fenerbahce for Wissa, six months after his protracted £55m transfer from Brentford and just 477 minutes into his Newcastle career, gives a pretty clear indication as to how they view his time thus far on Tyneside.

Having missed the first four months of the season either sulking to force the transfer, injured, or both, he’s scored three goals in nearly 800 minutes since returning to action at the start of December – though he was excellent v PSV – and has been used sparingly by Howe even with Woltemade dropping into a No.10 position as Anthony Gordon has been preferred and impressed as the central striker.

He’s currently flop adjacent; full status is in the post.

17) Jamie Gittens (12, 16, 15, 15)

He’s done some good things – a stunner against Wolves in the League Cup, a nice assist in defeat at Leeds – but still feels nailed on to be the next young forward to drown in the stagnant pool of attacking talent that Stamford Bridge has become in the BlueCo era and can’t take much heart from being below Alejandro Garnacho at the bottom of a winger pecking order which has recently been stretched by Cole Palmer moving back to the right to accommodate Enzo Fernandez at No.10.

Gittens has not started a Premier League game since the start of December as niggling injuries have contributed to a wholly predictable flat first season at Stamford Bridge.

16) Xavi Simons (n/a, 13, 9, 13)

Clearly a hugely talented footballer and the obvious suggestion is that he would have done rather better under a different, less conservative, more forward-thinking manager than Thomas Frank. The question also has to be asked as to which attacking player could have made a tangible difference in a Tottenham team this bad.

Dejan Kulusevski, for one, and the concern for Tottenham fans will be that the football happens all-too frequently around rather than through Simons; we could list a dozen high-profile playmakers who have arrived in the Premier League and left soon after for whom that was the case.

15) Alejandro Garnacho (n/a, 14, 13, 12)

There remains a huge demand for Garnacho content, chiefly on the basis of his performances providing opportunities to either rub his talent in the faces of Manchester United fans or grant them space to gloat at him failing to realise it. Some outlets can’t help themselves even when he’s not playing.

There’s been more of the latter than the former, but in truth his displays for Chelsea have in the main not merited any opinions of either extreme. He’s been fine.

The problem for Garnacho is that fine isn’t and will never be good enough for Chelsea and we’ve seen very little to suggest that he will ever reach his actual potential, let alone the absurdly overinflated one built on the back of him playing quite a bit for Manchester United as a teenager.

14) Tijjani Reijnders (6, 9, 11, 11)

A wonderful performance against Wolves has since been put into perspective as City’s opening-day opponents still require points to avoid the status as the worst-ever Premier League team.

That display was followed by a string of nothing outings from Reijnders, who’s shown mere glimpses of quality since while large periods of games go by in which you forget he’s playing, which is quite the feat for a midfielder in a Pep Guardiola team. His only two starts in the last seven games came in the domestic cups.

13) Milos Kerkez (10, 18, 16, 14)

For the first few weeks of the campaign he was playing as though he was constantly trying to make up for mistakes he hadn’t made yet but then duly did make in desperation to impress. He didn’t know where to be or what to do so tried to be everywhere doing everything, and was therefore usually nowhere, doing nothing.

Arne Slot’s move to a style of football some would call functional and others would see as the most turgid sh*te they’ve witnessed at Anfield for many a moon has minimised the mistakes – from Kerkez and any of the other culprits.

But although we’ve seen a bit of an upswing from Kerkez in attack – his attacking intent, at least – Liverpool would have expected more than a goal and two assists from a left-back signed largely on the basis of his raiding quality on the wing.

12) Noni Madueke (7, 10, 5, 9)

We may never have been more invested in an Arsenal signing doing well after the #NOTOMADUEKE petition but have also struggled with the thought of those unthinkable tw*ts lacking any sort of human decency being allowed to enjoy the football he’s playing.

Here’s hoping they hung their heads in shame as his piledriver against Club Brugge cannoned in off the underside of the crossbar in recognition that they are wholly underserving of nice things.

But Madueke will only ever be one performance lacking end product away from being lambasted on social media by those purporting to be Gooners and as a mercurial winger that looks set to be a common occurrence.

11) Nick Woltemade (n/a, 2, 3, 6)

We will forever have a soft spot for footballers who don’t look as though they should be good at football. Combine that with him being the cause of great mirth for naysayers in the summer having joined for a fee way above his market value as Newcastle’s fourth or fifth-choice striker and him having to replace £125m defector Isak and we were tucking into veritable jambalaya of joy at seeing Woltemade’s early goalscoring form at St James’ Park.

But the downturn has been considerable. He’s scored just three goal in his last 18 appearances and initial claims that he might just be the ideal striker for Newcastle as he drops deep to allow Anthony Gordon and other flying wingers to run in behind him turned into suggestions he was the worst possible foil for them as he didn’t then have the pace to get into the box to meet their crosses.

Howe has since moved Woltemade deeper to accommodate a No.9 who can move at more than trotting speed.

Wayne Rooney isn’t at all happy with what he’s seeing from Woltemade in that role and amid (presumably spurious) claims that Newcastle could cut their losses on their record signing at the end of the season you’ve got to wonder if Bruno Guimaraes’ return from injury towards the end of the season will see Woltemade jettisoned to the bench.

10) Eberechi Eze (n/a, 5, 6, 10)

His first Arsenal goal being the winner against his former club and his other five in the Premier League coming against the Gunners’ bitter north London rivals whom he was days, perhaps even hours away from joining instead of them suggests a) Eze’s return to his boyhood club was meant to be, b) The Narrative is all powerful, and c) he’s not got close to what Arsenal expected from him in his debut season.

The only Premier League game in the previous 11 he started before the NLD he was hooked at half-time in and his failure to displace an out-of-form Martin Odegaard from the Premier League starting XI and Bukayo Saka being crowbarred into the No.10 role is damning.

9) Viktor Gyokeres (8, 12, 14, 16)

It looked for a long time as though Arsenal would win the Premier League title despite signing the wrong striker in the summer. They were winning while Gyokeres made fruitless runs in behind opposition defences who would inevitably crumble under the pressure of a Declan Rice set piece and walk away with nothing from games Arsenal had neither played well in nor ever looked like they wouldn’t claim three points from.

A Gyokeres nadir against Nottingham Forest coinciding with Kai Havertz’s return to fitness suggested Arsenal may win the Premier League title quite literally without Gyokeres rather than metaphorically so, or at best as a flat-track super sub. Another Havertz injury and draws with Brentford and Wolves granted brief but glorious hints of a bottling, after which a large chunk of the blame would surely be pinned on the flopping striker.

Fistfuls of salt are required given the zenith arrived against Tottenham, but two very Gyokeres goals and the dramatic change from a timid striker to the brutal one who scored a gazzilion goals in Portugal bodes very well in the title run-in.

8) Benjamin Sesko (13, 11, 17, 17)

The abiding memories of Sesko’s contribution to English football for a long time were him stepping up 10th in the penalty shootout defeat to Grimsby Town having put a stoppage-time chance over the bar from roughly four yards out to ensure the game went that far, and getting injured when clean through against Tottenham.

A brace against Burnley to double his United goals tally offered promise that was quickly and fairly comprehensively extinguished when he didn’t make it off the bench in Michael Carrick’s first game in charge against Manchester City, which was also the latest Best Manchester United Performance Since Sir Alex Ferguson.

When Sesko only played a very brief role in the next game to challenge that game’s exalted status, the 3-2 win over Arsenal, it was hard to see how he might force his way into Carrick’s team.

But boy has he been pushing. Talk of space being made for him in the XI which began with his stoppage-time winner over Fulham became a clamour when he scored an even later goal to equalise having come off the bench against West Ham and we’re now experiencing the clamour of all clamours after another winner against Everton.

The combination of the importance of those goals, to win five points in 70-odd minutes of football for United, and the quality of them suggests Carrick has to find a way to get Sesko in the team, and yet there is a perfectly valid ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ rebuttal to be made.

Either way, Sesko looks the real deal.

7) Hugo Ekitike (5, 7, 7, 5)

Started superbly with five goals and an assist in his first seven games to raise questions as to why Liverpool spent £125m on another striker, then endured a barren spell with no goals or assists in 12 games – largely off the bench – while Slot tried and failed to bed in his £125m striker, ahead of five goals in three games upon being reinstated to the starting XI to again raise questions as to why they signed an alternative £125m striker, before two in his last eight has granted space to ponder whether Liverpool might actually need their £125m striker.

No matter how you see or spin Ekitike’s debut season, 15 goals in your first campaign in English football for a generally woeful Liverpool team is very good going. They would have been nowhere without him.

6) Mohammed Kudus (3, 1, 1, 4)

Suspicions that those questioning Kudus’ price tag after a very ordinary output of five goals and three assists last season were missing the obvious ‘but he was playing for West Ham’ caveat have been confirmed through his displays for Spurs this term and their results without him.

He ploughed a lone furrow as Spurs’ only real attacking outlet before his injury. The 1.37 PPG Tottenham have won with Kudus in the team would be enough to see them comfortably mid-table if stretched over their 27 games. The 0.37 PPG without him would see them level on points with Wolves at the bottom of the table.

5) Florian Wirtz (14, 15, 12, 8)

Wirtz has gone from being one of the major problems in a mistake-ridden, brittle Liverpool side to the only solution in an almost entirely toothless one in record time.

Less than four months on from being dropped as one of the major scapegoats after a run of four defeats on the bounce, his absence against Nottingham Forest on Sunday – which Arne Slot is in no position to complain about – saw Liverpool put in an almost laughably turgid display in which they couldn’t keep the ball for more than a few seconds, let alone create any chances. They were essentially playing without a midfield.

It may be more to do with the dramatic slumps from those around him more than his own upturn in form, but it’s becoming increasingly clear – as was predicted at the start of the season – that Wirtz is the player that Slot, or the next Liverpool manager, will need to build the team around next term.

4) Matheus Cunha (5, 8, 10, 3)

We’re tempted to hand him top spot for that falling-over pass to Bryan Mbeumo alone and that moment stands as a perfect example as to why – and we recognise our hypocrisy here – a forward’s worth shouldn’t be boiled down to goals and assists.

That pass doesn’t fit in The Man’s tiny little goal contribution box but will be remembered by United fans and anyone else watching as one of the moments of the season. It was glorious, and although Cunha’s goals and assists for Wolves played a big part in him signing for United, there was always a sense that he was more than a numbers machine.

He has magnetic energy, he’s a vibe train, a footballer who’s already proven beyond doubt that he has the character required to avoid cowing under the pressure at Old Trafford as so many big-money signing have done before him.

3) Bryan Mbeumo (9, 4, 2, 2)

Mbeumo looks to have bucked a very long trend in being a high-quality footballer who arrives at Old Trafford and continues being that very same high-quality footballer. Nine goals and three assists in 22 appearances is a very serviceable return.

We do, though, have some doubts over his use long-term if United want to win games of football through control, as we assume they do and will probably have to if they’re to challenge for titles. As was the case at Brentford, Mbeumo is a menace in transition and on the counter-attack but limited when a game calls for an opposition team to be ground down.

We’re being picky though, finding faults that in truth we don’t really know will be a problem as United are yet to find that control in their football. As it stands, Mbeumo is a perfect Manchester United forward.

2) Joao Pedro (1, 6, 8, 7)

Genuine hope that Chelsea may have found a fully-formed striker to lead their attack after two goals and three assists in his opening four Premier League games faded into suggestions he may actually be better suited behind a central striker and thus find himself out of the team owing to the superior talents of Palmer and Fernandez in that role after just four further goals in his next 17 appearances.

But we’re back believing after seven goals in his last 11 in the Premier League, with five of those plus four assists coming in Liam Rosenior’s six games in charge hinting that this may be the new norm rather than another purple patch for the Brazilian, who also scored an outstanding brace in a must-win game to secure automatic qualification in the Champions League vs Napoli under the new boss.

1) Martin Zubimendi (4, 3, 4, 1)

As suckers for low stress, technically brilliant defensive midfielders we suspect we will be swooning over the Spaniard for a long time yet. While so many others struggle to come to terms with the pace and power of the Premier League, his transition has been seamless.