Man United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Spurs stars among top 10 Like A New Signing contenders for 26/27 | OneFootball

Summer is a time for transfers. For new signings to fill you with almost certainly misplaced hope for the future.

But you know what’s even more beguiling, even more cruelly deceptive than the hope generated by a new signing? The hope generated by a like a new signing. That’s the real endorphin spiker.

There’s a glorious sense of somehow beating the system with the idea that a solution to the holes in your squad might be found down the back of a metaphorical sofa in the form of a player unexpectedly reintegrated after a loan move away fails to turn permanent, or more commonly a player coming to the end of what can only be described as an Injury Nightmare.

Does it work? No it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might… but it might work for these lads.

10) Fabio Carvalho (Brentford)

He won’t be the last ACL victim to pop up on this list. The former Liverpool winger has been out of action since his injury last November and had made only six Premier League appearances before that blow.

But he’s back in action now having returned in a behind-closed-doors friendly against Swansea’s Under-21s for Brentford’s B team, which tickled us because it is Bees B and we are but a simple and easily amused creature.

9) Giovanni Leoni (Liverpool)

Liverpool’s season really could rest pretty significantly on what happens at centre-back. Ibrahima Konate is gone, new signing Jeremy Jacquet is still recovering from injury, Ifeanyi Ndukwe looks a huge talent but cannot get a work permit so will by necessity be off on loan, and Ronald Araujo has been – somewhat desperately – drafted in on loan from Barcelona.

And then there’s Leoni. Signed last summer and earmarked as Virgil van Dijk’s long-term replacement he suffered a season-ending knee injury on his debut in the Carabao Cup.

He’s now back in solo training and spoke recently about at last being able to see ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ as he and Liverpool tentatively pencil in a September return to action, exactly a year after a promising debut suffered such a harrowing end.

8) Stefanos Tzimas (Brighton)

There are two contributing factors to a Like A New Signing tale. The first, obviously, involves the player returning from a period of absence. Injury, loan, whatever. It doesn’t matter what, just that they’ve not been playing for the club for an extended period of time.

That is obviously the main one. A proper Like A New Signing scenario can easily emerge from that alone.

But it also helps if the wider context and circumstances of the club feed in to the need for that unique cheat-code buzz that finding a solution to a problem from an unexpected or forgotten source already available to you can be. And that’s Stefanos Tzimas’ situation at a post-Welbeck Brighton.

He had the cruellest start to his Brighton career after a £21m move from Germany last summer, slowly showing his worth and getting fans increasingly excited with a series of increasingly eye-catching cameos from the bench, getting his first Premier League goal, and then doing his ACL on his very first Premier League start. Brutal.

But he’s now back in training for Brighton and could have a huge role to play in filling the goals – and vibes – void left by Danny Welbeck’s move to Chelsea.

7) Levi Colwill (Chelsea)

There were many reasons Chelsea’s season turned to cack in the second half of 25/26 and a great deal of them can be summed up by the words ‘Liam’ and ‘Rosenior’ and ‘LinkedIn bumgravy’.

But the absolute disgrace that was Chelsea’s defence was certainly not entirely the fault of football’s pre-eminent ager of men.

As well as getting slapped silly by PSG in the Champions League knockouts, Chelsea went through a bizarre little phase where they just seemed to concede three goals in every Premier League game they played regardless of opposition. Shipping three to Man City? Fair enough, that can happen to anyone. But Everton? That’s a cry for help. Clubs only concede three to Everton when they are very sick.

Levi Colwill isn’t the most high-profile superstar on Chelsea’s books, but we do feel certain their season would have looked very different had he not spent almost all of it injured, only returning in the very late stages of the season to offer glimpses of what had been missed. That is, a central defender who isn’t a gigantic liability.

Interesting times indeed at Chelsea, as an aside. They’ve got a new manager, which is nothing new, but they’ve bucked recent trends by appointing a really good one. And as well as a lot of actual new signings there’s a fairly strong contingent of Like A New Signing possibilities.

Point of order here, while we’re at it. The lifting of Mykhailo Mudryk’s drug ban makes him Like A New Saleable Asset, not Like A New Signing.

6) Matthijs de Ligt (Manchester United)

An interesting one. De Ligt was ever-present for Man United across the first 13 games of last season before a back problem proved increasingly troublesome and kept him out of the rest of the season before eventually requiring surgery in May.

That might not normally be enough to qualify for Like A New Signing status, but when combined with just how much has changed at United since he was last involved it starts to stack up. He last played for United under Ruben Amorim’s stubborn and grumpy gaze, which already somehow feels like a lifetime ago.

He’s now back in training and was an eye-catching member of those involved in sessions in Ireland this week.

The precise timeline for his return remains uncertain, which also for now means he can only go down as Like A New Signing because it’s unlikely he can prove his fitness in time to become a chip United might be able to cash.

5) Dejan Kulusevski (Tottenham)

Tottenham’s most plausible Like A New Signing has always been James Maddison, who missed almost the whole of last season with an ACL injury, returning in those desperate last weeks of the season when clearly nowhere near fit enough to do so because Spurs were at that time a club more in need of Like A New Signing energy than just about any other club has ever been or ever will be.

But he’s now injured again. Other contenders remain likewise sidelined by the one thing not even Roberto De Zerbi’s manic energy can cure: the Tottenham injury curse. Your Mohammed Kuduses, the Xavi Simonses of this world.

So let’s instead pretend that Dejan Kulusevski still exists. Imagine that. What a twist that would be. There have been sketchy reports that the Swede is back in training of some sort, a mere 15 months after picking up a ‘knock’ against Crystal Palace left him an injury doubt for the 2025 Europa League final.

A return for Kulusevski any time soon would certainly alleviate the mounting pressure on Spurs to attempt to fix their popgun attack in something like the manner in which they’ve already addressed a defence made of string and a midfield formed of Swiss cheese this summer. And De Zerbi has sounded at least slightly optimistic about the idea.

“Kulusevski fit and right, he’s one of the best players we have in the squad,” he said during his side’s recent pre-season tour Down Under. “I wouldn’t like to put too much pressure on him or accelerate the rehabilitation process, but I hope he can be available as early as possible.”

Actual prediction: Xavi Simons plays for Spurs again before Kulusevski does.

4) Cheick Doucoure (Crystal Palace)

You can’t get much more Like A New Signing than this. We’ll be honest and admit we’d completely forgotten Palace’s 2022/23 player of the year was even still there until we saw his name pop up on a couple of pre-season team sheets this summer.

It’s been a brutal three years for Doucoure, who was being pursued by Liverpool when his stock was at its summer 2023 high but has barely played a game in the last two-and-a-half injury-wrecked years. Having to watch the most successful period in Palace’s history almost entirely from the sidelines must have been bittersweet indeed for the midfielder.

A series of injuries including a horrible Achilles tear and a meniscus problem with his knee have seen Doucoure limited to just 13 Premier League appearances totalling less than 500 minutes since November 2023.

But the tentative signs from pre-season are that the Mali international is back in meaningful contention to offer a timely injection of LANS energy for new boss Pierre Sage.

3) Nicolas Jackson (Chelsea)

Of course, to become Like A New Signing, Jackson must first ensure he Remains A Current Signing at Chelsea. If he goes to Spurs or Villa then he’ll just be an actual new signing, that’s literally how this works.

But at Chelsea he could certainly qualify. Paul Merson can be a guff-merchant but he’s a big fan of Jackson and has frequently spoken pretty convincingly about the ‘Palmer Connection’ and how both Jackson and Cole Palmer improve for the presence of the other. Last season certainly bore that out, with Palmer looking lost for much of the campaign and eventually missing out on the World Cup.

Jackson became something close to a joke figure during his time at Chelsea but there is very obviously a player there. Chelsea’s latest manager Xabi Alonso has been, at the very, very least, willing to give Jackson pre-season minutes and he has looked sharp in the kind of knockabouts that of course only matter when Arsenal are losing them.

Chelsea have at least one striker too many on the books but the best, albeit difficult, remedy there is surely to find someone else foolish enough to confuse Liam Delap for a footballer.

2) Alexander Isak (Liverpool)

Given it was all anyone talked about last season, it’s still remarkably easy to just kind of forget Alexander Isak is a Liverpool player after his first season at Anfield was bedevilled by poor form and persistent injuries.

He just doesn’t feel like a Liverpool player. Not yet. Even when you see him playing for actual Liverpool in actual matches it still just looks like he’s been AI’d into the kit for some scurrilous transfer gossip-mongering rather than being an actual for-real Liverpool player.

But that could all change very quickly indeed.

Ideally, a true Like A New Signing should have been at the club longer than a year. At that stage a player is technically still very much within the New Signing Adapting To Surroundings Before Exploding window. That is very much, for instance, where we see Florian Wirtz.

But there are subtleties and exceptions. While Wirtz definitely doesn’t meet LANS qualification criteria and absolutely feels like a NSATSBE contender, Isak feels different despite joining Liverpool after the German.

The key point with Isak being that he should have required little to no adaptation period. Part of the reason Liverpool hurled the very biggest of bucks in a reluctant Newcastle’s direction last summer was the fact here was the most Prem-proven striker available who wasn’t an unobtainable Viking robot programmed to generate goals and memes in equally vast numbers at all times.

But Isak last season was pretty much permanently one or both of two things: injured and pish.

Andoni Iraola has already made some grumblings about the general fitness state of his new charges during pre-season in what can only be interpreted as a dig at Arne Slot’s methods.

Isak won’t be the only Liverpool player to welcome the change in the manager’s seat at Anfield this season, but he might well prove the most significant. Anything remotely like a return to Newcastle Isak will make him stand out in a league that remains conspicuously short on elite strikers.

1) Marcus Rashford (Manchester United)

The ultimate Like A New Signing if, as looks increasingly likely, the club’s biggest earner does end up grudgingly reintegrated at Old Trafford. There really is no proper reason for that not to happen and hasn’t been for a while. Seems a bit daft really how long it’s taken for everyone involved to realise they should give it another go and get back together. You know, for the kids.

Rashford had to leave when he went off on his loans, first to Villa and then to Barcelona, because at the time Ruben Amorim was Man United manager and being weird about certain players. Rashford was front and centre of that.

Amorim is long gone, replaced by Rashford’s former team-mate Michael Carrick who obviously knows him well and is less likely to cast him out in the cold.

It was understandable that Rashford still fancied sticking with his new life in Barcelona, but once it became clear that wasn’t really an option, the best remaining one has always felt like giving Man United another crack now so much has changed since he was forced out in the first place.

And here he now is, back in the ranks with a squad number and everything. Not the one he had before all the unpleasantness but even that’s probably for the best. A reminder that this is indeed a fresh start, a new beginning for United’s No. 14.