January transfer window losers: Tottenham, Crystal Palace, Aston Villa, Liverpool, All of us | OneFootball

Another January transfer window been and gone.

And, as happens often enough now that we should really all have worked it out by now, an awful lot of talk and rumours and hints and bids and pleas and swoops amounted to something close to the square root of f*ck all in actual real-life transfers.

Some teams did nothing. Some teams did quite a bit. Most of them have probably got it wrong. Because that’s the general vibe of the January transfer window. Here, then, are this year’s January losers. The winners are here for those of a more optimistic bent.

All of us

Will we ever learn that the January window is just always going to be a massive letdown and not to be trusted? It doesn’t even end in January half the time. An absolute con and it hoodwinked us all, again.

Tottenham

The usual caveats all apply. Yes, January is a difficult window. Yes, signing the wrong players can very often prove a bigger misstep than signing no players.

But there is a basic rule of the January transfer window that should hold true for any club that carries sufficient heft – which Spurs, despite themselves, undoubtedly maintain – to withstand any bothersome wintry interest in their good players until at least the summer. And that rule is that while it might not be possible to end January in a stronger position than you started it, there is no excuse for ending it weaker.

When you lurk precariously on the fringes of a relegation fight, that’s even less forgivable.

It’s not been a complete catastrophe. We know this isn’t universally accepted but we are entirely convinced that effectively trading Brennan Johnson for Conor Gallagher for a net outlay of zero pounds has improved Tottenham’s squad. We’re absolutely certain which one of that pair Palace would rather have at this time, anyway.

Gallagher remains a solution rather than the solution to Tottenham’s long-term lack of dynamism and progressive passing in that midfield, but he still offers them something the other options in there could not and showed as much against Man City.

He’s also an instructive signing because Gallagher comes across very much as a footballer’s footballer. We strongly suspect he is far more highly regarded by those inside the game than fans outside it. And his qualities are of the type that pretty much any manager would want in his squad.

That’s important in Spurs’ case specifically because it feels certain a large part of the reason they’ve not managed to do anything else at first-team level this month is because they have ignored the two viable options with regard to the current manager in favour of the third, more cowardly non-answer.

They could have backed Thomas Frank this month. Remember, this is a club that boasted in October of a £100m cash injection from the new owners (who are in fact the old owners but without Levy as the lightning rod/fall guy and now unconvincingly rebadged as the cuddly and hands-on Lewis Family) that has been left entirely untouched.

They could, of course, have sacked Thomas Frank. There have been multiple opportunities where it would have been entirely justified. Daniel Levy would definitely have done it by now.

Instead they have neither backed nor sacked him, and now it’s all starting to crack.

Frank shouldn’t be Tottenham manager, that’s obvious, but it’s also now impossible not to feel some sympathy for him. He’s out of his depth. He doesn’t understand the job he now holds. He, performatively or otherwise, doesn’t seem to realise that last season’s 17th-place finish is what he’s here to improve rather than a target to repeat.

But he’s also being asked to do an incredibly difficult job with one arm tied behind his back.

The injuries Spurs have suffered over recent weeks have been unfortunate; there’s not been the same sense you had of them being part and parcel of the football being attempted in the way you did when hamstrings twanged on the regular under Ange Postecoglou.

So yes, there’s bad luck. But that bad luck hit in the one month of the season when you can do something about it. Spurs have lost Rodrigo Bentancur, Lucas Bergvall and Mohammed Kudus to long-term injuries in recent weeks and done absolutely nothing to replace them.

They have done nothing to address the now potentially season-long absences of both James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski despite knowing about them well before January and seeing how badly they were missed.

They didn’t even, in the end, do anything to replace Brennan Johnson, whose early January departure for a fair but underwhelming fee that Levy would not have accepted appeared to spell a welcome change of course for a club that too often prioritised being on the winning side of deals over being on the winning side of football matches.

Under the new regime, they win neither. They have chosen inaction over action with both the manager and the playing squad, and that is a very dangerous game.

Even letting Dane Scarlett out on loan appears risky. He’s not good enough, so fine, whatever, we suppose, but he had been on the bench for all Spurs’ recent games and come off it four times in January alone. When Dominic Solanke was unable to complete the final few minutes of the bonkers Man City game at the weekend, Frank had to turn instead to a 17-year-old defender.

Spurs have, clearly, decided to write this season off. Given the state of performances, results and squad depth that appears an act of astonishing hubris and grave stupidity that even their own captain has called ‘disgraceful’.

Crystal Palace

Spurs and Palace are really the two most interesting teams in the Premier League at this time. They are locked together in both the Premier League table and the awful vibes coming off of them.

Both have 29 points, both are freefalling towards a relegation battle that neither should have had to worry about at all. They even both won trophies last season only to completely f*ck or have f*cked up for them the opportunity that presented.

Yet they have taken wildly differing approaches to arresting their decline in this window. And our fear is that they have rather neatly shown the dangers of both.

Spurs have made the error of doing too little, Palace of doing too much. Palace have spent an awful lot of money on unconvincing recruits. Brennan Johnson always looked an odd one given how very narrow and specific his skillset, and how there didn’t really appear much reason to suppose Oliver Glasner’s Palace would suit those skills any more than Thomas Frank’s Tottenham did.

But he’s also scored even fewer Premier League goals this season than Johnson. Palace have dropped £80m on two players whose combined Premier League record this season before heading to Selhurst Park was three goals (one a penalty) in 39 appearances. The most recent of those three goals came in October. Johnson has not improved those numbers in his first four Premier League games with his new club.

The counterpoint, of course, is that between them Johnson and Larsen managed 25 Premier League goals last season. But if anyone should know just what ancient history last season now feels like, it’s Crystal Palace.

And offering £20m for Dwight McNeil in the year of someone’s lord 2026 is something football clubs only do when they are very distressed.

That’s before we even get to the subject of outgoings. The reason Palace aren’t in even worse bother than they are is down to their defence, which is still the meanest in the Premier League’s bottom half and seven goals better than fourth-placed Manchester United’s.

Can they maintain that defensive stability in the absence of Marc Guehi and, if not, can those attacking arrivals do enough to mitigate the damage with the improvement they bring to a team that has outscored only Wolves and Nottingham Forest this season?

We get that he was unsettled and desperate to leave, but the economics of Palace’s decision-making during this window still feel askew. Spending £80m on an attacking Hail Mary while pocketing just £20m to leave the back door open could prove a catastrophic error of judgement.

Aston Villa

It’s not that they’ve brought in bad players, because they haven’t. It’s just the fact it’s been an irritating month in which patchy on-field results and the struggle to bring in precisely who they wanted have served as a reminder that nearly challenging for the title is as high as Villa will be allowed to fly.

We can all argue about where Villa might best target their frustrations over this point, and we would still contend that a great deal more if it should be ‘inward’ given the ongoing flirting with PSR catastrophe, but those frustrations are very real indeed.

That Villa’s January business has amounted largely to getting the band back together after re-signing Tammy Abraham, Douglas Luiz and reintegrating a post-loan Leon Bailey just feels like a club having to make do and mend at the very highest level.

None of what Villa have managed to do in this window feels like it was their first choice.

Liverpool

Prioritising the flashier if not particularly necessary signing of Alexander Isak over a centre-back is looking like one of the summer’s greatest transfer boo-boos, so Liverpool’s failure to take any meaningful steps to correct it in January when they still have plenty to fight for is an odd one.

As with all failures of absence in January round-ups, we’ll apply the usual caveat about how if the right players aren’t available then the right players aren’t available. And Liverpool have taken a significant step to address this in the long-term with the confirmed summer arrival of Jeremy Jacquet from Rennes. But Liverpool have certainly made a choice with regard to the short-term, and it’s a bold one.

It’s been a trying, chastening season for Liverpool but one where much can still be achieved. They are only a point outside the top five and with it Champions League football next season, while still having every chance of going deep into this season’s competition given the way English clubs have dominated proceedings thus far.

Yet this is also a team that has conceded more Premier League goals than Crystal Palace and the same number as Spurs and has done nothing material to correct that right now.

Arsenal

Clearly at the very lowest end of the loser scale, but when you reach February with quadruple talk intact and have had a week to come to terms with the knowledge that a very important member of your squad is out long-term, then the failure to bring in any kind of replacement is a bit of a p*sser.

Mikel Merino has performed a curious but vital role for Arsenal since arriving in North London, and is a player who has got them out of sticky situations on more than one occasion.

There will almost certainly be games on the run-in where his uncomplicated but effective style is notable by its absence.

But yeah, when the reason you’re in the losers is ‘failing to replace this squad player makes it slightly less likely you win the quadruple’ a sense of perspective is inevitably required.

West Ham

Tricky one, because the Hammers have measurably improved since at least taking decisive and early January action to arrest what appeared to be an inevitable demise, yet it’s not really the new players that have had a direct invigorating effect on the Hammers.

The mere presence of Taty Castellanos and Pablo does seem to have reminded Jarrod Bowen and Crysencio Summerville that they are themselves actually quite good footballers, so that’s something, but the only real tangible impact made by any of West Ham’s assorted newcomers has been Adama Traore tossing Marc Cucurella around like a rag doll. Again, it’s not nothing. But is it enough?

Credit must at least go to the Hammers for appeasing the January transfer gods by performing the ancient transfer window ritual that demands a team clad in claret and blue MUST sign Axel Disasi on loan from Chelsea before deadline day is done.