Florian Wirtz next? The worst signings by last 10 reigning Premier League champions | OneFootball

The best time to strengthen is when you’re on top, it’s commonly been argued when it comes to sustaining a successful football squad.

But not every player who gets signed by a reigning Premier League champion manages to match the level of the squad they join.

Right now, there’s a lot of scrutiny on Liverpool’s summer spending spree on the back of their title win last season. There was huge enthusiasm for how they strengthened their squad, but recent results have raised questions of if they changed too much.

There’s still time for their new players to come good, but what if some don’t? TEAMtalk decided to take a look at the last 10 Premier League champions and pick out their worst signing from the summer straight after their title wins…

2025 – Liverpool – Florian Wirtz

Liverpool made history in 2025 by bolstering Arne Slot’s title-winning squad with an abundance of highly-rated new players. In fact, they embarked on the biggest-spending transfer window of all time.

The first impressions made by most of their new signings, though, haven’t been great. Hugo Ekitike is a notable exception; the former Eintracht Frankfurt striker looks a menace and has had a goalscoring impact already.

But the likes of Milos Kerkez, Alexander Isak and Wirtz are all taking their time to justify their high transfer fees.

Liverpool fans may have felt most disillusioned with Wirtz so far, since he hasn’t got any goals or assists from his first nine Premier League matches. Remember, he got 23 goal contributions from 31 Bundesliga games for Bayer Leverkusen last season.

The addition of Wirtz into the attacking midfield role seems to have affected Liverpool’s rhythm. Time is on his side and the club are still backing him, and he may well make this early judgement look silly in the long run, but there are more questions than answers about him right now.

2024 – Manchester City – Ilkay Gundogan

A key part of Manchester City becoming a winning machine during the Pep Guardiola era has been their lack of fear with letting go of players who have been important to them.

In 2023, they released Gundogan at the end of his contract, just weeks after he scored a brace in the FA Cup final and lifted the Champions League trophy to cap off their treble-winning season.

City put sentiment to one side and let Gundogan go with their lasting gratitude. But after an average season with Barcelona, the Germany international became available – and City got too nostalgic.

The Gundogan that City brought back to the Etihad Stadium – after making it four Premier League titles in a row – was not the same kind of player they had bid farewell to a year earlier.

Gundogan was one of City’s most-used players in the 2024-25 season, but couldn’t get across the pitch as effectively as before.

City ultimately relinquished the title as Liverpool raced away with the honours. Gundogan was allowed to leave for Galatasaray at the end of the only season of his second spell with City.

2023 – Manchester City – Matheus Nunes

To account for the departure of Gundogan in 2023, City signed Nunes from Wolves for £53m after his debut season in the Premier League.

Guardiola had previously declared his admiration of Nunes after coming up against him for Sporting CP in the Champions League, but those now-infamous comments came back to haunt him.

The City boss backtracked with his opinion on Nunes after starting to work with him and ended up having to convert the midfielder into a full-back to get him in the team.

Nunes has 80 appearances to his name for City and has now embarked on a third season with the club, but none have been as good on an individual level as the one in which he introduced himself to the Premier League with Wolves.

2022 – Manchester City – Kalvin Phillips

A year prior to Nunes’ arrival, City sought to strengthen their midfield by bringing in Phillips from his boyhood club Leeds United.

Phillips had previously attracted widespread interest, but it was City who won the race for the England international at a cost of £42m.

Unfortunately, Phillips failed to live up to the hype and was accused of being overweight by Guardiola upon his return from the Qatar World Cup midway through his debut season.

Guardiola only named Phillips in two Premier League starting lineups in their first season together: the third-to-last and last games of the season.

Loan spells with West Ham United and Ipswich Town didn’t do Phillips many favours and he’s now back as a forgotten man at the Etihad Stadium.

2021 – Manchester City – Jack Grealish

Grealish became the most expensive player in Premier League history when City spent £100m to sign him from Aston Villa in 2021, on the back of reclaiming the title from Liverpool.

However, the attacking midfielder immediately had to adapt, going from being the main source of inspiration at Villa to just one of many stars at City.

Grealish only scored three league goals during his debut season with City. He improved the following season to become a valued treble winner, but still only by scoring at a rate of once every 10 games across all competitions.

His form dwindled and he ended up joining Everton on loan for the current season, where he looks a more natural fit.

2020 – Liverpool – Thiago Alcantara

Liverpool’s biggest oversight after finally winning the Premier League title in 2020 may have been their failure to reinforce at centre-back, which came back to bite them after injuries to their main starters throughout their title defence.

Of the signings they did actually make, the three additions to their first team were all respectable: Kostas Tsimikas, Thiago and Diogo Jota.

Perhaps the most disappointing compared to expectations was Thiago. A lot of energy went into signing him from Bayern Munich, and while he wasn’t a disaster, he wasn’t his prime self for Liverpool either.

Injury issues hampered the Spain international, who never made more than 25 league appearances in a season for Liverpool. He retired at the end of his contract in 2024.

2019 – Manchester City – Angelino

Angelino wasn’t a completely new player for City to add to their squad in 2019; he’d already made three appearances for the club before they sold him to PSV, only to use their buy-back clause a year later.

From that point on, though, the left-back only lasted half a season back in Manchester. Come the January 2020 transfer window, he was being shipped off to RB Leipzig after making 12 appearances.

City still managed to make a quick profit on Angelino, who has gone on to have spells with Hoffenheim, Galatasaray and Roma, but his impact for themselves was minimal.

2018 – Manchester City – Philippe Sandler

After hitting the 100-point mark in the 2017-18 Premier League title race, City didn’t have too many gaps to strengthen in the subsequent transfer window.

Their only major signing was Riyad Mahrez, who was a more-than-capable reinforcement to their squad.

A lesser-known acquisition was Sandler, a young defender who’d just made 23 appearances in the Eredivisie the previous season for PEC Zwolle.

Sandler never made a Premier League appearance, though, with his only outings for City coming in the FA Cup and EFL Cup (one appearance apiece).

After some loan spells and injuries, Sandler signed for Feyenoord in February 2022, before settling at NEC Nijmegen later that year.

2017 – Chelsea – Danny Drinkwater

After winning the Premier League title in his first season, Antonio Conte – a notoriously demanding manager in the transfer market – was ready to bolster his squad further.

But of the six players they signed in the summer of 2017, only one – Antonio Rudiger – was a quantified success.

As for the worst? Alvaro Morata was underwhelming, but Chelsea‘s two new midfielders, Tiemoue Bakayoko (£40m) and Danny Drinkwater (£35m), flopped even harder.

Bakayoko embarked on the first of four loan spells away the following summer by joining AC Milan, while Drinkwater was left in limbo by Conte’s successor, Maurizio Sarri, and eventually left for Burnley in 2019 at the start of his own four-chapter series of loans.

The difference in the calibre of club each player went on to represent should paint enough of a picture, but Drinkwater himself would confess to being the bigger flop.

He made only 23 appearances for Chelsea – 20 fewer than Bakayoko – and saw his career spiral out of control, never adding to the three England caps he won in 2016 as a Leicester player.

2016 – Leicester City – Ahmed Musa

In their wildest dreams, Leicester would have never even expected to have had to navigate a transfer window with the status of reigning Premier League champions, but the most miraculous title win of them all in 2015-16 set them up for an incredibly intriguing summer.

The Foxes broke their transfer record three times over the summer: first on Nampalys Mendy (£13m), then on Musa (£16m) and finally on Islam Slimani (£28m).

This was a club whose unlikely title success had been built on strong scouting, bringing in the likes of N’Golo Kante (£5.6m in 2015) and Riyad Mahrez (£450,000 in 2014) for shrewd fees.

But it was hard to say their more lucrative signings were good value for money, with Musa and Slimani only lasting 18 months before being loaned away.

Although he didn’t cost as much, Musa was arguably the worse-performing signing between them. The winger only scored two Premier League goals from 21 games (only a third of which were starts) and never provided an assist.