The five worst 2023 Premier League summer transfer windows - including Man Utd and Everton shambles

The transfer deadline has finally passed and as the dust settles (mostly on the tops of fax machines as they get wheeled back into their corners), we can finally make some judgements on who did the best business and – far more importantly for the purposes of cheap banter on social media – who did the worst.

And quite a few clubs had a tough summer this time around, from top four contenders to expected basement boys. Perhaps we’ll come back to these five clubs in a few months’ time and owe them an apology after their seemingly underwhelming purchases come good, but for now, we reckon these are the teams that have set themselves up to fail over the course of the coming months…

Everton

Everton finished last season with one of the division’s worst defences and the worst attack, barely surviving the drop and clearly in need of reinforcements in several areas. Judging by the one point the Toffees have earned from their first four games, not enough has been done.

Not that the players who eventually arrived necessarily seem like bad buys – Beto looked extremely handy against Doncaster Rovers in the League Cup, Jack Harrison is an experienced and versatile player, young Youssef Chermiti has many admirers back in Portugal, and Arnaut Danjuma could be an important addition based on what we’ve seen, but that’s offset by a lack of investment in the defensive unit (a 38-year-old Ashley Young is the only new face while Yerry Mina and Mason Holgate have left), the departure of the inconsistent but often very useful Alex Iwobi, and the feeling that they haven’t really found many upgrades for one of the weakest teams in the division. A tough season beckons after a summer which doesn’t seem to have solved much of anything.

Fulham

Keeping hold of João Palhinha, even if it was very much against his will, means that Fulham’s summer can’t be called a true disaster, but the departure of Aleksandr Mitrović and the failure to replace him means that the Cottager have reached September with a glaring hole in the number nine spot and very few apparent ways to get themselves in the goals.

The only attacking addition to the squad was Raúl Jiménez, who with all the love in the world has not looked like a Premier League striker since that awful head injury during his time at Wolves. The blunt fact is that Mitović was the team’s biggest goal threat by far and is gone without proper replacement, and it may not matter how well-sculpted the rest of the squad is if nobody can put the chances away. Other additions like Timothy Castagne and the aforementioned Iwobi look canny, or at least will if they can stay fit for a change, while Calvin Bassey’s working-over against Arsenal shouldn’t lead us to judge him too harshly just yet. We will, however, judge Adama Traoré, who has years of proving that he offers extreme pace with minimal end product, but at least he was only a free.

Wolverhampton Wanderers

The need to keep up with FPP requirements not only massively restricted their spending this summer, but also essentially cost them that best manager they’ve had in years. Re-signing Matt Doherty probably doesn’t quite make up for losing Rúben Neves, either.

Wolves had problems last season – a limited defence and a lack of strikers – but had the manager to paper over the cracks in Julen Lopetegui. Whether Gary O’Neil can weave the same kind of magic remains to be seen, but his job will be even harder, with Neves and Mathues Nunes gone, Nathan Collins departing from the back line and no new strikers added to the ranks despite that having been a concern for years now (although the freshly fit Sasa Kalajzdic does have that “feels like a new signing” energy to him, at least). Understated new signings like Jean-Ricner Bellegarde and Santiago Bueno, from Strasbourg and Girona respectively, had better hit the ground running, because the Wolves squad looks light on quality and dangerous low on quantity.

Manchester United

United came into this striker with several goals – get a new goalkeeper, refresh the midfield, sign a new striker, and get rid of Harry Maguire. Based on early evidence they’ve barely scraped passing grades for the first three, and can only be said to have failed at the last. Maguire is still about, so is Scott McTominay, and Mason Mount does not seem to be settling well at all – and performances on the pitch haven’t been great either.

Up front, £64m has been spent on young Rasmus Højlund, a big talent but probably not ready to bear the striking burden at Old Trafford all by himself. Mount looks like a good player bought for the wrong reasons. The only central defender who arrived was 35-year-old Jonny Evans after United publicly pursued Kim Min-Jae and Benjamin Pavard. New goalkeeper André Onana is off to a shaky start. The signing of Sofyan Amrabat could balance the midfield out a bit, at least, but at first glance it’s hard to see whether Erik Ten Hag will get the returns he wants from over £175m of players brought in. So far, United seem to have spent a lot of money to make themselves a worse team than they were before.

Sheffield United

The loan re-signing of Tommy Doyle, who scored some key goals during the Blades’ promotion season in the Championship, really doesn’t make up for one of the worst summers imaginable – one that has seen the club lose its two best players, one to an immediate rival, and set them up for a very long, very hard season indeed.

Losing key goal threat Iliman Ndiaye to Marseille for a cut price was bad enough, but shipping midfield general Sander Berge to Burnley for a little over £10m looks positively suicidal. In Cameron Archer and Gustavo Hamer they have found some very decent replacements, but it’s hard not to wonder if they’ve made a substantial loss on player trades which have, at best, sidegraded the squad. Other signings made, like Vini Souza from Lommel in Belgium and Bénie Traoré from the Swedish Allsvenskan, are essentially unknown and unproven at the top level. Maybe we’ll be praising some stunning pieces of obscurist recruitment in the near future, but it seems somewhat more likely that we’ll see Sheffield United in the relegation zone instead.