The Transfer Flow

Welcome to the last edition of Premier League transfer grades. If you missed any of the earlier pieces: Today we’ve got: Manchester United Newcastle Nottingham Forest Sunderland Tottenham Hotspur Total incomings — £155m Carlos Baleba — £60m + 5m add-ons Andrey Santos — £48m + 2m add-ons Youri Tielemans — £35m Karl Darlow — Free First off, I would like to thank Manchester United for keeping things simple.

Previously, we’ve had to go slightly out of order with our transfer grades to avoid getting too many rich teams in the same piece. But with some B and W teams getting relegated, it just happened to work out perfectly this year. Today’s teams are: Hull City Ipswich Town Leeds United Liverpool Manchester City If you’ve missed our previous transfer grades pieces, you can find the first one featuring Arsenal here, and the second one featuring Chelsea here.

We’re back with 5 more teams today, including the protagonists of every transfer window: Chelsea Coventry Crystal Palace Everton Fulham If you missed yesterday’s piece, we had transfer grades for the first 5 alphabetical teams, which included some very big moves for Arsenal and Aston Villa.

It’s our favorite time of the year. Transfer grades are back, running through the next couple weeks of newsletters. We’re going to cover all 20 Premier League teams this week, and the 20 most interesting teams in Europe next week, with grades coming out in batches of 5. As usual, we’ll go in mostly alphabetical order, with some minor adjustments to spread out big teams.

Data from two weeks into the season does not mean anything, but this newsletter is something that Ted and I do for fun, and sometimes you just want to look at funny graph. Here, please enjoy funny graph. Chelsea’s attack looks completely rejuvenated by Xabi Alonso, as well as Morgan Rogers and a finally healthy Cole Palmer. They’re getting a spectacular volume of high-quality shots, and they’re taking lots of risks going forward, seemingly unafraid of conceding big chances in transition.

As the final whistle blew for the 2025-26 season and Tottenham were confirmed to remain in the Premier League for another year, the focus turned to the transfer market. Having finished in 17th place in back to back seasons, and with Roberto De Zerbi in the fold on a long-term contract after preserving their top-flight status, there was acceptance of the squad needing a substantial refresh.

Having spent well over £400 million on what was largely an attacking rebuild last summer, Liverpool are still bringing fresh faces into their front line. Víctor Muñoz came in quite early on in the window, but the real headline signing came right at the end. Bradley Barcola had been on the market all summer as he was reportedly open to a move after losing his starting spot at Paris Saint-Germain.

Deadline day is upon us, which means it’s the last of these rumour roundup posts for a couple of months. We hope you’ve had fun speculating about all of the nonsense with us this summer. Over the next couple of days, we’ll have analysis from Neel and Mohamed on some of the biggest moves of the window and how players are going to fit in with their new clubs. After that, we’ll dive into transfer grades for all 20 Premier League teams, and for 20 of the biggest teams on the European continent.

Liverpool, Chelsea, and Manchester United were all involved in extremely chaotic games this weekend, full of fun goals and terrible defending. It’s probably just start of the season stuff, but it sure would be cool if this was just the direction the league was going in. I did not particularly enjoy Enzo Maresca’s highly disciplined positional play at Chelsea, and I thought his tactics would stifle City’s best players.

Manchester United have plugged a massive hole in their squad, adding a sorely needed athletic defensive midfielder. Carlos Baleba has signed from Brighton for £65m + £5m in add-ons, ending a long pursuit that started last summer. Brighton were reportedly asking in excess of £100m for Baleba a year ago, but a poor 2025-26 campaign lowered his value.