Sterling late move sees him join Man Utd and West Ham among the transfer window winners

Manchester United remain a long way from being back, but if you ignore all the other nonsense it does look on paper like a very decent transfer window for them. And also West Ham.

And you’d need a heart of stone not to be pleased to see Raheem Sterling’s escape route from Chelsea taking such a steep upward curve. After you’ve finished reading about the winners, your losers are here.

Manchester United
The first two games of the season have shown they remain way off it, but putting right the wrongs of the last decade was never going to be the work of a single transfer window and nobody expected otherwise.

We remain someway short of being convinced sticking with Erik Ten Hag was the right move, a lot of what Sir Jim Ratcliffe does and says gives us the ick and it’s still weird to us that Jason Wilcox wields the sort of power he now does at a club like Manchester United, but this is supposed to be the winners, isn’t it?

Sorry. Back on track. So. Winners. Yes. Manchester United. Good window, it has to be said. And in a window where the general trend has been toward the dreary.

The incomings are impressive enough – topped off by the deadline-day arrival of Manuel Ugarte, a player who would appear to be the very ideal kind of thing for this soft-centred iteration of United .

Joshua Zirkzee has already shown plenty of promise, Matthijs de Ligt has ground to make up after his struggles at Juventus and Bayern but has undoubted quality if it can be reharnessed and Leny Yoro, injury apart, could be a generational signing.

But the outgoings are just as important. Perhaps more so. There’s a true sense of one era ending and another beginning. Mason Greenwood is no longer their problem while in other cases, expensive mistakes have been accepted and corrected as best they can.

The deadwood has been shipped out, alongside those that were not quite the requisite fit for where United aim to be. Neither Aaron Wan-Bissaka nor Scott McTominay could be fairly described as deadwood, but neither were going to take United back to the promised land.

These are still only steps in the right direction for a club that remains entirely capable of jumping right back again. The road is not straightforward. There are still no guarantees as to when or if United complete their long journey back to the summit. But they exit this transfer window with a superior and leaner squad than that which began it. Not all their rivals can say as much.

West Ham
Perhaps the most eye-catching summer’s work as the Hammers make a bold attempt to muscle in on the big boys.

It may well be doomed because it’s really hard to do and this is, after all, West Ham. But let it never be said they’ve not made a tremendously fun effort.

There is improvement all over the pitch, to the extent that James Ward-Prowse – who seemed so integral during his first season – is now surplus to requirements and loaned out to Nottingham Forest’s giant player farm.

Wan-Bissaka looks a better fit for West Ham than he ever was for Manchester United, while Jean-Clair Todibo is a genuine coup given the clubs who’ve been chasing him in recent years. He himself would in all probability have ended up at United had UEFA not kiboshed it due to Ineos’ ownership of both clubs in that transaction.

The most interesting of the lot is clearly Niclas Fullkrug. It’s surely the most interesting signing of the summer, the Andy Carroll replacement none of us even realised we needed in our lives.

We’re still struggling to see any of it propelling West Ham much higher than about tenth but whatever happens is going to be a tremendous amount of fun, albeit not necessarily for West Ham.

The move away from Moyesball couldn’t have been more decisive and even if it does all go a bit West Ham and their dreams fade and die then they still deserve credit for at least daring to dream.

READ MORE: Every Premier League transfer completed in the summer of 2024
Raheem Sterling
Treated unbelievably shabbily by Chelsea who waited until the season began to tell him he was no longer required and that he could try and leave. The failure from all at the club to see Sterling as a human being rather than a playing piece to move around the board in a stupid game reveals something about football generally and Chelsea specifically.

What’s happened to Sterling is a reminder that even in the unlikely event of Todd Boehly and Clearlake’s wheezes coming to fruition and making Chelsea successful it still relies on treating a lot of people extremely shabbily along the way.

Naïve to pretend that isn’t the way of the world, of course, and Premier League footballers aren’t exactly top of the list of people to worry about being treated shabbily by their employer. But that doesn’t mean we should accept or even revel in it either.

No, it was an ugly business that reflected poorly on everyone involved from Enzo Maresca up.

So for Sterling to not just find his move but to stumble upwards to a better club with a better plan on a better trajectory and with better prospects? Well, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to get some pleasure from it. Especially if the rumours that Chelsea are still paying more than half his wages are anywhere close to accurate.

We’re also childishly pleased that by adding Arsenal to a CV that already includes Liverpool, Manchester City and Chelsea, Sterling has completed the Full Anelka.

Arsenal
And while we’re mainly just happy for Sterling here as he joins a title challenge under a manager he knows well, let’s not forget what an opportunistic bit of brilliance this might be for Arsenal.

The absence of a striker still slightly worries us, but there is enough evidence now that Arsenal can get along fine without and Sterling represents as close to a risk-free signing as exists. He bolsters a formidable collection of forwards while offering something slightly different to the rest as well as increasing the flexibility all round.

Bukayo Saka might even get the occasional rest. There may be times now when Kai Havertz can be deployed in midfield.

Arsenal will not get and should not expect consistent perfection from Sterling. But there will be weeks and there will be games where he is a decisive difference-maker.

And he is just one last bonus part really of a window built around evolution rather than revolution. There may be no equivalent of the transformative Declan Rice deal, but Arsenal have strengthened their defensive options on the left through Riccardo Calafiori, which felt very necessary, as well as landing a clear top target in Mikel Merino.

The absence of a striker is now clearly a plan rather than oversight and like other big clubs there has been a deal of success in the clearing of decks. There will be pangs at the loss of academy grads like Eddie Nketiah and especially Emile Smith Rowe; but it is a sign of Arsenal’s progress that they had so clearly outgrown such players.

The only downside is the loss of Mo Elneny and Cedric Soares means we’ll have to work that little bit harder when the next ‘Forgotten Men’ one per club feature comes around, but that’s an us problem not an Arsenal problem.

Whether any of it is enough to reel in City and actually win the Premier League title is another matter of course, but it certainly once again feels like a transfer window Arsenal leave in better shape than they began it. And they began it in pretty good shape.

Tottenham
Just about. We think. It is by no means a perfect window, and the failure to add any defensive cover does appear to be a frankly unnecessary repeat of a previous error. The versatility of Archie Gray and at least theoretical potential for Djed Spence to activate Like A New Signing Mode means the right-hand side is less of a concern, but on the left…

Ben Davies remains a redoubtable figure, but he does appear to be once again first reserve for both Destiny Udogie and Micky van de Ven, a pair of players with wildly different skillsets to his own.

So yeah, not perfect. But still good, and that means still ‘winners’. Because the over-arching strategy is the right one: buy brilliant younglings and chuck big money at ready-made solutions for the squad’s most conspicuous holes.

Lucas Bergvall was signed in January but only arrived this summer and, along with Gray, appears to be just ideal business: preparing for the future but good enough for the here and now. Wilson Odobert will have harder games than his debut against a beleaguered, depleted Everton but showed enough there and last season at Burnley to suggest Spurs might have pulled off a bit of a masterstroke there.

Plus it was a good old-fashioned out-of-nowhere signing too, and those are rare and precious these days. No drawn-out saga, barely a mention anywhere in the press, just BANG, official ‘delighted to announce’ statement. That’s the stuff.

The cornerstone of Spurs’ summer was always going to be identifying and securing a striker, and they got the one they wanted. We all now must wait and see whether Dominic Solanke is the right choice.

It’s a huge amount of money for a 26-year-old with one good Premier League season on the CV but, while it does look like an overpayment he does also feel like the right kind of all-round striker for the way Spurs play. His early injury setback is an irritation but there’s a long and busy season ahead for Spurs.

Perhaps the main reason it’s a window win, though, is the near completion of the deck-clearing that had been so necessary for so long. The mistakes of the now quite unequivocally bad 2019 summer window, in which Spurs responded to reaching the Champions League final by signing Tanguy Ndombele, Giovani Lo Celso and Ryan Sessegnon, are at long last past-tense concerns.

Milan fans are now the ones who get to enjoy Emerson Royal, while this has also been a summer largely free of any talk at all about Spurs losing any player they didn’t want to lose. Always a boon after selling your club’s greatest ever player on the eve of the previous season.

Brighton
Have spent a lot of money on a lot of players without selling anyone this summer. A shiny if sadly fictitious penny on its way to any non-Brighton fan who can, off the top of their head and without cheating, name all six of the players on which Brighton have dropped at least £25m but we are of course all tremendously excited to see which three of them Chelsea buy for a combined £350m in 12 months’ time.

Ipswich
Don’t ask us to explain it, we can’t really, but their huge squad overhaul post-promotion looks far more coherent and manageable than that of, say, Nottingham Forest a couple of years back.

There’s a pleasing combination there of crumbs from the big club table and Championship standouts that point towards Ipswich having quite cleverly put together at a non-insane cost what is, at worst, a kind of Championship super squad to try and get them back up even if this season does go horribly wrong.

Man City’s net spend
They’re over £100m in credit and yet the return of Ilkay Gundogan means they’ve probably strengthened overall.

There is really no other club that could lose a player like Julian Alvarez for 60-odd million quid and genuinely barely notice he’s gone.

An absurdly quiet window on the incomings front, but where was the hole in the squad? What was the hole that needed to be filled? There really wasn’t one, and City remain absolutely unchallenged at the masters of securing significant money for players they neither need nor want. Trousering over £50m for Taylor Harwood-Bellis, Liam Delap and Joao Cancelo is just absolutely classic Man City.

Fulham
Yes the loss of Joao Palhinha hurts, but that’s the reality of mid-table life and Fulham have at least softened the blow with some lovely incomings. Emile Smith Rowe and the return of Ryan Sessegnon are just nice and good transfers that feel nice and good, and sometimes that’s all it takes and all you need.

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