While you were busy watching Phil Foden and Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane try to rip a soccer ball into three pieces for England at Euro 2024, or getting seduced by the glow -- but still keeping a safe distance -- from the tire fire that was the USMNT's Copa América campaign, the transfer window came and went.
"What?" you say. "I thought the window closed at the end of August?"
OK, fine. Not the transfer window, but a transfer window. Per the site Transfermarkt, Premier League clubs have spent around €610 million on outgoing transfer fees already -- more than double any other league in the world. But they've also made some €470m from incoming transfer fees -- nearly triple any other league.
Both numbers are so high, in large part, because Premier League teams have been doing a ton of business with each other. And they've been doing a ton of business with each other because of the June 30 deadline for clubs to come into compliance with the league's profitability and sustainability rules (PSR). A number of clubs were desperate for immediate profits, and the only real way for a soccer club to make an immediate profit is to let a player leave in exchange for millions of dollars.
Since you've likely been distracted from all the action at the Copa América and/or the Euros, let's run through all of the transfer action and award some winners and losers.
WINNER: The Premier League
To be clear: I mean this in the sense of the bureaucracy that manages the league, not the 20 teams that make up the league.
It might shock you to hear that the current PSR have been around since 2013, when Premier League clubs agreed to rules that clubs could lose £35m a year. However, their compliance is judged on a rolling three-year window, so you're basically allowed to lose £105m over three years. There are certain loopholes and exceptions, but this is the general idea.
So why are you only hearing about it now? Well, the price of the ball has gone up. Per some estimates, what was worth £105m in 2013 wages is now worth £218m. Put another way, Manchester United were England's richest club in 2013, with a profit of £348m; today, Manchester United's annual revenues are right around £634m. The £105m loss is now a much smaller portion of what clubs have to spend in order to compete.
And while Manchester City mounts a legal case against the Premier League for the 115 charges issued against them, it seems like clubs are actually paying attention to PSR. After Everton and Nottingham Forest were docked points last season for violating the rules -- and then both flirted with relegation for large portions of the campaign -- everyone else hustled to get into compliance from the opening of the summer transfer window on June 14 to the PSR deadline two weeks later.
I don't think the rules make total sense for a number of reasons -- mainly, the inflation we've already discussed -- but the league created these rules, and most clubs took serious actions to abide by them. It's a win for an institution that's about to go to court with the club that has won six of the past seven titles.
LOSER: Aston Villa
Growing up in New York, I remember constant complaints about how the Yankees were "buying" their World Series titles. Those columns or monologues were usually followed by someone else decrying the rising salaries of professional athletes compared to what, say, an elementary school teacher makes each month.
Without getting into how capitalism decides what to value and what it says about our society, the new (and proper) mode of journalism among baseball writers is to praise the teams that spend and bash the clubs that don't. The structure of American sports guarantees massive profits to billionaire owners regardless of how much is invested in the team and how they perform on the field. To spend more is to try to win more; if you can't spend -- and almost all of these owners can spend -- then you should sell the team to someone who can.
Thanks to promotion and relegation and the method in which players are acquired (namely paying tens of millions of dollars to break a contract), it isn't so simple in soccer. Throw in the potential for corruption with agents and intermediaries, and spending doesn't necessarily even equate to "trying to win."
Financial regulation in soccer is mainly meant to prevent owners from overspending, saddling the club with debt, and then letting the team go bust and walking away -- something that UEFA's Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations have mainly succeeding at doing -- but one of the knock-on effects is that the regulations make it really hard for any new clubs to break into the realm where you're regularly competing for the most prestigious trophies.
Gab Marcotti doesn't believe Chelsea can afford the £150 million transfer fee Newcastle has reportedly put on Alexander Isak.
Take Villa, for example. Their owners have spent a ton of money on improving the team, and it has worked. They finished fourth last season, and they'll be in the Champions League this year for the first time since the competition was rebranded in 1992. On top of that, the owners have spent their own money, meaning Villa have barely any debt.
The reward for all their success? A cap on their spending, right as they're about to compete with the likes of Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid.
Per estimates from football-finance expert Kieron O'Connor of the Swiss Ramble, Villa needed to make back somewhere in the £50m-£60m range by the end of the PSR period. And they did it by letting Douglas Luiz go to Juventus for £45m, and England youth international Omari Kellyman to Chelsea for £19m.
Barring a rule change, it's only going to get worse. Next year's three-year compliance period won't include the £100m profit from Jack Grealish's move to Manchester City in the summer of 2021.
WINNER: Aston Villa
And yet, I'm not sure that Villa haven't improved over the past month!
In a bit of an "I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine" situation, a bunch of the clubs needing to get into PSR compliance made deals with each other. My colleague Gab Marcotti covered it in detail last week:
Enter the "swap deal," which may sound funny and may appear like some sort of bookkeeping sleight of hand, but it is actually in line with accounting practices. It hinges on the fact that when you transfer a player out for a fee, that fee gets booked as profit straight away, whereas when you acquire a player, the transfer fee gets spread out over the life of the contract.
One such swap involved Kellyman and Ian Maatsen. The former was not a well-known prospect -- his crowd-sourced valuation on Transfermarkt is right around £1m -- and since he's an academy player, his transfer fee is pure profit. (When a player acquired for a transfer fee is then transferred elsewhere, the accounted-for profit is the new fee, minus whatever value is left on the club's books from the previous deal.)
Oh, and since Chelsea needed to get into compliance and move on from one of their academy guys, Villa get ... one of the best young left backs in the world? A 22-year-old who started the Champions League final? Left back is one of the hardest positions to find talent for, and Villa might be set in that spot for the next eight years.
As for the Luiz move, he has always been a player whose reputation exceeded his impact on the field. I can't say it any better than transfer consultant Ted Knutson did, so I'll just quote him: "[David Luiz is] the Chipotle burrito of midfielders: slightly below average in just about everything, but functional enough to keep you alive. There are many better alternatives."
Going the other way in that deal, from Juventus, were Samuel Iling-Junior -- a very effective attacking wing-back in around 900 minutes for Juventus as a 19-year-old last season -- and 23-year-old Enzo Barrenechea, who played over 2,800 minutes for Frosinone last season and was a high-volume passer and a decent ball-winner.
In other words, they swapped the low-ceiling-not-really-high-floor of Luiz for two pretty decent prospects who both could become contributors for their new club.
WINNER: Brighton
How do they keep getting away with this?
There's a theme here: The teams that spent enough money to compete and then qualify for the Champions League are getting hammered by PSR. I'm a little more sympathetic to Villa because they're not owned by a sovereign wealth fund, but the above analysis also applies to Newcastle.
Needing some immediate profit, Newcastle moved Yankuba Minteh -- who was initially acquired for £7m from Danish club Odense last summer -- to Brighton for £30m. Now, shouldn't this be the other way around? Aren't Brighton the ones who increase a player's value by 400% in a single season and then move him on to some desperate, rich club?
It seems that way, but that's not really the case. Playing on loan for Feyenoord in the Eredivisie last season, here's where Minteh ranked among all wingers across a slate of different statistics, via the site FBref and per 90 minutes:
Non-penalty goals: 97th percentile
Non-penalty expected goals: 98th
Shots: 93rd
Non-penalty expected goals+expected assists: 97th
Shot-creating actions: 97th
Progressive carries: 98th
Successful take-ons: 98th
Touches in the box: 99th
Progressive passes received: 99th
Tackles: 96th
More important than any of those numbers, though, is his age: 19. Minteh played only about 1,500 minutes in the league last season, but that's potentially the profile of a future star: tons of shots, lots of production, absurd dribbling and relentless defensive pressing.
Across Europe's Big Five leagues plus Portugal and the Netherlands since 2017, this is the list of players to play at least 900 minutes and average at least 0.8 non-penalty xG+xA per 90 minutes and at least four progressive carries at age 19 or under: Kylian Mbappé, Jadon Sancho, Minteh.
Is this really where Newcastle had to find that money?
LOSER: Newcastle
Newcastle have been a club without a sporting director for five months, amid the gardening-leave standoff with Dan Ashworth and Manchester United, and they're certainly acting like it. First, they let Minteh leave to a direct Premier League competitor. (And while we're here, a word of advice for any big-ish club: When Brighton call you, just hang up the phone! If the club that's better at scouting than pretty much anyone else in the world want one of your players, then that means he's probably pretty damn good.)
The other PSR-related move made by the Magpies was to let 21-year-old Elliot Anderson head to Nottingham Forest for £35m. This was another swap between PSR-violating brethren, with Homerian shot-stopper Odysseas Vlachodimos heading in the other direction.
That's a ton of money for Anderson, but it's also another promising young performer out the door, and if you paid attention to Newcastle's season last year, you know it completely fell apart because of a complete lack of depth in the squad. For a Champions League-challenging squad, Anderson and Minteh are ideal depth pieces: guys you didn't have to spend massive fees to acquire, prospects who'd be fine coming off the bench, and players who could help you win and develop their own games at the same time.
After a sharp upward trajectory for the first season and a half after the Saudi takeover, it's hard to see where this club is trying to go.
Gab & Juls discuss Newcastle's moves on the transfer market including Yankuba Minteh's departure to Brighton.
LOSERS: Chelsea and Leicester
Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall was Leicester's best player last season -- and maybe the best player in the Championship -- under new Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca. He's also the exact kind of player who might struggle to make the leap to a higher level: a tweener with either a great attacking output but poor passing ability for a midfielder, or with mediocre attacking output but above-average passing ability for an attacker.
And so, despite Maresca's clear love for him, his £30m move from Chelsea to Leicester feels like it could be a lose-lose for both clubs.
Leicester needed to make some immediate revenue to comply with PSR, though it's still unclear whether the income from Dewsbury-Hall will be enough to do it. On top of that, they might get punished for violations from the previous three-year period, ending in 2023. And oh yeah: They no longer have the services of a guy who scored 12 goals and 14 assists last season.
Given that they've spent the GDP of a Micronesian island republic on midfielders over the past 18 months, Chelsea don't really seem to need another midfielder. Plus, Dewsbury-Hall is 25; this isn't a bet on potential. And there's still plenty of uncertainty about his ability to contribute to a team that absolutely needs to find a way to qualify for the Champions League this season.
Chelsea's new ownership continues to run the club like it's a hedge fund rather than a soccer team. To create the latter, you acquire human beings who fit together, whose characteristics complement and amplify each other. You create an environment where these human beings feel some kind of institutional stability that will allow them to succeed.
To create the former? Any time you see an "undervalued asset," you gobble it up without worrying about what it might mean for everyone else.