The transfer window is closed. So what did everyone end up with?

We published our 2026/27 predictions ten days before the summer transfer window closed, which was apparently enough time for several clubs to make us rethink everything. Chelsea sold Enzo Fernández and lost his replacement, City bought half a new midfield, Arsenal still forgot the winger and Sunderland had two private jets waiting for one player. So, what did everyone actually end up with?

Quick answer

Chelsea had the best transfer window, but Manchester City now have the best squad. Chelsea finally cleared out most of the players who had been sitting around since 2023 and still finished in profit. City spent much more, although they now have a strong option in almost every position. The one obvious exception is a proper backup for Erling Haaland.

Arsenal improved an already strong team but missed the left-sided attacker they needed. Roma are the team that changed my mind most, Atlético finally look like a proper team, Bayern look unstoppable again, and Monaco managed to look completely unprofessional on an otherwise quiet Ligue 1 deadline day.

Premier League: Chelsea finally lean out their squad, City look the most balanced side, while Arsenal miss out on the winger they needed

Chelsea finally deal with the squad they built in 2023

Chelsea players are basically everywhere now. Nicolas Jackson, Liam Delap, Trevoh Chalobah, Tyrique George, Marc Guiu, Tosin Adarabioyo and several others left permanently, while Mykhailo Mudryk, Alejandro Garnacho, Benoît Badiashile and Robert Sánchez went on loan, so this was not really another case of Chelsea selling everyone again as part of their usual summer chaos, but more the club finally finding exits for players who had probably needed to move much earlier.

The selling itself was ridiculous, because Chelsea brought in roughly £500 million through permanent exits and loans, according to the Guardian's deadline-day report, while Sky Sports calculated a final transfer balance of £67.3 million in profit. Fans of other clubs keep joking that Chelsea can somehow sell an unwanted player for £60 million while everyone else struggles to give theirs away, and after watching them do it over and over again this summer, it is difficult to argue with the joke anymore.

It was also very close to being an incredible window, until Chelsea tried to be a little too clever with the Lamine Camara deal. Enzo Fernández had already left for City for £125 million, Chelsea had a written £47 million agreement with Monaco and Camara was ready to go, but Monaco pulled out so late that there was no realistic time left to find another midfielder, which made their director look completely unprofessional, although Chelsea still have to take some responsibility for leaving such an important replacement until the final day in the first place.

That decision looks even riskier when you really look at the midfield they are left with, because most of Chelsea’s midfield options are either made of glass or halfway into a retirement home. Moisés Caicedo is injured, Roméo Lavia can barely stay fit, Reece James can play there but has his own injury history, Jordan Henderson is reliable but clearly not someone you want carrying a high-intensity midfield for an entire season, and Valentín Barco is still learning the position. There is quality there, but the availability is a completely different question, which is why the Camara collapse matters so much.

Maybe Reggie Watson gets his chance after a good preseason, maybe Chelsea find another solution from the academy, and maybe the midfield ends up being completely fine anyway, but selling Enzo before Camara was fully secured was still a big risk and probably the one thing that stopped a brilliant transfer window from becoming close to perfect. Even with that mistake, I still think Chelsea had the best window: they finally leaned out a squad that had been bloated for years, added Morgan Rogers, and somehow continued selling players for fees that most clubs would struggle to get even for players they actually wanted to keep.

City basically bought every proven Premier League player they could

Manchester City took a different approach and spent about £457.5 million, but a lot of that money went on players who already know exactly what the Premier League is like. Enzo, Elliot Anderson, Iliman Ndiaye and Allan have all played here already, while Ayyoub Bouaddi gives Maresca another option at No 6, so instead of gambling on five or six players who might need a year to adapt, City basically went shopping for people who could walk straight into the squad. They also recovered around £282 million in sales, which obviously does not make this a cheap window, but at least softens what is still a pretty ridiculous bill. The Guardian's club-by-club review has the complete list.

You have to give them credit for how little risk they left themselves with, because they now have different types of midfielders, several options out wide and defenders who can cover more than one position, while most of the expensive signings already know the league and should not need six months of excuses about adaptation. Maresca is still copying plenty from Pep Guardiola and I am curious to see what happens when he eventually runs into a problem that Pep's old structure does not already have an answer for, but for now it is difficult to complain when Cherki and Haaland are making everything around them look much easier.

For me, this is now the most balanced squad in England, although there are still a couple of obvious problems if you really want to look for them. Haaland is the one position where there is no proper direct replacement, because Ndiaye and Semenyo can cover parts of the role but neither gives City anything close to the same kind of striker, while AFCON could also take several useful players out of the squad at the same time. That could become annoying in January, but when everyone is available there are very few areas where City can look at the bench and genuinely say they have nobody.

Arsenal did plenty of business and still forgot the winger

Arsenal did not have a bad window. Bruno Guimarães, Ezri Konsa, Piero Hincapié and Christos Tzolis improve a team that already won the league. The defence and midfield are still excellent. The same problem we had in the prediction article is also still there: the attack can look painfully boring.

Leandro Trossard left, Gabriel Martinelli may still move to Saudi Arabia, Gabriel Jesus joined Barcelona, and Arsenal ended the window without the established left-sided attacker they wanted. Julián Álvarez was not interested, Vinícius Júnior renewed with Madrid, and that was basically it. The Guardian's verdict was similar: Arsenal improved the squad but missed the marquee attacker.

Then they terminated Reiss Nelson's contract. Somebody asked which free-agent winger Arsenal could sign and another fan replied: Reiss Nelson. Fair enough. Tzolis may become very good, but after moving so many attackers out, Arsenal needed one more established option. Sørloth looked promising at first and then looked terrible against Aston Villa. Maybe the attack clicks anyway. Right now, the missing winger looks fairly obvious.

United bought midfielders and then remembered the defence

Manchester United improved the midfield with Carlos Baleba, Andrey Santos and Youri Tielemans, which at least gives them more quality and a bit more control in an area that badly needed it, but once you move behind that midfield the squad starts looking very familiar again, because the defence is still far too close to the same group United fans have been complaining about for years.

The left side is probably the weirdest part of the whole thing. United were still looking at left-back options while Patrick Dorgu was being used further forward, which makes you wonder what the actual plan was, because they bought Dorgu as a left-back in the first place. He may turn out to be useful in midfield or higher up the pitch, but moving him away from the position you signed him for and then deciding the squad suddenly needs another left-back is a pretty odd way to build a team.

Maybe United are keeping money back for the stadium, maybe they simply did not like the defensive options available, I do not know, but overall it was a surprisingly quiet window for a club with this many obvious problems. The midfield is better, that part is clear, but the defence still looks like the area that could drag everything else down, and I can understand why the fans are not exactly coming out of this window feeling excited.

Tottenham bought everyone, because Tottenham are Tottenham

Tottenham spent around £300 million and then took two more players from Chelsea on deadline day. Mudryk joined on loan, Tosin arrived for £7 million, and Roberto De Zerbi now has Tonali, Sávio, Marmoush, Van Hecke and half a new defence as well.

What do I think? I do not know. Tottenham are Tottenham. They looked much better in preseason than they have at the start of the season, and now everybody is waiting to see whether De Zerbi gives this group enough freedom to play or enough freedom to destroy themselves. Mudryk barely played for a year and somehow landed at Tottenham with a possible big move waiting if the loan works. Madness, although I genuinely hope he does well.

There is a lot of talent in the squad. There are also a lot of players who want the same spaces and no clear sign yet that all of this works together. We wanted Tottenham as a dark horse before the season; after the first games, I am much less confident.

Sunderland made deadline day fun, while Everton sold nearly everyone

Malick Fofana had two private jets waiting in Lyon, one sent by Sunderland and one by Crystal Palace, and in the end he chose Sunderland in a club-record deal, which is already a pretty good summary of how ambitious their window became. More importantly, they managed to do that without ripping apart the useful core they already had, keeping Granit Xhaka, Enzo Le Fée, Robin Roefs and Noah Sadiki rather than creating one exciting deadline-day story and weakening themselves somewhere else.

Hull were quieter, but I still liked quite a few of their moves, especially Tim Iroegbunam and Joe Gelhardt, and while they were obviously not more interesting than half the Big Six, they did more than I expected and have started well enough that I actually want to keep an eye on where this goes instead of just filing them away as another club that had a busy summer.

Everton are much harder to read because Iliman Ndiaye left for City in a deal worth up to £65 million, which still feels strangely low when you look at what other proven Premier League players were going for, and although Tyrique George, Merlin Röhl and Hayden Hackney are good additions individually, so many senior players left that the squad now feels like it has been rebuilt without anyone being completely sure what the final version is supposed to look like. The failed move for Folarin Balogun on the last day only made that feeling worse, because by that point the window already looked messy enough without ending it on another deal they could not get over the line.

Where the Premier League contenders are still short

Serie A: Roma are making me reconsider everything

Roma are probably the team that changed my mind the most. We had Inter, Milan and possibly Juventus ahead of them in the preseason predictions, and obviously I am not going to rewrite an entire season after two matches, but winning 4–0 twice is still a pretty convincing way to make people reconsider what they thought a few weeks ago.

Donyell Malen scored a hat-trick against Fiorentina with Paulo Dybala assisting all three, then Roma beat Lecce by the same score, and while Malen was already good for them last season, he now looks even more dangerous in a team that seems to understand exactly how to use him. They also added Santiago Castro, Rodrigo Mora, Konstantinos Koulierakis, Daniele Ghilardi and Nahuel Molina, while keeping Matías Soulé, Manu Koné and Mile Svilar, which matters just as much because Roma did not have to rip apart the parts of the squad that were already working. They had spent around €123 million before the final deals, and looking at the squad now, it feels like most areas have either improved or at least stayed strong.

The team just looks really good on paper and, so far, on the pitch as well. Svilar is a serious goalkeeper, the defence has quality, Koné staying gives them stability in midfield, and there are enough goals and creativity in attack that they do not have to depend on one player carrying everything. Dybala has basically taken on his own Totti-type role there now, and fair play to him for staying and accepting a lower salary, because whatever happens from here, you can see that Roma means something to him and that he is not just hanging around for one last contract.

I really hope Roma win Serie A, partly because I just prefer them to the other contenders, but also because I think they have a genuine chance now rather than being the fun outsider you mention before eventually picking Inter anyway. Inter are still the safer prediction because the core has been together for years and they keep replacing older players gradually without breaking the structure of the team, which is probably why every season it feels like you are watching roughly the same Inter side and every season they are still there near the top.

Milan could easily finish second if the attack clicks, while Juventus look organised and difficult to beat, although I am still not completely sold on what they are actually trying to become. The squad almost looks like Newcastle's second team mixed with bits of several other clubs, with Nick Woltemade, Pape Matar Sarr and Guglielmo Vicario all there now, and while that could absolutely work, there is not really one clear identity or player who has made me think, yes, this is why Juventus are going to challenge for the title.

Napoli worry me more because losing 2–1 at home to Como is already a bad start, the squad still looks a little light in certain areas, and with a few injuries I can see things becoming uncomfortable quite quickly. Como, on the other hand, are getting harder to treat as just a nice story, because they won in Naples and added Trevoh Chalobah and Yan Couto to a group that was already interesting, so while I would not put them anywhere near the title race yet, European football no longer sounds unrealistic.

La Liga: Atlético are finally looking like a proper team

Atlético are getting dangerous for two reasons, because the new signings obviously help, with Jonathan David arriving on loan from Juventus and Kang-in Lee adding more creativity, while Julián Álvarez staying after months of Barcelona links is probably just as important, but the bigger change is that several of the players who arrived earlier are finally settling into the team and starting to understand what Simeone actually wants from them.

That is why Atlético look much better now than they did for long stretches last season. David and Lee are not walking into a broken attack and being asked to fix everything immediately, they are joining a group that already looks more settled, while Álvarez can stay closer to the areas where he is most dangerous instead of constantly trying to compensate for everything around him. Last season there were too many moments where Atlético looked like several very good attackers standing around and waiting for one of them to invent something, whereas now the movement, spacing and understanding between them already looks much more like an actual team.

Barcelona apparently spent part of the summer convincing themselves that Atlético might suddenly agree to sell Álvarez to a direct rival, which was always a strange idea considering the history between these clubs and especially everything that happened around Griezmann. What exactly did they expect Atlético to do, take one of their best players and politely send him to Barcelona because Barcelona wanted him?

They eventually signed Gabriel Jesus from Arsenal for a reported £8.6 million, and one of our colleagues, who is a Barcelona fan, immediately told me not to worry because “Barcelona’s medical team will get him fit.” Come on. This is a player who has barely managed to stay on the pitch for the last couple of years and at this point looks like he is made from float glass; you almost expect him to touch the ball the wrong way and break something. Jesus can obviously still be useful when he is healthy, but getting him healthy is basically the entire problem, so acting as if Barcelona’s medical team will simply fix him feels slightly optimistic.

Missing out on Álvarez does not ruin Barcelona’s window because Anthony Gordon, Karim Adeyemi, Rodri and João Cancelo still leave them with an extremely strong squad, but Atlético are clearly the happier club with how that particular saga ended, especially when keeping Álvarez also means the new arrivals can be added around him rather than replacing him.

Real Madrid have almost the opposite problem, because there is so much attacking talent that half of it seems to want the same patch of grass. Yan Diomande, Vinícius Júnior, Kylian Mbappé and Rodrygo can all start from the left, so maybe Mourinho’s solution is just to let all four of them run around there together and see what happens, although realistically somebody is going to have to move, somebody is going to lose touches, and sooner or later somebody is probably going to get annoyed. There is far too much quality for this to become a disaster, but fitting the pieces together may be more difficult than simply listing the names.

Behind the big three, Villarreal, Betis and Real Sociedad still look like the most realistic teams fighting for fourth, while Deportivo La Coruña were more interesting than I remembered when we wrote the first predictions. They signed our old king Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who is obviously old now but somehow keeps scoring anyway, and at this point I have learned not to completely write him off just because the birth certificate says I probably should.

Bundesliga: Bayern look unstoppable again, while Leipzig's scouting network strikes again

Bayern were quiet because they did not need to do much. Nathaniel Brown and Ismaël Saibari give them more options, the important players stayed, and the team already looked completely overpowered. Dortmund pushed them in the Supercup and still lost. Across a full season, Bayern should have too much again.

Dortmund at least keep finding interesting young players. This time they went shopping in Greece for Konstantinos Karetsas and Giannis Konstantelias. Karetsas already looked comfortable against Bayern, while Konstantelias scored early before his injury. There will be frustrating weeks because it is Dortmund, but both players look like very good business.

RB Leipzig are probably hated by almost everyone in Germany, although their scouting is still fascinating. They find young players before the biggest clubs are completely convinced, give them proper minutes and usually already know who replaces them when they leave. Marc Guiu, another 20-year-old forward from Chelsea, fits the same model.

This Leipzig team is extremely young, so of course they will have matches where the inexperience shows. Then another youngster appears, looks brilliant for three months and suddenly every rich club wants him. Their scouting network just keeps doing it.

Freiburg are the team I forgot about in our first predictions. They should be in the top-four conversation and may go higher if Dortmund or Leipzig become inconsistent. Leverkusen are harder to trust after Xabi Alonso left and they already lost to a promoted team. I also hope Hamburg and Schalke can get back toward European football, get some proper investment and start looking like the big historic clubs they are. Maybe that is mostly nostalgia. Fine.

Ligue 1: Monaco looked completely unprofessional on deadline day

There is not much I would change from our Ligue 1 prediction, because PSG are still clearly the strongest team, Lens remain the most obvious challenger, and most of the league is operating with budgets that look almost modest compared with what Premier League clubs were spending this summer.

The one deadline-day story that really changed anything was Monaco making a complete mess of the Lamine Camara situation. Chelsea had a written £47 million agreement, Camara had passed his medical and was ready to travel, then Monaco pulled out because they expected to make money from Folarin Balogun’s move to Everton instead, only for that deal to collapse as well, which left everyone involved looking at a situation that probably should never have reached that point.

Chelsea deserve some blame because selling Enzo before Camara was fully secured was obviously a risk, but Monaco created most of this mess themselves, and the end result was a player who had already prepared to leave suddenly having to return to the same club after his transfer was stopped at the last moment. It made their director look completely unprofessional, and in a league where deadline day was otherwise fairly quiet, Monaco somehow managed to become the main story for all the wrong reasons.

What changed from our preseason predictions?

Final verdict: who won the summer transfer window?

Chelsea won the window for me, because they finally moved most of the old squad, somehow kept getting huge fees for players other clubs would have struggled to sell, and still finished with a profit despite making plenty of additions of their own. Missing out on Camara leaves the midfield much thinner than it should be and probably stopped the window from being close to perfect, but it does not erase the amount of work they got done elsewhere.

Manchester City, meanwhile, have the best squad overall, with quality and proper replacements in almost every position, so Maresca now has very little room to complain about not having enough options. Arsenal can still retain the title because the defence and midfield remain so strong, although the attack is already showing why not signing that winger could become annoying, while United improved the midfield and basically left the defence for another summer. Tottenham bought half the market, which at least makes them interesting, although I still have no idea whether buying that many players actually solves the problem of Tottenham being Tottenham.

Outside England, Roma are the team I underestimated most and probably the one I now want to watch more than anyone else, while Atlético finally look like a squad that is starting to come together rather than just a collection of expensive signings. Bayern look overpowered, Leipzig found another group of youngsters who will probably be sold for a fortune in two years, and Ligue 1 was fairly quiet until Monaco's director managed to turn deadline day into his own little disaster.

The old predictions are staying online because I would rather leave the mistakes there and show how the view changed than quietly edit everything afterwards and pretend we had it right from the start. We were too high on Napoli, too careful with Roma, and if I were comparing the full squads again now I would put City above Arsenal, so anyone can read both versions and see exactly what changed once the transfer window closed and the first proper evidence started coming in.