Liverpool set for quadruple after Chiesa: Rubbish transfer windows that preceded brilliant seasons
Liverpool are yet to play a Proper Team yet this season and won’t at any point, and that surely means they’re on for the quadruple, which – try as we might to belittle their achievements – would be alright.
Even if they don’t win the lot they’re very much on course to join themselves and four other teams in enjoying brilliant seasons following terrible transfer windows having this summer signed a winger we all knew wasn’t going to play, hasn’t played and won’t, and a £25m goalkeeper they decided they don’t need in a season in which Caoimhin Kelleher has shown enough to suggest they won’t ever.
Anyway, here are eight previous examples of teams thriving in the season after a poor summer transfer window.
Manchester United: 1995/1996
Tony Coton (£500k, Manchester City)
Quite the baller move from Sir Alex Ferguson after ceding the Premier League title to Blackburn the season before to decide all they needed to do over the summer to surpass Kenny Dalglish, Alan Shearer and the lads was to sign a 34-year-old goalkeeper who went onto make no appearances in their double-winning campaign.
Manchester United: 1999/2000
Mikael Silvestre (£4m, Inter), Massimo Taibi (£4.5m, Venezia), Quinton Fortune (£1.5m, Atletico Madrid), Mark Bosnich (free, Aston Villa)
It’s possible that they got a bit too big for their boots after the treble, or Ferguson took the If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It approach. Either way, their blasé approach to the transfer market that summer paid off, as United won 12 more Premier League points compared to the season before as runaway champions.
More than a bit unfair to tar Silvestre with the Taibi and Bosnich brush given he made 361 appearances for the Red Devils, but it’s perhaps not the marquee post-Champions League glory signing some may have expected.
We can’t imagine him tweeting (or shouting into a crowd in the absence of social media) ‘I’m signing for the champion’s league winner’ would have let to quite the same losing of the sh*t from fans as it did when the big-arsed Belgian did it in 2012.
Chelsea: 2002/2003
Enrique de Lucas (free, Espanyol), Filipe Oliveira (£500,000, Braga)
Jesper Gronkjaer scored the £1bn goal on the final day but it was 36-year-old Gianfranco Zola who drove Chelsea to Champions League qualification in what was both his final and most productive season at Stamford Bridge. Legendary status assured for him if it wasn’t already as fourth place encouraged Roman Abramovich to invest.
Thirteen new players arrived in his first summer and hundreds thereafter during the Russian oligarch’s 19 trophy-laden years at the helm. And what suddenly looks as though it could be another productive era under new ownership is still all thanks to Claudio Ranieri and his team in 2002/2003, though not so much marquee summer addition Enrique de Lucas, who got no goals and no assists in what was his only season in the Premier League.
Arsenal: 2003/2004
Philippe Senderos (£1.35m, Servette), Jens Lehmann (£1.5m, Dortmund), Johan Djourou (free, Etoile Carouge), Gael Clichy (£250,000, Cannes), Cesc Fabregas (free, Barcelona)
A rarely experienced addendum in Arsenal fans’ gloating over the over-egged excellence of their Invincible season is the Gunners spending only slightly more than £3m the summer before they went unbeaten and soared to the title by 11 points.
Jens Lehmann played every Premier League, Champions League and FA Cup game upon his £1.5m arrival from Germany and was therefore critical to their success as well as being mad as a box of frogs.
But while Cesc Fabregas became one of the stars of his generation and went onto captain Arsenal before achieving things of significance with Barcelona and then Chelsea, Gael Clichy was the only other summer arrival to contribute during the 38-game run, making seven appearances as Ashley Cole’s understudy,
Chelsea: 2009/2010
Yuri Zhirkov (£18m, CSKA Moscow), Daniel Sturridge (£6m, Manchester City), Nemanja Matic (£1m, MFK Kosice), Ross Turnbull (free, Middlesbrough)
Ask Chelsea fans their favourite ever season and they will probably say 2004/2005, when Jose Mourinho arrived and set fire to the Red Cartel. The combination of his magnetism and it being the first Premier League title makes it very difficult to even consider an alternative.
Carlo Ancelotti probably doesn’t even want them to – he’s an unfussy winner, and led Chelsea to their first ever domestic double playing some brilliantly attacking football that saw them score the most goals in a Premier League season (103), including eight on the final day against Wigan to see off the challenge of Manchester United.
Neither Zhirkov nor Matic scored a goal – with the latter leaving for Benfica before coming back as the dominant midfielder we later saw in Mourinho’s second spell – Sturridge got five, and not a sausage from Turnbull.
Tottenham: 2018/2019
n/a
Just imagine the smug grin on Daniel Levy’s face had they beaten Liverpool in that diabolically bad Champions League final after spending literally nothing in the summer.
‘What’s that Mauricio, you want £60m for Tanguy Ndombele? Don’t need him, mate.’ Would have been a good call as it turned out with Poch out on his ear in November and Jose Mourinho arriving to fat-shame Ndombele and call the rest of the Spurs squad Specialists In Failure or something equally motivational.
But they were good when they signed no one. Man City, Ajax, remember all that? Yeah. Lovely.
Liverpool: 2019/2020
Sepp van den Berg (£4m, PEC Zwolle), Adrian (free, West Ham,), Andy Lonergan (free, Middlesbrough), Harvey Elliott (Fulham, £1.5m)
“We have solutions for all the situations,” Klopp said when asked at the end of the transfer window about his side’s relative inactivity. Not half.
Liverpool went unbeaten and won 26 of their first 27 Premier League games of the season to give themselves a huge lead at the top of the table that Manchester City got nowhere clawing back, with the Red finishing 18 points clear of Pep Guardiola’s side come the end of the campaign.
Adrian played his part, with Liverpool winning all 11 games he subbed in for the injured Alisson, but neither Van den Berg nor Lonergan made a Premier League appearance and Elliott made just two.
Chelsea: 2019/2020
Mateo Kovacic (£40m, Real Madrid)
They qualified for the Champions League under Frank f***ing Lampard.