Man Utd trio in top five as Wirtz reverts in ranking of 20 biggest summer signings

Viktor Gyokeres is a big mover after a run of nine goals in 12 games in the title run-in, while Florian Wirtz is going the other way as touches of the ball for Liverpool serve as reminders that he’s still playing.

Here’s where the players ranked three games into the Premier League season and after nine, then 15, before 22, 28, and finally 32, with their previous positions included in brackets.

20) Alexander Isak (n/a, 19, 19, 20, 20, 20)

Any hope that the floodgates might open after his first Premier League goal against West Ham in November – a fine finish it was too – faded dramatically with arguably even worse performances to strengthen claims that Isak might just be the biggest flop in Premier League history before a second goal came with an ankle injury that’s kept him out for the vast majority of 2026.

Arne Slot insisted he saw “a player much stronger” upon his return last month but after a third Premier League goal arrived against Crystal Palace he’s back on the treatment table again. Karma’s a b****.

19) Yoane Wissa (n/a, 18, 18, 19, 19)

A more than cheeky £30m offer from Fenerbahce for Wissa, six months after his protracted £55m transfer from Brentford and just 477 minutes into his Newcastle career gave a pretty clear indication as to how they view his time thus far on Tyneside.

Having missed the first four months of the season either sulking to force the transfer, injured, or both, Wissa has scored three goals since returning to action at the start of December in just over 800 minutes of action.

Eddie Howe clearly isn’t convinced despite the Newcastle boss insisting before the Crystal Palace defeat last month that he “chased and endorsed” all of their terrible signings last summer.

Wissa came on in the 95th minute of that game and incurred the further wrath of Newcastle fans by swapping shirts with match-winner Jean-Phillippe Mateta after ‘liking’ Brian Brobbey’s Instagram story celebrating Sunderland’s derby win over Newcastle. Read the room, mate.

18) Anthony Elanga (11, 17, 18, 19, 19, 18)

We all nodded in agreement with Dave Tickner’s sage assertion that while Elanga might not be worth £55m to any other team, he was to Newcastle because of their excellence in transition on the counter-attack, but are now very much distancing ourselves from that fool of a journalist/man.

He spent much of the first half of the season watching Jacob Murphy or a left winger playing in his position on the right. An increase in game time at the turn of the year coincided with Newcastle’s dramatic slump to the brink of a relegation battle.

He creeps ahead of Wissa courtesy of his Nou Camp brace and can take solace in the knowledge he will be a tricky answer to a quiz question in years to come after that 7-2 Champions League defeat, but three goals and two assists in over 2000 minutes of football is a shocking return for a winger in a Champions League team.

Howe made his feelings on the summer signings abundantly clear on Saturday as Wissa, Elanga and Nick Woltemade all watched from the bench as a front three of Joelinton, Will Osula and Murphy drove them to their first Premier League victory since mid-March.

17) Jamie Gittens (12, 16, 15, 15, 17, 16)

Yeah, we forgot about him too. He’s not featured for Chelsea since January as he recovers from a hamstring injury, but in truth his performances barely registered before that anyway.

He’s done some good things – a stunner against Wolves in the League Cup, a nice assist in defeat at Leeds – but still feels nailed on to be the next young forward to drown in the stagnant pool of attacking talent that Stamford Bridge has become in the BlueCo era and can’t take much heart from being below Alejandro Garnacho at the bottom of a winger pecking order which has been stretched this season by Cole Palmer moving back to the right to accommodate naughty boy Enzo Fernandez at No.10.

16) Nick Woltemade (n/a, 2, 3, 6, 11, 15)

We will forever have a soft spot for footballers who don’t look as though they should be good at football. Combine that with him being the cause of great mirth for naysayers in the summer having joined for a fee way above his market value as Newcastle’s fourth or fifth-choice striker and him having to replace £125m defector Isak and we were tucking into a veritable jambalaya of joy at seeing Woltemade’s early goalscoring form at St James’ Park.

But the downturn has been considerable. He’s scored just one goal in his last 26 appearances and initial claims that he might just be the ideal striker for Newcastle as he drops deep to allow Anthony Gordon and other flying wingers to run in behind him turned into suggestions he was the worst possible foil for them as he doesn’t have the pace to get into the box to meet their crosses.

Howe moved Woltemade deeper to accommodate a No.9 who can move at more than trotting speed and Wayne Rooney wasn’t at all happy with what he’s seen from the Germany international in that role and apparently his manager wasn’t hugely enamoured either as Woltemade didn’t feature in either game against Barcelona and has watched Osula from the bench in the last four Premier League games, failing to even get on in the win over Brighton.

15) Alejandro Garnacho (n/a, 14, 13, 12, 14)

There remains a huge demand for Garnacho content, chiefly on the basis of his performances providing opportunities to either rub his talent in the faces of Manchester United fans or grant them space to gloat at him failing to realise it. Some outlets can’t help themselves even when he’s not playing.

There’s been more of the latter than the former, but in truth he’s been precisely as good as we all expected. He’s been fine.

The problem for Garnacho is that fine isn’t and will never be good enough for Chelsea and we’ve seen very little to suggest that he will ever reach his actual potential, let alone the absurdly overinflated one built on the back of him playing quite a bit for for a very poor Manchester United as a teenager.

14) Tijjani Reijnders (6, 9, 11, 11, 14, 13)

A wonderful performance against Wolves on the opening day to suggest he might be the second coming of Kevin De Bruyne, David Silva and/or Yaya Toure has since been put into perspective by Wolves’ rock-bottom status.

That display was followed by a string of nothing outings from Reijnders, who’s shown mere glimpses of quality since while large periods of games go by in which you forget he’s playing, which is quite the feat for a midfielder in a Pep Guardiola team.

He played no part in the Carabao Cup final or the FA Cup quarter-final and has featured for just 65 minutes across their last nine Premier League games. Guardiola had evidently decided that Manchester City’s best bet of winning a remarkable domestic treble is without Reijnders in the team and the abiding memory of the Dutchman in his debut season looks set to be his struggle to extricate himself from a Pep headlock in the dramatic FA Cup comeback vs Southampton.

13) Xavi Simons (n/a, 13, 9, 13, 16, 17)

Very telling that a talented young forward in need of nurture to fulfil his huge potential must be absolutely gutted not to have secured a move to Chelsea, where such players typically go to stagnate.

There were plenty of apologists insisting that Simons would have done rather better under a different, less conservative, more forward-thinking manager than Thomas Frank. The question also has to be asked as to which attacking player could have made a tangible difference in a Tottenham team this bad.

Dejan Kulusevski, for one, and the concern for Tottenham fans for much of the season was that the football happened all-too frequently around rather than through Simons; we could list a dozen high-profile playmakers who have arrived in the Premier League and left soon after for whom that was the case.

A brace against Atletico Madrid strengthened suggestions that he’s just not up to the famous Premier League rigours and just at the point at which it looked as though he might be key to Spurs avoiding relegation with a goal and assist in the draw with Brighton and another encouraging display in the win over Wolves the poor sod tore his ACL.

A huge win over Aston Villa means Simons may well be playing Premier League football next season. Is it a coincidence that Spurs’ best performance of the year came with him on the sidelines? Yeah, probably.

12) Noni Madueke (7, 10, 5, 9, 12, 12)

We may never have been more invested in an Arsenal signing doing well after the #NOTOMADUEKE petition but have also struggled with the thought of those unthinkable tw*ts lacking any sort of human decency being allowed to enjoy the football he’s playing.

Here’s hoping they hung their heads in shame as his piledriver against Club Brugge cannoned in off the underside of the crossbar in recognition that they are wholly underserving of nice things.

But Madueke will only ever be one performance lacking end product away from being lambasted on social media by those purporting to be Gooners and having offered seven goals and four assists in over 2000 minutes of football it’s been a debut season of rumbling discontent.

11) Milos Kerkez (10, 18, 16, 14, 13, 10)

For the first few weeks of the campaign he was playing as though he was constantly trying to make up for mistakes he hadn’t made yet but then duly did make in desperation to impress. He didn’t know where to be or what to do so tried to be everywhere doing everything, and was therefore usually nowhere, doing nothing.

Arne Slot’s move to a style of football some would call functional and others would see as the most turgid sh*te they’ve witnessed at Anfield for many a moon has minimised the mistakes – from Kerkez and any of the other culprits.

But although we’ve seen a bit of an upswing from Kerkez in attack – his attacking intent, at least – Liverpool would have expected more than two and two assists in over 3000 minutes of football from a left-back signed largely on the basis of his raiding quality on the wing.

Reports of Liverpool looking to sign competition for his spot following Andy Robertson’s departure rather than an understudy offers a pretty clear indication as to how things have gone.

Kerkez looks set to be given the chance to prove his worth in what remains of the season following Robertson’s “dreadful” display against Manchester United.

10) Eberechi Eze (n/a, 5, 6, 10, 10, 11)

His first Arsenal goal being the winner against his former club and five of his other six in the Premier League coming against the Gunners’ bitter and awful north London rivals whom he was days, perhaps even hours away from joining instead of them suggests a) Eze’s return to his boyhood club was meant to be, b) The Narrative is all powerful, and c) he’s not got close to what Arsenal expected from him in his debut season.

The only Premier League game in the previous 11 he started before the NLD he was hooked at half-time in and increased faith from Arteta in the form of three consecutive starts following that second star turn this season yielded nothing but confirmation that his innovative style is wholly unsuited to a brutally pragmatic Arsenal.

But he scored the stunning winner against Newcastle to show he has the star quality to make the difference in the title run-in.

9) Florian Wirtz (14, 15, 12, 8, 5, 5)

Wirtz went from being one of the major problems in a mistake-ridden, brittle Liverpool side to the only solution in an almost entirely toothless one in record time before moving to the middle ground and now sliding back into “neat and tidy” apathy.

he currently finds himself in as a player who occasionally makes a difference in a team more reliant on a teenager to do the business for them.

Less than four months on from being dropped as one of the major scapegoats after a run of four defeats on the bounce, his absence in the fortunate win over Nottingham Forest and shock defeat to Wolves was keenly felt as Liverpool couldn’t string two passes together let alone create chances.

The huge concern for Liverpool fans is that it’s still not clear whether Arne Slot or the next Liverpool manager should be building their team around him next term.

The defeat to Manchester United granted the opportunity for a comparison with Bruno Fernandes, from which Wirtz didn’t didn’t come out well as questions are raised as to whether he has the character to grab games by the scruff of the neck like the Red Devils captain.

8) Mohammed Kudus (3, 1, 1, 4, 6, 8)

Suspicions that those questioning Kudus’ price tag after a very ordinary output of five goals and three assists last season were missing the obvious ‘but he was playing for West Ham’ caveat were confirmed through his displays for Spurs at the start of this season and their results without him.

He ploughed a lone furrow as Spurs’ only real attacking outlet before his injury. The 1.37 PPG Tottenham won with Kudus in the team would be enough to see them comfortably mid-table if stretched over their 27 games. The 0.67 PPG without him would see them already relegated on 25 points

7) Hugo Ekitike (5, 7, 7, 5, 7, 6)

Started superbly with three goals and an assist in his first five Premier League games to raise questions as to why Liverpool spent £125m on another striker, then endured a barren spell with no goals or assists in eight games – largely off the bench – while Slot tried and failed to bed in his £125m striker, ahead of five goals in three games upon being reinstated to the starting XI to again raise questions as to why they signed an alternative £125m striker, before three in his last 12 has granted space to ponder whether Liverpool might actually need their £125m striker.

He was branded a flop and a “disgrace” for failing to chase the ball around the pitch in the Parcs des Princes but no matter how you see or spin Ekitike’s debut season, 17 goals in your first campaign in English football for one of the worst Liverpool teams in living memory is very good going. They would have been nowhere without him.

6) Viktor Gyokeres (8, 12, 14, 16, 9, 9)

It looked for a long time as though Arsenal would win the Premier League title despite signing the wrong striker in the summer. They were winning while Gyokeres made fruitless runs in behind opposition defences who would inevitably crumble under the pressure of a Declan Rice set piece and walk away with nothing from games Arsenal had neither played well in nor ever looked like they wouldn’t claim three points from.

A Gyokeres nadir against Nottingham Forest coinciding with Kai Havertz’s return to fitness suggested Arsenal may win the Premier League title quite literally without Gyokeres rather than metaphorically so, or at best as a flat-track super sub.

Fistfuls of salt were required when his zenith arrived against Tottenham, as two very Gyokeres goals and the dramatic change from a timid striker to the brutal one who scored a gazillion goals in Portugal suggested he might be the man to get them over the line.

At the very least fingers of blame will be pointed elsewhere if Arsenal bottle the Premier League and Gyokeres may yet be hailed as the reason they win it as his brace in the win over Fulham made it nine goals in 12 for the Big Swede.

5) Benjamin Sesko (13, 11, 17, 17, 8, 7)

The abiding memories of Sesko’s contribution to English football for a long time were him stepping up 10th in the penalty shootout defeat to Grimsby Town having put a stoppage-time chance over the bar from roughly four yards out to ensure the game went that far, and getting injured when clean through against Tottenham.

A brace against Burnley to double his United goals tally offered promise that was quickly and fairly comprehensively extinguished when he didn’t make it off the bench in Michael Carrick’s first game in charge against Manchester City, which was also the latest Best Manchester United Performance Since Sir Alex Ferguson.

When Sesko only played a very brief role in the next clash to challenge that game’s exalted status, the 3-2 win over Arsenal, it was hard to see how he might force his way into Carrick’s team.

But boy did he push. Talk of space being made for him in the XI which began with his stoppage-time winner over Fulham became a clamour when he scored an even later goal to equalise from the bench against West Ham and Carrick bowed to the clamour of all clamours after another winner against Everton.

Another winner against Crystal Palace after being granted that start suggested he might have nailed down a spot in the XI, but he was back as a scoring super-sub in the victory over Aston Villa before returning to the starting lineup and finding the back of the net against Brentford and Liverpool.

It all adds up to Sesko scoring nine Premier League goals in his last 685 minutes of football for United. He’s the real deal, folks.

4) Martin Zubimendi (4, 3, 4, 1, 1, 4)

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

As suckers for low stress, technically brilliant defensive midfielders we were swooning over the Spaniard for much of the season. While so many others struggle to come to terms with the pace and power of the Premier League, his transition was seamless.

His goal against Chelsea was sublime and the surprisingly conceited Declan Rice credited Zubimendi for his own “unstoppable” form this season. But well, well, well, how the turn tables…

The Arsenal fans turned on him following the defeat to Bournemouth, at which point they might reasonably have begun to question when they last saw the 27-year-old play a forward pass.

With fan frustration seemingly mirrored by some of his teammates as they gestured for him to at least turn on the ball and switch play rather than playing a pass straight back to the player he received the ball from, Zubimendi is staking a claim as the biggest Arsenal bottlejob given the heights he’s fallen from in his debut season.

A great improvement in Arsenal in the victory over Fulham with Myles Lewis-Skelly playing in his stead has put the Spaniard under further pressure.

If they win the title he will be a big factor in that triumph given his form for the majority of the season, which means he remains high in this ranking, but lose it and a sizeable portion of blame will be laid at his now cement-laden feet.

3) Bryan Mbeumo (9, 4, 2, 2, 3, 2)

Mbeumo has bucked a very long trend in being a high-quality footballer who arrives at Old Trafford and continues being that very same high-quality footballer. Nine goals and three assists in 22 appearances is a very serviceable return.

We do, though, have some doubts over his use long-term if United want to win games of football through control, as we assume they do and will probably have to if they’re to challenge for titles. As was the case at Brentford, Mbeumo is a menace in transition and on the counter-attack but limited when a game calls for an opposition team to be ground down.

We’re being picky though, finding faults that in truth we don’t really know will be a problem as United are yet to find that control in their football. As it stands, Mbeumo is a perfect Manchester United forward.

2) Matheus Cunha (5, 8, 10, 3, 4, 2)

We were tempted to hand him top spot for that falling-over pass to Bryan Mbeumo against Crystal Palace alone and that moment stands as a perfect example as to why – and we recognise our hypocrisy here – a forward’s worth shouldn’t be boiled down to goals and assists.

That pass doesn’t fit in The Man’s tiny little goal contribution box but will be remembered by United fans and anyone else watching as one of the moments of the season. It was glorious, and although Cunha’s goals and assists for Wolves played a big part in him signing for United, there was always a sense that he was more than a numbers machine.

He has magnetic energy, he’s a vibe train, a footballer who’s already proven beyond doubt that he has the character required to avoid cowing under the pressure at Old Trafford as so many big-money signing have done before him.

1) Joao Pedro (1, 6, 8, 7, 2, 1)

Genuine hope that Chelsea may have found a fully-formed striker to lead their attack after two goals and three assists in his opening four Premier League games faded into suggestions he may actually be better suited behind a central striker and thus find himself out of the team owing to the superior talents of Palmer and Fernandez in that role after just four further goals in his next 17 appearances.

But we’re now wholly convinced by Joao Pedro’s brilliance, which shone through while Chelsea soiled their bed under Liam Rosenior and even did in the harrowing defeat to Nottingham Forest as he put a cherry on the turd with a sublime overhead kick in stoppage time to take him to 20 goals in all competitions and 15 in the Premier League in his debut season for the Blues.