Liverpool transfer failure could be biggest crossroads of Premier League season

Here’s our hyperbolic hot take for the day: Crystal Palace digging their heels in over Marc Guehi at the end of the transfer window is the single most significant event of the entire season.

We’ve only really decided that’s true this morning, but we are now so utterly convinced of its correctness that it has become a core belief that we will defend to our very last breath. It is now up there with such key planks of our entire psyche as ‘F*ck the Celebration Police’, ‘VAR chat is always boring even when it’s us doing it – especially when it’s us doing it’, ‘There is no Conspiracy’ and ‘Erik Lamela is the greatest footballer of all time’.

It definitely isn’t just because it had a huge impact on the powerfully significant Premier League weekend that’s just happened and is fresh in our minds.

Nor because Ibrahima Konate’s entire head is already in Real Madrid.

There was much work done in the transfer window, and much of it – as the rumour gods demand – done desperately and absurdly late. As yet another August ticked into yet another September, we once again found our mind boggled by the shoulder-shrugging willingness of these vast multi-million-pound companies behaving like a student with an essay due the next morning.

And not one of your modern students they have these days who can get ChatGPT to do it. Proper students, old-school students, propelled not by the humanity-destroying tentacles of AI doom but the brain-awakening power of Pro Plus and Red Bull. Better times, simpler times.

What’s wild is that even the very best and most successful and less overtly stupid clubs fall victim to the last-minute caffeine-fuelled deadline-busting panic. Liverpool, for instance, who were so preoccupied with trying to build the best attack the Premier League has ever known that they completely forgot they only really had two centre-backs, one of whom is 34, until the very last minute.

They’d been sort of dimly aware this maybe warranted attention and kind of but not really pursuing Guehi as the solution to this very obvious problem they had within their squad. It was and remains a far more obvious problem than whatever minuscule crack in the attacking ranks has been filled by Alexander Isak.

Liverpool did eventually make a proper bid to actually get the Guehi deal done, and there absolutely was a deal to be done. Palace were listening, Guehi was – understandably – enormously keen on the whole idea.

But they left it too late. With no time to source a replacement and with Oliver Glasner threatening to walk if his squad were so disastrously undermined at this late stage, Palace put their foot down. No deal. He stayed and Liverpool were left short.

The significance of that is already being felt. Obviously by Palace. Obviously by Liverpool. But also at Arsenal and throughout the league.

Liverpool have been left with a squad that contains precisely one conspicuous weakness. That’s no great disaster, as they have already shown by winning five straight league games to kick off the season. But it’s also precisely one more conspicuous weakness than their main rival.

We have to be careful with Arsenal. There’s a fine line to tread with the world’s most terminally online fanbase. They want praise for all the clever and brilliant things their club does, sure, but if anything, Clive, you can sometimes praise them too much. Arsenal must always occupy a curious liminal space: a very big and important and magnificent club doing big and important and magnificent things, but also at the same time plucky little battlers trying to down Goliath armed only with a small catapult and several hundred million pounds worth of player investment.

We do get it. It’s the bottling thing. The danger of being good is that there’s always the risk it’s still not actually good enough, and given the only two possible states of being for good teams in these culture war times are ‘all-conquering champions’ or ‘pathetic embarrassing bottle jobs’, it can easily get very fraught.

To our mind Arsenal are now favourites to win the Premier League. They have negotiated an absurdly tough opening set of fixtures and limited damage to the bare minimum, while also being in possession of the best squad and one that is now battle hardened.

That doesn’t mean they will or should definitely win the league and that failure to do so constitutes bottle-based meme-ageddon. That should be obvious, but these things aren’t always.

Yet that is now where we think we are. But if Guehi was a Liverpool player, it would all look very different. They’d probably still have a perfect record for one thing, and Arsenal’s trip to Newcastle would have taken on a whole different complexion.

The scoreboard pressure is on a whole other level if Liverpool start that game eight points rather than five clear of Arsenal. It’s like in a penalty shoot-out where a decisive penalty to win seems so much easier than one to stay in it.

And that’s before we even get to the impact on Palace, for whom Guehi has remained a vitally important player in what is becoming a truly absurd run.

They are now 18 games unbeaten, a run that includes three meetings with Liverpool, beating Manchester City in a cup final to secure their first ever major trophy, as well as games against Arsenal and Chelsea. They are third in the table, but this is no deceptive early-season mischief. Only Liverpool, Arsenal and Man City have more Premier League points in 2025 than Palace’s 45 from 25 games.

It would be fair to say Palace do not, like Liverpool and above all Arsenal, bring with them a squad boasting much depth. It’s a big reason why they were so reluctant over the Guehi situation.

But they do have a brilliant manager and wonderfully settled, well-drilled first XI. With a following wind and a bit of luck with injuries, we’re really only one or two very minor bottlings from the big two before we all get to start the ‘Doing a Leicester’ conversations, and that’s when the real fun begins.

It’s not all because of Marc Guehi, but it is quite a lot because of Marc Guehi.