Man Utd dithering and transfer window hyper-focus among season’s biggest mistakes

We’re nine games into the Premier League season now. That’s basically a quarter of the way through. It’s more than enough time to be making firm and unshakeable calls on who has f*cked it and precisely where.

It is these lads in these places.

10) Newcastle United 2.0
In Newcastle’s obvious defence, they didn’t have a huge amount of choice about the summer of 2026 being a rebuilding job. But deciding to try and polish the unfortunate turd that was left on their doorstep was nevertheless bold.

They may not have had much choice about sanctioning the departures of Anthony Gordon, Sandro Tonali and Bruno Guimaraes, even if that all contributed to Eddie Howe also deciding to sod it all off, and it’s not entirely their fault they were also unable to convince their top targets to come.

But deciding that the way to therefore go was to take a whole load of speculative punts on players all over the pitch and the manager is the sort of f*cking around that invites a finding out in the modern Premier League where the number of teams that can genuinely afford to engage in shenanigans on this scale without any real risk of coming relegation-level unstuck doesn’t even extend to the entirety of the now largely theoretical Big Six.

The good news for Newcastle is that there are at least a dozen Premier League sides who could conceivably contrive to find themselves in relegation danger this season. The bad news is that they are absolutely one of them. They’re on the same points as Ipswich and Hull, FFS. This just isn’t the dream they were sold, is it?

9) Nottingham Forest thinking Liam Delap was a £40m answer to a genuine question
Forest stayed up pretty handily in the end last season despite a flirtation with danger and rotating cast of managers. Then they got Oliver Glasner in, which was certainly bold even if it did mean treating Vitor Pereira like dirt.

But it was also pretty clear Forest would be in need of a new striker, with injuries and the cruel passage of time leaving Chris Wood a pale imitation of the man who plundered 34 goals in 67 Premier League appearances in the 23/24 and 24/25 seasons, all while still performing his primary role of Leaving Centre-Backs Knowing They’d Been In A Game.

For genuinely inexplicable reasons, Nottingham Forest decided Liam Delap was that striker. It’s easy to be sniffy about the way Chelsea operate their player-trading-with-a-sideline-in-football business model but when you can sign a player for £25m, watch him score one goal in 28 Premier League games and then sell him for a profit, you do start to drift towards ‘Don’t hate the player, hate the game’ territory.

Anyway, Forest’s folly currently has them residing inside the bottom three as the division’s lowest scorers as Glasner’s back three continues to stymie their best player in Morgan Gibbs-White while the lesser players it’s supposed to help simply prove themselves to be, well, lesser players.

Delap has at least already matched his Premier League goal tally from last season but the real quiz as far as we’re concerned is that Liam Delap Premier League Goals has fallen further behind Liam Delap Premier League Bookings after two more yellow cards this season. The current standings are now 18-14 in favour of cautions.

8) Liverpool thinking Bradley Barcola was a £100m answer to a genuine question
Let’s be clear here that this is a very different scale of grievance to the Delap one. We’re not saying Barcola is a bad player. No, we’re saying Delap is. Barcola is a very good footballer and perfectly cromulent addition to any Premier League squad.

But he was still basically a PSG reserve. No shame in that – they are really very good indeed – but a PSG reserve does not a £100m solution to your creative shortcomings make.

With Florian Wirtz continuing to find the adaptation to the Premier League fiendishly hard, Liverpool needed a more reliable hit-the-ground-running option, a safer bet than the PSG man.

He has managed a couple of Premier League assists now and that cheeky hat-trick in the Champions League. Like we say, he is certainly not without his charms. But you don’t drop a nine-figure sum on a player for November to come around and his only goals to have been against LASK, and for your team to be among the worst in the entire Premier League when it comes to creating clear-cut chances.

Wirtz has been and continues to be a disappointment but we don’t blame Liverpool for going all-in on him. It was seen as a right coup when they landed him from under the noses of all Europe’s biggest beasts.

With Barcola it just always looked like what it is: paying double what a player’s worth and expecting – needing – him to deliver double what he’s capable of.

Liverpool v Arsenal tactics: How Reds were restricted to ZERO shots on target

7) Aston Villa threatening Jamie Carragher with legal action for hurty words
If we were a football club that was determined to establish itself among the best in the country and had done a great deal of good work over several years in attempting to make that happen, we would simply not then respond to a podcaster’s opinion in the most tinpot small-club fashion imaginable.

Aston Villa were so incensed by Jamie Carragher saying that Aston Villa would never be as big as Manchester United that they had no option but to completely prove his point. It’s a shame, in a way, that he’s now apologised and there will be no follow-through from Villa on their threats, because we’d be fascinated to see precisely how they were actually going to try and go about it.

It’s a really interesting thing about clubs who want to infiltrate and break up the established elite. Your Villas, Your Newcastles. There’s a cake-and-eat-it element to it where they want to be treated like big clubs right up until they want to remain plucky underdogs fighting the good fight.

Villa and Newcastle have in the last couple of years, like Spurs, ended embarrassingly long trophy droughts. But while Spurs’ trophy cabinet was such a national source of banter that at one point even the Dulux dog was getting involved, Villa and Newcastle’s even dustier trophy cabinets were off limits.

We’re not asking for sympathy for Spurs here. Or for Manchester United, or Liverpool, or Arsenal – clubs who can’t do anything without prompting a thousand pissy articles furiously demanding this outcome or that blood sacrifice. Just noting that if you really want to be a big club in big 2026, you are going to have to accept some attention and criticism without resorting to pathetic behaviour of a sort that would make Mr Marinakis blush.

6) Man United dithering over a visibly finished manager, again, and writing off another season, again
Talking of Man United, let’s have a go at those f*cking idiots. We’ll give them a pass for making Michael Carrick’s appointment a permanent one in the summer. We can’t say we’re surprised at how it’s turned out, but that was always the gamble they took when giving him half a season on easy mode and – listen, fair play – he took the chance he was given back in January and really ran with it.

You could sense United’s reluctance to go permanent with Carrick and why, but he had made it almost impossible for them to do anything but at least give him the chance to fail.

But to have given him that chance, watched him fail, and then done nothing about it is unacceptable.

It might be 4d chess from Jason Wilcox and the INEOS gang. What they’ve done by basically letting it be known that Carrick remained the manager after the 3-0 defeat to Bournemouth because the rest of them couldn’t really agree on who should replace him is to restore him to de facto interim status.

Not one person inside or outside Manchester United now expects Carrick to still be manager at the end of the upcoming international break, and that might be just the thing to burgle a couple of results before binning him off. He’s proven himself very capable in an interim role with a clearly defined end point.

But it’s not that, is it? Not really. It’s just shambolic and embarrassing dithering from a club that has entirely lost its way. Carrick is the most ‘not the problem, but not the solution either’ manager yet at a club that has employed a series of such doomed souls, and it is now entirely absurd that he remains in charge when so visibly, obviously done.

United have effectively written off games against Chelsea, Roma and Aston Villa as a necessary sacrifice to their own inability to act decisively. We’re not even sure those making the decision know who actually needs to make the decision.

The relegation talk is probably an overexcited overreaction to a quite bad run coupled with Spurs’ heroic efforts last season to truly redefine what a bad Big Six season could look like. But the chances of this season being anything other than another wasted one for United shrink by the day and by the game while Carrick is allowed to remain a dead man walking.

READ: Man Utd tactics exposed Chelsea before their usual self-implosion

5) Spurs taking so bafflingly long to give their most obvious and best midfield a go
You’d just think, wouldn’t you, that at some point during a painful run of six games without a win – the first four of them without a goal, the first five of them without a huge amount of hope – you might give the new £185m midfield pairing you bought in the summer a go?

For whatever reason, Roberto De Zerbi took a strange amount of convincing on Mateus Fernandes’ obvious charms. We really aren’t sure why, because he’s a) very good and b) just looks every inch a De Zerbi midfielder.

His progressive passing instincts and more aggressive intent offer a perfect complement to Sandro Tonali’s more effortless-looking game-controlling gliding around the pitch. Together they give Spurs the kind of all-bases-covered midfield they haven’t had anything remotely like since the Dembele-Wanyama days.

Tonali has been a fixture in the Spurs midfield all season but, although Fernandes has played some part in every one of Spurs’ Premier League games, it’s only in the last two that they’ve been properly paired together as a double pivot behind a number 10.

Those two games now account for 33 per cent of Tottenham’s Premier League wins and 29 per cent of Tottenham’s Premier League clean sheets in 2026. And 50 per cent of their Premier League wins at Stamford Bridge ever. We’d probably stick with it for all the games from now on, to be honest.

4) Chelsea finally making some signings for on-field reasons but forgetting that defending exists
They got a proper manager instead of a pliant company man! They bought in some really good players for the here and now to make a difference on the pitch instead of on a spreadsheet! As a result they’ve scored loads of goals and have often looked like a really good football team! But defending is still a thing! And Chelsea don’t have anyone who’s really any good at it! Certainly not good enough to sustain a proper title challenge anyway!

3) Sunderland putting all their effort into retaining Granit Xhaka rather than strengthening the squad
Understandable that they wanted to keep him because he’s really very good indeed and a huge part of what made Sunderland so good in their first season back in the top flight.

But Sunderland are so far learning the painful lesson that standing still in this league means taking a vast step back. Even without the added workload of a European campaign, taking last season’s squad and adding a few (undeniably exciting) youngsters and Tottenham’s fifth-choice centre-back would be asking for trouble.

With the European tour, it’s starting to look like a club self-fulfilling itself into second-season syndrome. They are in big trouble.

2) Man City going all in on Enzo Fernandez
With reports suggesting Man City knew back in the summer of the impending guilty verdict on almost all the charges they faced, it’s easy enough to imagine all their frenzied transfer activity as one final f*ck you to the Premier League, a determination to go out in a blaze of main-character glory.

In truth, it’s probably more a reflection on the sheer hubristic arrogance that allows them – even now – to believe they’ll just probably get away with it, pretty much. And you know what? They still might. It is going to be a ballache to give them a fitting punishment, which is why it was so clever of them to make sure they committed such vast amounts of cheating instead of falling into the trap your Evertons and Forests found themselves snagged in whereby they committed only relatively small and thus easily punished amounts of cheating.

But whatever drove it, signing Elliot Anderson as your new Rodri and then just deciding very late on to meet Chelsea’s deliberately outrageous asking price for the highly talented but enormously volatile Enzo Fernandez was proper last days of Rome stuff.

If the current chapter of the City story ends as surely it still must, then the wantonly frivolous and provocatively ostentatious capture of Fernandez will look like such an obvious precursor to the sh*t hitting the fan and being splattered all across the last 15 years of Premier League lore that absolutely everyone will pretend they said so at the time.

1) Man United’s insistence on addressing only one area of the pitch per summer
We were going to limit this to one entry per club in keeping with standard Top 10 protocols, but it would be quite wrong to do so here because that would be to let United off the hook when they have clearly made a greater number of wrong-headed decisions than any other club.

For some reason, they seem to think it very clever to make it their business to improve one area and one area only of their squad in any given summer. Last year it was the attack. This year it was the midfield.

And the fact they were in urgent need elsewhere – especially a striker but especially a left-back – could not be allowed to disturb the purity of that vision.

We assume the plan is to address the defence next summer, because lord knows that defence is in need of addressing. But also it would be funny if they just skip it and go right back to the attack. Which, in all seriousness, will also need sorting out.

But even having decided that they don’t have the bandwidth to be trying to complete transfers in more than one area of the pitch at a time, United could still have done a better job. Sandro Tonali, Elliot Anderson, Mateus Fernandes and Bruno Guimaraes were all Premier League-proven midfielders who moved within the league this summer, and United were either not that bothered by them, blown out of the water by f*cking Spurs of all clubs, or both.

We can understand that there’s an attempt at United now to avoid the expensive superstar-obsessed spending of previous regimes, and that making a cut-price deal for Youri Tielemans looks very clever. But they still then went out and overpaid for Carlos Baleba and Andrey Santos. They still ended up spending an awful lot of money to have a far less impressive midfield overhaul than Spurs, who a) are Spurs and b) did manage to also sign some useful players in other positions too.

Absolutely none of United’s business looks very clever now, with several United fans only half-joking when wondering if it might be at all possible to find a way to bring a 34-year-old Casemiro back to the club, with the midfield looking no better – worse if anything – for all the attention it received while the defence in particular has been left desperately lacking by inattention.