Top ten Premier League defectors features more players from Liverpool than Man Utd
Us Premier League-centric Football365ers do occasionally venture beyond the green and pleasant land to take in the football that inferior leagues have to offer, obviously paying particular attention to potential Premier League acquisitions and those who took the ill-advised step to leave these shores.
Some of them end up doing rather well (easier, isn’t it?) and we’ve picked out the top ten players who left the Premier League in the summer based on their performances for their new clubs so far. We’ve only considered players in Europe’s top five leagues – or four, as we’re discounting players who have swapped one Premier League club for another – as it’s early days in our journey to full football enlightenment.
Jarell Quansah (Liverpool to Bayer Leverkusen, £30m)
If Arne Slot and Richard Hughes weren’t already regretting selling Quansah this summer after failing to land Marc Guehi on deadline day, Ibrahima Konate’s consistent bed-sh*tting since has surely hammered home that remorse.
The 22-year-old scored six minutes into his Leverkusen debut and has played every minute of nine games in all competitions, retaining his place in the starting XI under Kasper Hjulmand after the comically brief tenure of Erik ten Hag. The German side have picked up ten points from their four games under the new manager, conceding just three goals.
When exactly does that buyback clause become active?
Nayef Aguerd (West Ham to Marseille, £20m)
Returned after a season-long loan with Real Sociedad to concede 11 goals in three games for West Ham, and while that evidence suggests he’s a very lucky centre-back to have received the call from Marseille, conceding just one goal in four games for the Ligue 1 side suggests Aguerd may not have been the problem.
Marcus Rashford (Manchester United to Barcelona, loan)
Barcelona president Joan Laporta can’t believe his luck. He and the other Catalan bosses are ‘stunned’ that they will be able to secure Rashford’s £26m ‘massive bargain’ transfer at the end of the season.
After that wholly predictable and depressing hokum about Barcelona wanting to ‘send Rashford home’ after a couple of games, he’s scored three goals – including the outstanding brace against Newcastle at St James’ Park – and claimed five assists to assert himself as a fixture in Hansi Flick’s starting XI.
Matt O’Riley (Brighton to Marseille, loan)
Fabian Hurzeler had said he was “100 per cent” confident O’Riley would still be at Brighton come the end of the transfer window, and looked set to rely on him more this season after he started both their opening games and scored the goal in the 1-1 draw with Fulham.
O’Riley said it was a chat with former Seagulls boss Roberto De Zerbi which persuaded him to make the switch to Marseille and it’s paid off so far, with the 24-year-old grabbing a goal and an assist in the most recent of four victories in the four games he’s played so far.
Rasmus Hojlund (Manchester United to Napoli, loan)
Despite all evidence to the contrary, even we were doubting whether Hojlund being utterly useless for Manchester United last season was simply because he was playing for Manchester United rather than him maybe, actually, being utterly useless.
After a goal on debut, an outstanding Proper-Striker brace in the Champions League to beat Sporting and the winner against Genoa on Sunday we were kicking ourselves. Of bloody course it was Manchester United’s fault.
Arijanet Muric (Ipswich to Sassuolo, loan)
We don’t know whether there’s a build-up of catastrophic errors that will arrive in a disastrous cluster at some stage of the season or whether Muric has managed to remove those brain fades from his game and is now only producing the outstanding displays we did also see from him in the Premier League.
David Raya (83.3%) is the only Premier League goalkeeper with a better save percentage than Muric (82.8%) and no-one in the English top flight comes close to his PSxG minus goals allowed score of +3.1. ‘What the f*** is that?’ you might reasonably ask. Here’s what the f***.
Tyler Morton (Liverpool to Lyon, £8.7m)
Unfortunate for the purposes of our continued bid to stoke the mini-crisis fire into becoming a full-blown one that just about the only position on the pitch that we can’t in good conscience claim Liverpool need to improve upon is defensive midfield. Damn you to hell, Ryan Gravenberch.
But the bellows will be out if Arne Slot is forced to turn to Wataru Endo while Morton tears it up in Ligue 1.
He’s slotted straight into the starting lineup as Lyon’s metronome at the base of their midfield, scoring the only goal in a 1-0 victory over Lille last weekend and helping them to fourth in the table, just one point behind league leaders PSG.
Luis Diaz (Liverpool to Bayern Munich, £65.5m)
Only ridiculous teammate Harry Kane (9.14) has a higher WhoScored rating in the Bundesliga than Luis Diaz (8.17) and no Premier League player can match that, with Erling Haaland (7.89) leading the way. Cody Gakpo (7.16) is Liverpool’s highest-rated forward.
Diaz is also second behind Kane (11) in what admittedly doesn’t look like much of a race for the goalscorer’s cannon with five goals and no-one has more than his four assists.
Kevin De Bruyne (Manchester City to Napoli, free)
Not one single person thought De Bruyne would be anything other than brilliant for Napoli. Three goals and two assists in eight games isn’t outstanding, and Antonio Conte raised eyebrows after leaving him out of the starting lineup for Genoa on Sunday, but his impact off the bench illustrated just how key he will be if Napoli are to win back-to back Scudettos.
The famously spiky Italian boss insisted “we understand each other perfectly” amid rumours of an all-too predictable rift between the pair after De Bruyne was instrumental in Hojlund’s game-winning goal.
Bilal El Khannouss (Leicester to Stuttgart, loan)
El Khannouss put himself firmly in the ‘there’s something about him’ category through his performances for Leicester last season. At just 20, having moved from the Jupiler Pro League, he looked perfectly at home in the Premier League and quite reasonably didn’t fancy the step down to the Championship having proven his mettle in a big five league.
El Khannouss revealed that Pep Guardiola told him after a Manchester City clash with Leicester that “he was impressed with my play” and after both Arsenal and Tottenham were linked with him in the summer, we fully expect the Premier League elite to come calling again at the end of this season, after a start which has seen the playmaker score three goals in six games.
