January is a time for mistakes -- in the soccer world, at least. While everyone takes a step back and resolves to find ways to improve during the first month of the year, soccer clubs tend to double down on what they've already done wrong.
Activity in the January transfer window has very little correlation with increased success. Lots of strikers signed in January don't score a single goal from here on out, and most title-chasing teams that sign new players actually see their overall performance decline.
So, as the January window winds to a close, what better time to take a step back and celebrate everyone's biggest mistakes? I've identified the worst mistake made by each Premier League club over the past five years, and then ranked them against each other, in descending order.
All transfer data comes from the site Transfermarkt
20. Ipswich Town
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Acquiring Sammie Szmodics from Blackburn for €10.60 million
I feel bad A) even including Ipswich Town here, and B) singling out Szmodics. Ever since the club hired Kieran McKenna as manager in 2021, they've nailed just about everything you can reasonably expect to nail. There's really no other way to go from the third tier to the first tier in two years.
Szmodics, though, was the kind of low-ceiling, low-floor move that promoted teams -- especially ones with league-low budgets like Ipswich Town -- can't really afford to make. He massively outperformed his expected-goal total in the Championship last season, and those 23 non-penalty goals were, by far, a career-best. Before that, he'd scored 11 goals in the Championship -- across two seasons. The rest of his career was spent in League One and League Two.
Not only were Ipswich acquiring a player after an outlier season; they were bringing him in at the tail-end of his prime. Szmodics turned 29 in September; he's scored four goals so far this season.
19. Brighton & Hove Albion
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Transferring Alexis Mac Allister to Liverpool for €42m
We're picking nits here, as this is one of the best-run teams in all of sports. But in the summer of 2023, no less than 16 midfielders moved for a higher fee than what Brighton received from Liverpool. Since then, Mac Allister has emerged as one of the most reliable midfielders in the world. The crowd-sourced Transfermarkt values aren't inarguable truths, but his value has risen up to €80m since he arrived at Anfield.
Almost every other major transfer out of the club has been a "win" for Brighton -- meaning more money in than whatever value that player is able to provide to his new team. While there were some reports that Liverpool activated a release clause in Mac Allister's contract, the explanation doesn't really matter, as this is one of the few deals that it seems like Brighton might've "lost."
Still, that loss is only a loss measured against their impeccable track record. They acquired Mac Allister for just €8m, four years before he left for over five times' that amount.
18. Brentford
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Acquiring Igor Thiago from Club Brugge for €33m
Brentford have seemingly built their team around all of the things we do and don't know about how soccer actually works. They spend on attackers and center backs -- the positions that directly influence goal-scoring and prevention -- and shy away from investing in the harder-to-quantify performance of midfielders.
While it's harder to describe good center-back play with on-ball statistics, we're pretty good at quantifying centerforward performance through expected goals. The best goalscorers are the ones that get on the end of the most high-quality chances; not the ones who convert their chances at the highest rates. This idea still hasn't solidified into conventional wisdom, and Brentford have been able to exploit it by acquiring undervalued strikers who do the fundamentals well but suffer a season of unsustainably poor finishing.
This works in the other direction, too: Brentford can move on from forwards who inflate their own values with a season of unsustainably excellent finishing.
Since they've been so good at identifying undervalued forwards -- and so willing to eventually move them on -- five of their nine biggest transfer fees received came from centerforwards. And the two best players on the current roster, Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa, are forwards, too.
Given all that, I wouldn't give up hope on forward Igor Thiago just yet, but Brentford made him their club-record transfer over the summer. Thanks to a knee injury and then a reported joint infection, he's only played 130 Premier League minutes and attempted a single shot for the club.
17. AFC Bournemouth
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Replacing Eddie Howe with Jason Tindall
Without Eddie Howe handling the major personnel decisions, Bournemouth really haven't made any major mistakes since he stepped down after the club were relegated in 2020. It's even hard to say that it was a mistake to hire Scott Parker. Yes, they got outscored 16-2 during his four Premier League games in charge, but he helped get them promoted the year prior, and they also immediately cut bait once they realized it wasn't working.
After the 2019-20 season, Howe was replaced at Bournemouth by his assistant Jason Tindall. He lasted a little over half a season in the Championship before being replaced by Jonathan Woodgate, who led the team on a winning run that earned the Cherries a spot in the Championship playoff.
If Tindall's name sounds familiar it's because you've seen his face before: he's the guy who stands next to Howe on the Newcastle sideline every weekend and screams at the ref, opposing players, or even the other team's coach.
16. Fulham
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Acquiring Anthony Knockaert from Brighton for €11.7m
When Fulham got promoted in 2018, they signed a ton of players that a lot of people liked ... and they finished 19th. When they were promoted in 2020, they took the opposite approach: a couple small, permanent deals and then a number of loans.
Their biggest outlay was the nearly €12m paid to make a permanent move for 28-year-old Knockaert from Brighton after a successful loan. Knockaert retired this past summer after playing zero Premier League games for Fulham. And while Fulham are firmly established in mid-table now, they were relegated once again after the 2020-21 season.
15.Newcastle United
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Giving a direct rival their best midfielder and best striker
You can't really blame Newcastle for not seeing Forest's rise coming, but you also can't really say anything other than: Newcastle directly fueled Nottingham Forest's rise!
Chris Wood joined last summer on a permanent deal from Newcastle, and he's currently fourth in the league in goals scored. Elliott Anderson, meanwhile, joined this past summer, and he's leading Forest with 66 line-breaking passes completed, per data from PFF FC. The main way that Forest move the ball up the field is through Anderson; the main way they convert that movement into goals is through Wood.
Oh yeah: as of this writing, Forest are three points ahead of Newcastle in the Premier League table.
14. Crystal Palace
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Never getting anything for Wilfried Zaha
There was a time where it seemed like Palace would sign any 29-year-old dude who had played a couple seasons in the Premier League. But right around the turn of the decade, they started to get a lot smarter, scouring the Championship for young talent and bringing in a bunch of younger players from overseas.
The biggest error, then, of the past five years was to never get anything in return for Zaha.
Rather than seemingly accepting their place in the Premier League pecking order, Palace gave Zaha a really hefty contract, signed him to extensions, kept him for nine seasons, and then let him leave for nothing. Now, there's nothing wrong with this, in theory! Palace got nine solid seasons of performance from Zaha. He became a club-legend, and he's their best player of the Premier League era.
But Palace never finished below 15th or above 10th during his nine years with the team. And in the two seasons since his contract ran out and he signed with Galatasaray, they've finished in 10th and now sit in 12th. Wouldn't, say, an extra €50-60m -- the numbers rumored with a potential Zaha transfer almost every summer for nearly a full decade -- be the kind of thing that might have helped this club finally challenge for a European place?
Gab & Juls react to Myles Lewis-Skelly's red card for Arsenal against Wolves in the Premier League.
13. Arsenal
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Acquiring Kai Havertz from Chelsea for €75m
I was going to go with the €50m Arsenal spent on midfielder Thomas Partey here. The team was in a rebuilding moment, and yet they decided to drop a lot of money on a midfielder at the tail end of his prime, who was emerging from the meat-grinder that is Diego Simeone's Atletico Madrid. Partey has only played about 55% of the minutes since joining Arsenal, and he played fewer than 800 minutes last year, which was easily the best year of the Mikel Arteta era.
Except, given Arsenal's scoring issues, I have to go with Havertz -- a misunderstood player just like the next one on this list, who I also really enjoy watching.
The problem here isn't having Havertz on your team; Havertz would make just about any other team in the world better. And he's played a ton for Arsenal. The issue is that they paid Chelsea a lot of money at a time when Chelsea seemed desperate to move on. On top of that, he was brought in to play in the midfield, something that never panned out.
Instead, he's spent most of his minutes at centerforward. He does all of the little things as well as anyone, but he just doesn't do enough of the main things. Since the start of last season, he's scored and assisted as many non-penalty goals as Chris Wood, and one fewer than Anthony Gordon and Jarrod Bowen.
12. Liverpool
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Acquiring Darwin Núñez from Benfica for €85m
Someone who works with some of the best clubs in the world put it to me like this. In the summer of 2022, Liverpool made Nunez their club-record signing. He was coming off a season in which he massively out-performed his expected-goal totals, he'd played particularly well against Liverpool in the Champions League, and he'd shown no ability to contribute in buildup play or out of possession in the same way all of Liverpool's other attackers had done as they nearly won four trophies in the 2021-22 season.
That same summer, Newcastle signed Alexander Isak, a 22-year-old striker who already had three seasons of above-average performance in a Big Five league under his belt, and who was coming off of a season in which he'd massively underperformed his expected-goal totals. Isak was similarly limited in buildup, but he had a longer track record in a tougher league, he was a year younger, and he cost €15m less than Nunez.
In other words, the team owned by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund got a better deal than the club that had spent the past five years nailing every transfer.
I love watching Nunez, and when he played under Jurgen Klopp, his output was fast approaching world-class. He's a valuable and poorly understood player, but the reality is that he's Liverpool's most expensive signing of all time, and he's barely played half of the available minutes since he joined the club.
11. Aston Villa
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Acquiring Philippe Coutinho from Barcelona for €20m
I can't believe that move for the 29-year-old guy who barely played soccer for three years, but was friends with your coach, didn't work out!
Of course, I'm being a little harsh. Coutinho was good in his half-season loan with Villa in 2021-22: a little over a goal-or-an-assist per 90 minutes. But after Villa made the deal permanent in the summer of 2022, they signed the Brazilian to a four-year deal, and he played about 800 more minutes for the club, scored one more goal, registered no more assists, and eventually left to go on loan to the Qatari league.
10. Nottingham Forest
BIGGEST MISTAKE: The entire summer of 2022
This was Forest's approach to the first offseason after achieving promotion: identify which professional soccer players exist, then attempt to sign every single one of them.
In the first two windows after promotion, Forest literally signed 30 different players. The wildest part: only three of them, Neco Williams, Morgan Gibbs-White and Chris Wood, have played significant minutes this season.
While they did stay up in 2022-23, the whole thing came really close to ending in disaster. They ended the season in 16th, but tied for third-worst in goal differential (minus-30) and finished with the second-worst expected-goal differential in the league. Thanks to some good fortune, Forest survived and then got their act together over the next season-and-a-half. It really could've been so much worse.
9. Everton
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Hiring Frank Lampard
Your honor, I request that this piece of evidence be entered into the record:
I rest my case.
8. West Ham
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Acquiring James Ward-Prowse from Southampton for €34.8m
West Ham are the kings of suboptimal moves. OK fine, that's Manchester United, but West Ham are the princes of suboptimal moves. They keep signing big-name players right as they're aging out of their primes for a little more than they're worth. No single move feels too egregious, but you stack enough of those moves on top of each other, and the result is a team with a massive stadium and enough revenue to compete for a Champions League place sitting in 14th place with a minus-16 goal differential at the end of January.
The most egregious example of it all was the move for Ward-Prowse. He's an England international, and everyone knows he's one of the best free-kick kickers in the whole world. So, when West Ham signed a soon-to-be-29-year-old JWP in the summer of 2023, the move, like many others, was received mostly positively on British television and in the papers.
But here's the problem: soccer players tend to get worse once they hit their late 20s. Ward-Prowse, in particular, had already morphed into a player who didn't really do anything at even an average level other than serve the ball into the box. While he exceeded my expectations in year one at West Ham -- playing a lot, notching seven assists and five non-penalty goals -- he's already out on loan at Nottingham Forest, where he's played three total minutes since the calendar flipped to 2025.
7. Wolverhampton Wanderers
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Acquiring Fábio Silva from FC Porto for €40m
Given the club's close connections with Portuguese super-agent Jorge Mendes, Wolves make it difficult to assess what they're actually trying to achieve with any given move. Most clubs are trying to win more games when they acquire a new player, while Wolves? Well, sometimes Wolves sign Fabio Silva.
They paid €40m to acquire the then-18-year-old center forward. And while big-money deals for teenagers have become normal over the past five or 10 years, spending that much on a guy who had started one game as a pro is not something we'd ever seen before or have seen since.
If I remove my cynicism for a minute and judge this as a normal transfer -- e.g. trying to value a player based on his expected future performance -- then it's one of the most absurd front-office decisions I've ever seen, in any sport. Wolves made a kid with 190 minutes of professional experience the most expensive transfer in the history of the club.
Whatever the reason (good or questionable) Silva was signed, this move still helps explain why Wolves are now battling relegation instead of fighting for a Europa League spot like they were in their first few seasons after promotion. Back then, their agent connections allowed them to acquire players like Rúben Neves and Diogo Jota, who otherwise never would've signed with a midlands club in the Championship. Now, their agent connections are helping them sign players whom no-one else would've ever considered signing for the same prices.
Since joining Wolves in 2020, Silva has scored four non-penalty goals. He's currently on loan at Las Palmas.
6. Tottenham
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Employing Jose Mourinho after Mauricio Pochettino
For nearly the entire Mauricio Pochettino era, Spurs were one of the better-run teams in the world. Sure, it helped that Harry Kane was in their academy, but they built one of the best teams in the world around him with what was mostly a collection of undervalued signings. Pochettino's eye for untraditional talent, combined with the club's ability to outbid pretty much every other club looking to sign anyone below the top-of-the-market talent, produced a Champions League final run and a two-year stretch in which Tottenham won more points than any other team in the Premier League.
While Mourinho was hired a little over five years ago, he was still employed as Tottenham manager within the past five years, so I'm breaking my own arbitrary threshold because this was so obviously a massive mistake. Mourinho had badly flamed out at last two managerial stops, and it had become clear that his reactive coaching style both didn't jibe with the current generation of players and couldn't win enough points in a league with a Big Six and growing quality beyond it.
Mourinho lasted 17 months, didn't win anything, and cost the club tens of millions of dollars.
Julien Laurens believes that Christopher Nkunku should leave Chelsea due to his lack of game time.
5. Chelsea
BIGGEST MISTAKE: The entire summer of 2022
After taking over a club that finished third during the previous season and won the Champions League a year prior, new owners Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital decided they needed to spend roughly €288m on transfer fees in their first summer in charge. The players they brought in on permanent deals: Wesley Fofana from Leicester City, Marc Cucurella from Brighton, Raheem Sterling from Manchester City, Kalidou Koulibaly from Napoli, Carney Chukwuemeka from Aston Villa, Cesare Casadei from Inter Milan, and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang from Barcelona.
This season, those players have combined to play 2,800 minutes in the Premier League for Chelsea. Most of them aren't even on the team right now. It's one of the worst individual transfer windows a club has ever had, and it should have tanked Chelsea's chances of building a competitive roster ...
Gabriele Marcotti believes Omar Marmoush's arrival could mean the end for Jérémy Doku at Manchester City.
4. Manchester City
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Sending Cole Palmer to Chelsea for €47m
Cole Palmer might be the best player in the Premier League not named Mohamed Salah. And Manchester City sent him to a direct rival for less than Wolves paid for Matheus Cunha and Tottenham spent to acquire Brennan Johnson. Not great!
Maybe they felt bad for the whole Kevin De Bruyne situation? Otherwise, it's hard to overstate how disastrous this is. Palmer is only 22, and is likely to be dominating the league for the next decade. Not only that, pretty much the entire viability of the new Chelsea project hinged on this transfer.
Had Chelsea not whisked Palmer away from City, then they're probably not contending for the Champions League, and if they're not contending for the Champions League, then they're probably locked into a mediocre roster without any obvious paths to increasing revenue and improving for the next half-decade.
T-2. Southampton and Leicester City
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Not signing established keepers in the summer of 2022
Although Southampton and Leicester were both relegated after the 2022-23 season, neither club was destined to go down. By expected-goal differential, Southampton were tied with Wolves in 17th, while Leicester were all the way up in 14th:
So why did Southampton finish dead-last, 11 points from safety, and why did Leicester drop all the way down to 18th? The primary explanations are the same for both clubs: their keepers couldn't stop shots.
Per Stats Perform's post-shot expected goals model, Southampton's Gavin Bazunu conceded an absurd 16.9 goals more than an average keeper would if he faced the same shots. Leicester's Danny Ward was much better than Bazunu, but still much worse than almost everyone else, conceding 5.5 goals more than expected. For a team that finished two points from safety, a goal or two saved could have been the difference.
While no one could've expected these levels of performance from Southampton and Leicester's keepers, both clubs took risks at a position where risks really aren't worth it. Great goalkeeping can win you some extra points, but there's really an upper limit to how many shots a keeper can save; there's no real limit on how poorly a keeper can play.
The former gave the keys to 20-year-old Manchester City product Gavin Bazunu, while Leicester replaced club legend Kasper Schmeichel with Liverpool's Danny Ward, who at 29 had never been a starter in the top flight and hadn't been a starter anywhere since a 2016-17 season with Huddersfield in the Championship. Both were terrible, and both have since lost their starting jobs with their clubs.
Gab & Juls discuss Manchester United's links with Lecce's Patrick Dorgu.
1. Manchester United
BIGGEST MISTAKE: Acquiring Antony from Ajax for €95m
These are the two transfers that sandwich Antony's move to Manchester United on the list of the most expensive transfers of all time: Gareth Bale's move from Tottenham to Real Madrid, and Cristiano Ronaldo's move from Manchester United to Real Madrid. I, uh, yeah ...
There are a bunch of mistakes that could have landed United in first here -- bringing back Cristiano Ronaldo, paying massive wages and a huge transfer fee for 30-year-old Casemiro, bringing back Erik ten Hag because he won the FA Cup to name just three -- but we have to go with Antony.
I mean, c'mon -- the guy looked terrible from the jump. He's scored five goals and added two assists across three seasons, and he plays the same position as Mohamed Salah and Bukayo Saka. While there was at least some upside to this deal compared to the Ronaldo and Casemiro moves -- Antony signed at 21 -- everything else about it stunk.
United didn't seem to be competing against anyone to sign Antony, and yet they got bid into making him the second-most-expensive player in club history. They also convinced themselves that the best available player at arguably the most important position in the sport just happened to be the one who played for the coach they just hired.
Need more? On top of all of that, he wasn't even that good at Ajax! He scored 17 goals and 12 assists over two seasons in a league that massively boosts attacking performance, and for a team that, at the time, still had a massive financial advantage over the rest of the league.
Along with Eden Hazard's move to Real Madrid, Antony's move to Manchester United really might just be the worst transfer of all time.