Granit Xhaka is among five players thriving after summer moves from Premier League clubs, who would be better off had they actually stayed…
Bitterness is a huge part of football fandom, and there’s nothing quite like a player leaving your club and being brilliant to bring those feelings of resentment rushing to the surface. On which note…
Ruben Loftus-Cheek
Everyone agreed: a prime Ruben Loftus-Cheek would be quite the player. A physically dominant box-to-box midfielder with excellent technical ability and an eye for goal – what was the catch?
Injuries, mainly. He had a lot of them, as a curiously high proportion of Chelsea players seem to, meaning he was invariably either on the treatment table or working his way back to fitness, and couldn’t be relied upon when various new managers arrived and were assessing the squad. He was essentially a bonus player; a positive afterthought, but an afterthought all the same.
Ironically he played more Premier League minutes in his last season for Chelsea (1,542) than in any of his previous campaigns for the Blues. He wasn’t brilliant, but being anything short of a bit rubbish was quite the feat in that team, and it’s hard to watch Chelsea under Mauricio Pochettino this season without thinking they would greatly benefit from a central midfielder who can beat a player or two with the ball at their feet.
Even if Enzo Fernandez and Moises Caicedo had set the world alight Chelsea would be missing a player like Loftus-Cheek, who could bounce away from a couple of challenges and drive forward in possession, as N’Golo Kante also used to do in his heyday.
He’s found a home at Milan, which has become something of a refuge for unwanted Chelsea players; Fikayo Tomori, Olivier Giroud and Christian Pulisic are also enjoying themselves at the San Siro. Loftus-Cheek has started 17 of 24 Serie A games this season and was the hero of their Europa League play-off on Thursday, scoring a brace of headers in a 3-0 win over Rennes.
We’re not saying he would have played every game had he stayed at Stamford Bridge – or even most of them – but his exit and form since will be a bitter pill to swallow for Blues fans, who waited so long for the prime Loftus-Cheek to emerge, only for him to be show his most enviable of attributes in a consistent way elsewhere.
And what did Chelsea do with the £15m they got for Loftus-Cheek? They signed Deivid Washington who has played 23 minutes of football.
READ MORE: Mudryk now (un)officially the worst of all 19 Todd Boehly signings for Chelsea
Cole Palmer
Every cloud. Loftus-Cheek’s exit, along with those of multiple others, opened the door for Palmer, who is undoubtedly the best signing of the Todd Boehly and Clearlake reign, and quite possibly the best since Kante joined in 2016. Although Antonio Rudiger, Mateo Kovacic and Thiago Silva will remain in that debate for the time being.
Of all the Under-21 players in Europe’s top five leagues, only Jude Bellingham (28) has more combined goals and assists than Palmer (23) this season. He’s taken the creative burden of an entire football team – one very much in the spotlight owing to both its trophy-laden recent history and extraordinary expenditure – on his young shoulders.
Signed for £40m on deadline day, Pochettino admitted Palmer’s transfer wasn’t his idea, with “one of the sporting directors” clearly of a ‘might as well’ mindset by that point in the window, as they targeted anyone at all who “fits the project”.
Pochettino may well be out of a job had they not made that last-gasp summer signing, such has been Palmer’s impact, and while it’s difficult to look at Manchester City on their seemingly inexorable path to another Treble and suggest they made a grave transfer error, just because they’re brilliant doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be more brilliant without another brilliant footballer.
He left to play football and has clearly played more at Chelsea this season than he would have done for Manchester City. But while many would have doubted whether Palmer would ever be good enough to start for the best team in world football, there will be fewer doubters now – and if the City bosses aren’t already regretting their decision, they will soon come to.
Jaden Philogene
Ridiculous rabona aside he’s got a delightful habit of making opponents look daft and the game look easy, with eight goals and five assists in the Championship evidence enough to suggest his legacy will be more than that of Askhat Tagybergen, Alou Kuol and Gauthier Hein, previous nominees for the Puskas Award that Philogene will likely be up for this year.
Standby for one of the goals of the season from @HullCity‘s Jaden Philogene 🤯
Watch @EFL Highlights on @ITVX 📺 pic.twitter.com/DgcOBKYYQA
— ITV Football (@itvfootball) February 14, 2024
Game time for Aston Villa may well have been hard to come by for the 22-year-old this season given a) how good they’ve been as a whole, and b) the form of both Leon Bailey and Moussa Diaby, but we would suggest given both the frequency and quality of his goal contributions that the Premier League side may well have made his move to Hull a loan if they could turn the clock back.
Deniz Undav
He’s the Bundesliga player of the month for January, with five goals in his last three games taking his league tally to 14 – six more than parent club Brighton’s top league scorer, Joao Pedro.
The 27-year-old managed eight goals for the Seagulls last term, was largely a forgotten man and generally mocked for being un-Brighton-like when he did play, in the sense that he was a new signing and wasn’t outrageously good. But in truth he was barely given a chance, and actually scored more goals per 90 minutes (0.77) than anyone at the Amex.
Roberto De Zerbi may well claim Undav doesn’t suit his style, but goals are goals and the German has proven between spells at Union SG, for whom he got 45 in 70, Brighton and now Stuttgart that he had the knack. Might he follow Dan Ashworth to Manchester United?
Granit Xhaka
Little did we know Xhaka left Arsenal to win a league title. Even given his outstanding form last season, most assumed Arsenal would sign an upgrade in the summer, and while the majority of those people were likely a bit perplexed by Mikel Arteta’s decision to make Kai Havertz his replacement, few would have predicted that by February the Arsenal manager would still be scrambling around for solutions to a problem of their own making on a game-by-game basis.
Havertz, Leandro Trossard and Fabio Vieira have all been used in the left-sided No.8 role this season and none of them have been anywhere near as consistent or effective as Xhaka was last term.
Reverting to his more customary defensive midfield role for Bayer Leverkusen since his £13m summer move, Xhaka has started all 21 of their league games, helping them to take a five-point lead at the top of the Bundesliga table. His form, along with the feeling once again that Arsenal are close but not close enough to Manchester City, begs the question: would Arsenal have won the Premier League had they not sold Granit Xhaka?
