Ryan O’HanlonDec 30, 2025, 04:00 AM ETCloseRyan O’Hanlon is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He’s also the author of “Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution.”Follow on X
play1:30Will Arsenal overcome their ‘blip’ in the title race?Shaka Hislop explains why Arsenal could still win the Premier League despite going through a ‘blip’ in the title race.
play0:47Maresca: Chelsea need to improve reaction to conceding goalsEnzo Maresca reacts to Chelsea’s 2-1 loss to Aston Villa in the Premier League.
play0:51Is Unai Emery the Premier League manager of the season?Janusz Michallik explains why he believes Unai Emery is already the Premier league manager of the season after Aston Villa’s eleventh win in a row vs. Chelsea.
Will Arsenal overcome their ‘blip’ in the title race?Shaka Hislop explains why Arsenal could still win the Premier League despite going through a ‘blip’ in the title race.
Shaka Hislop explains why Arsenal could still win the Premier League despite going through a ‘blip’ in the title race.
Maresca: Chelsea need to improve reaction to conceding goalsEnzo Maresca reacts to Chelsea’s 2-1 loss to Aston Villa in the Premier League.
Is Unai Emery the Premier League manager of the season?Janusz Michallik explains why he believes Unai Emery is already the Premier league manager of the season after Aston Villa’s eleventh win in a row vs. Chelsea.
Janusz Michallik explains why he believes Unai Emery is already the Premier league manager of the season after Aston Villa’s eleventh win in a row vs. Chelsea.
8. Newcastle United: someone who can turn possession into shots
3. Manchester City: someone who can provide control
I say this at the same time every year, but we always seem to forget it: Most January transfers don’t matter.
There has rarely been a signing across the Big Five leagues that genuinely made a difference for an eventual title-winning team. More specifically, via analysis from the consultancy Twenty First Group: “Net transfer spend in January has just a 5% positive correlation with change in points per game, and that €20 million in net spending has delivered on average just a 0.03 increase in points per game in the big five leagues since 2015.”
Of course, this doesn’t mean January transfers can’t make a difference — especially with the current bunched-up state of the Premier League. Over half a season, those 0.03 points per game add up to just over half a point, but that could be the difference between winning the title vs. coming in second or nabbing a Champions League place vs. spending your Thursdays traveling to Helsinki for Europa League matches.
With 20 games remaining, the gap between first and third is just three points, while the gap between fifth and 17th is just 11 points. Theoretically, everyone from Chelsea to Nottingham Forest could qualify for the Champions League next year. (Projections from Opta’s Nils Mackay give the Premier League a 98.2% chance of earning a bonus Champions League place again this season.) But by probabilities, the list is smaller than that.
Simon Tinsley’s projections give eight teams a 10% or better chance at qualifying for the Champions League, while the title race splits to 69% for Arsenal, 30% for Manchester City, and around 1% each for Aston Villa and, somehow, Liverpool.
So, today, we’re going to pick out the most urgent transfer needs for all eight of those teams and then rank them in order of how urgent they actually are.
Yes, we’re starting with the team that’s 13th in the table. Brighton & Hove Albion, Everton, Fulham, Brentford and Sunderland fans: You have a right to be angry that your team isn’t on this list. There’s a good chance at least one of you five is challenging for a Champions League place by the end of the season; there’s just not a good chance that it’s you, in particular.
And so, if you want, you can say that No. 9 on this list should be “The Rest: Brighton, Everton, Fulham, Brentford, Sunderland, and even Tottenham,” but all of their individual chances of finishing top-five are quite slim … so no, these teams need to go fishing in the expensive waters of the January transfer window.
However, Newcastle have the seventh-best expected goal differential in the league. And by adjusted goal differential — 70% goals, 30% expected goals — they’re also seventh. Throw in that they were excellent last season and have been pretty good in the Champions League so far this season, and projection systems are always going to be higher on this team than their place in the table suggests.
I get that there has been some consternation over Arsenal’s recent results. Since the 3-1 thumping of Bayern Munich, they’ve dropped four points in six matches, failed to beat a Chelsea team that played down a man for the majority of the match, were genuinely outplayed by an Aston Villa side that never outplays anyone — oh, we’ll get to that — and then could only beat Everton, Wolves and Brighton by a single goal each.
But here’s how they rank, purely by expected-goal differential in the Premier League, since that win over Bayern:
For better or worse, this is Arsenal’s team. They’re probably the best team in the world, and they’re definitely good enough to win the title — but that doesn’t mean they will.
Will Arsenal overcome their ‘blip’ in the title race?
It’s just that Palace are also playing in the UEFA Europa Conference League this season, and they haven’t played in Europe since 1998. This isn’t a squad built to compete domestically and abroad. We saw it in how they approached the summer; they replaced Eberechi Eze with Yéremy Pino, and signed 19-year-old center back Jaydee Canvot, presumably, to prepare for Marc Guéhi’s expected departure this upcoming summer, but that’s it.
They didn’t add depth, and while Glasner has rotated in the Conference League, he plays the same 11 guys in the Premier League every week — unless injuries force his hand, which has happened over the past few weeks.
Weirdly, it’s a good problem to have. Palace could sign a competent player — or players — at any position other than goalkeeper, and it would immediately make the team better.
I’m less convinced that signing a new center back will solve any immediate problems for Liverpool. They were hours away from signing Guéhi over the summer, and that was before Ibrahima Konaté developed a chronic case of brain flatulence and Giovanni Leoni tore an ACL while running out of bounds.
If Konaté or Virgil van Dijk gets hurt, then it seems like the plan is to either hope that Joe Gomez is healthy and able to play center back again or hope that Ryan Gravenberch or Wataru Endo can hold down the fort for a significant period of time.
But, as we saw over the summer, even signing players that pretty much everyone likes doesn’t guarantee success. At the very least, there’s something logically incoherent in seeing Liverpool’s season fall apart as they try to integrate six new signings and then thinking that the solution is … even more signings.
So, if Liverpool were to sign a defender, I think it would likely be as depth or as a long-term replacement for Konaté rather than as an immediate upgrade. They’re out of the title race, they have an outside shot at winning the Champions League, and Tinsley’s projections give them an 85% chance of finishing top-five.
Liverpool tried to thread the needle between winning now and building for the future, and their struggles this season have pushed them toward the latter. The January window isn’t quite as urgent as it seems.
They need Champions League revenue to continue with this model of turning a soccer club into an always-churning talent portfolio.
Reece James has suddenly given them elite midfield depth; he’s genuinely one of the best midfielders and fullbacks in the Premier League, and both at the same time. But also: He’s Reece James, the guy who has played 2,000 first-division minutes just once in his career. And Chelsea, on the whole, has played poorly when he has been on the field this season.
Chelsea can still get by with Moisés Caicedo and Enzo Fernández playing behind Cole Palmer in the midfield, but that’s a vulnerable setup, especially with no depth behind it and plenty more Champions League matches still to come. Maybe Andrey Santos or Romeo Lavia can perform at a high enough level if they have to, but I suspect that already would’ve happened were it true.
One area they can stand to upgrade is at center forward. Liam Delap has really struggled whenever he plays, and João Pedro still doesn’t take shots. Both players were signed over the summer, but if there’s any club that’s going to move on from someone after just a few months, it’s the one owned by BlueCo.
Maresca: Chelsea need to improve reaction to conceding goals
Enzo Maresca reacts to Chelsea’s 2-1 loss to Aston Villa in the Premier League.
One important piece of context for this image is that it’s not minutes adjusted or whittled down to any kind of per-game number. No, Manchester City have created more xG from counterattacks from the first 18 games of this season than they have in any of the 38 games of the previous eight seasons.
Last season, City’s slow-paced approach finally fell apart. Now, they’re the best counterattacking team in England, and they’re back to challenging for Premier and Champions League titles.
But it still doesn’t really make sense. Rodri has still barely played, and while his replacement, Nico González, can keep the ball, he isn’t close to the defensive presence that the 2024 Ballon d’Or winner is when healthy. Their forward line is Erling Haaland, who barely touches the ball, and then two high-risk winners in Rayan Cherki and Jérémy Doku.
In front of González, in the midfield, are both Phil Foden and Bernardo Silva — two tiny attacker-midfielder hybrids. And City’s two new fullbacks, Nico O’Reilly and Matheus Nunes, are big, ball-carrying types rather than possession players.
They’ve mostly flourished amid the chaos, but even though they won those back-to-back matches against Real Madrid and Crystal Palace a few weeks ago, they looked incredibly vulnerable for long stretches of both games.