Leicester City signed five players from Premier League rivals during the transfer window, the same number as in their past five summers as a Premier League club
It may come as a surprise to learn that, by net spend, this summer’s transfer window was perhaps Leicester City’s biggest ever.
Six of their nine signings arrived for a fee, with the expenditure finishing at around £80m. With Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall leaving for £30m and with players like Lewis Brunt and Zach Booth comparatively sold for spare change, the net spend stands at around £50m.
The lack of details around fees, and the potential for add-ons to be met, means it’s hard to be definitive around transfer spending, but that £50m figure would just eclipse the estimated net spend from City’s previous record, in summer 2021. That, of course, was City’s anomaly, the one summer where there was no major sale.
Kamal Sowah left for a fee rising to £7.5m in City’s most profitable exit. So when Patson Daka, Boubakary Soumare, and Jannik Vestergaard were signed for a combined £55m, that represented a significant outlay.
That this may be City’s biggest summer ever feels unusual for a few reasons. For a start, they weren’t busy throughout the window, going three weeks through late July and early August without an arrival.
Secondly, they were still some way from being the league’s biggest spenders. For net spend, they ranked eighth in the Premier League, while both of their fellow promoted clubs spent more, Southampton coming in sixth and Ipswich, with a net spend of around £123m, were second only to Brighton.
It’s also because there perhaps wasn’t the usual excitement around signings. To really get fans rubbing their hands in glee, new faces need to be high-profile players or have an air of mystique about them. Bilal El Khannouss is not a familiar name to most supporters, but as a 20-year-old Moroccan international renowned for his vision and creative talents, he’s got fans licking their lips.
Players like Jordan Ayew and Bobby De Cordova-Reid have been seen on Match of the Day and Sky Sports for years. Because they’re so well-known, they’re not signings that necessarily get the juices flowing.
And they represent a short-termist approach. They need to make an immediate impact, as they’re very unlikely to deliver for City for years to come. With younger signings, if they’re only at the club a short time, it’s usually because they’ve developed to an extent that they’ve been sold for a big fee.
But, equally they may keep City in the Premier League. And that is the club’s ultimate goal. With that being the objective, it seemed to influence City’s recruitment process, which was a slight stray from the norm.
Ayew and De Cordova-Reid were two of five first-team signings from fellow Premier League clubs, with Facundo Buonanotte, Oliver Skipp and Odsonne Edouard completing the line-up. Only Southampton recruited more players from Premier League clubs, a whopping eight, albeit three of those they had on loan last season.
Bringing in players from Premier League clubs is not something City typically do. To find the last five signings they made from top-flight rivals while they were a Premier League club themselves, you have to go back through five summers to 2018. In that time, they only brought in Danny Ward, Ryan Bennett, Ayoze Perez, Ryan Bertrand, and Jannik Vestergaard from Premier League clubs.
Ayew and De Cordova-Reid also represent a change in approach, given their ages. Since they won the Premier League in 2016, City had only signed one outfield player aged 31 or over, which was Bertrand. Now they’ve signed two in one window. Across the whole of the Premier League, only seven outfield players aged 31 or over were signed, with Ayew the oldest to come with a transfer fee.
In short, experience, and Premier League experience at that, is the name of the game. It’s often a shortcoming of newly-promoted sides, but cannot be an excuse at City.
The players at City have played a combined 2,015 Premier League games. That’s more than at seven other sides in the division. It’s much more in line with the league average. Southampton are only one place behind City, but have 300 fewer Premier League appearances in their squad. Meanwhile, City are within 300 appearances of seven sides above them.
Cooper has 10 players he can call on who have played at least the equivalent of two full seasons of Premier League football, with four of them added to the squad this summer. It is fair to say City, as a collective, know what this division takes.
While Cooper has played his part in requesting those experienced heads, he also wanted it balanced out. In Buonanotte, El Khannouss and Abdul Fatawu, City have three players aged 20 or under, and their job will be to bring a youthful exuberance and fearlessness to a group of cooler, older heads.
“It’s something that is important,” Cooper said on signing experienced operators. “Players that come into the Premier League for the first time, there’s a transition stage. Sometimes players can hit the ground running but other players can take a little longer, and that’s okay.
“And when players come to England for the first time, that needs a transition period as well. I know a lot about that. That’s probably where I was with making sure that if we brought players in, some of them we knew could play at Premier League level. We’ve been able to do that.
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