EPL agent transfer survey: Maddison best deal of the window, Havertz the worst
“I don't get it. I've never got it. I don't think he was needed.”
Less than a week after the Premier League summer transfer window closed, after a staggering £2.36billion ($2.97b) was spent by its 20 member clubs, The Athletic asked a cross-section of agents who were involved in some of those deals to try to make sense of it all.
Admittedly, that was easier said than done in some cases.
“Explain Cole Palmer to me,” asked one agent, sounding genuinely baffled by a move that came out of the blue.
Other questions in the survey were more straightforward to answer. Which Premier League club had the best window? Which club had the worst? Which deal do you expect to happen in January? Which manager is now under the most pressure?
Naturally, there were grey areas. According to one agent, Kalidou Koulibaly's move from Chelsea to Al Hilal qualified as the best and the worst deal, depending on whether you were the selling or the buying club.
Indeed, the Saudi Pro League's (SPL) extraordinary recruitment drive this summer (more was collectively spent by Saudi clubs than those in Germany, France and Spain) formed part of our transfer window survey, in which we asked 20 football agents to answer 11 questions anonymously on a variety of subjects. On occasion, some offered more than one answer per question or did not answer a question.
The agents' identities were protected to encourage them to reply candidly without damaging working relationships — something they duly did by singing the praises of Brighton and James Maddison, criticising Arsenal's decision to sign Kai Havertz and Chelsea's “scattergun” approach to recruitment, and condemning Everton and Sean Dyche to a season of misery.
Along the way, we discovered that “the rack rate for a
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