Tottenham 18th, Man United and Liverpool Struggling: The £180m Bill for Signings That Have Not Delivered

After five rounds of the 2026/27 Premier League season, Tottenham sit 18th with two goals scored, and it took seven hours of football for them to find the net for the first time. Manchester United and Liverpool have also laboured over the same stretch. I logged that marker the moment matchweek five closed, because it lands exactly in the cycle when all three clubs had just completed the most expensive batch of deals of the summer window. One sourcing note before the detail: the document I am working from carries no original headline, publication date or author, so every fee below is a figure stated by that document and I treat it as data awaiting independent verification. When the 222 million deal was signed, I knew I had chosen the right profession — and that profession taught me a September table is never a verdict, but a June invoice always is evidence.

The summer 2026 window leaned toward buying by profile rather than by tactical gap. Nottingham Forest valued Liam Delap at 45 million pounds. Manchester United paid 50 million for Andrey Santos. Tottenham spent 85 million on Mateus Fernandes. Chelsea handed Emmanuel Emegha a seven-year contract and loaned him back to Strasbourg. Liverpool brought in Bradley Barcola. Tottenham, beyond Fernandes, added Omar Marmoush, Savio and Mykhailo Mudryk to an attack that already had Mohammed Kudus and Mathys Tel. Add Delap, Santos and Fernandes together and the number hits 180 million pounds — a serious outlay on three players without a settled top-level season behind them.

Tottenham's forward line is the most telling case. When a club already has Kudus and Tel but still buys Marmoush, Savio and then Mudryk, the problem is not the quality of any individual but the absence of a defined pecking order. Mudryk has played 16 minutes and has not added to his Premier League tally since arriving. Savio cost a fortune and never proved it at his previous club. Congestion in the attacking third does not create healthy competition; it creates ambiguity of role. Modern football is not won on the pitch, it is bought first at the negotiating table — and when that table buys three players of the same profile, the pitch returns the invoice in the shape of disconnected moves.

Manchester United are misaligned in midfield. The profile they needed was a Rodri or Declan Rice style anchor, someone to shield the back line and set the tempo. Andrey Santos, 22, has not had enough career runway to show he can replace Casemiro immediately. The 50 million fee is hard to justify on current output. I rate this a medium-to-high profile mismatch risk, contingent on whether the coaching staff have eighteen months of patience to build him.

Nottingham Forest put 45 million on the table for Liam Delap, a player with one goal in 28 league appearances last season. He is 23 and had one strong campaign with Ipswich, so the investment is not baseless. But Delap has one goal in four matches this term — a small bounce signal, not evidence of revival. The market never lies, only contracts go unread. In Delap's case, what goes unread is the add-on structure, the instalment plan and the expected matchday role.

Chelsea and Emmanuel Emegha are a different story in kind. A seven-year contract plus a loan back to Strasbourg is the familiar long-amortisation model inside a multi-club ownership ecosystem. If the player does not develop, Chelsea carry a depreciating asset on the books for years. The risk here is accounting more than tactical, and it only surfaces when the contract extension cycle ends.

Liverpool signed Bradley Barcola as a pace-and-directness wide attacker — the profile the squad lacked last term. Four appearances without meaningful output is too small a sample. People see a fast player; I see a tactical era — and that era needs at least fifteen matches to reveal itself.

This is where I part with the mainstream story. The analysis I am working from builds a "money cannot buy happiness" picture after five games, with Tottenham 18th and a list of flop signings. That reading skips three variables. Liverpool, Tottenham and Manchester United all appointed new managers, and a tactical transition phase erodes early results. Several deals here may include performance add-ons, sell-on clauses or loan-to-buy structures that make real risk lower than the headline fee. And Savio creates chances, still looking lively despite being named among the worst signings — meaning his underlying output may be better than his current goal and assist totals.

Public pressure is landing on three different groups. Tottenham's coaching staff carry the heaviest load because the gap between expectation and 18th place is so wide. The recruitment department faces direct questions about who is giving the green light. The expensive signings risk losing confidence and minutes. Every transfer is a hand of cards, and I am among the few who know the real card — but the card only turns when the season runs long enough to show it.

If Tottenham, Liverpool or Manchester United win their next two matches, most of this list vanishes from the back pages. Football runs on a shorter emotional cycle than its data cycle. What matters over the next six weeks is not the table but Savio's chance-creation numbers, Mudryk's minutes, and the shape of Manchester United's midfield around Andrey Santos. Those three signals will speak before the November table does.