Spurs players Savio and Mateus Fernandes celebrate
Let's talk about G/As, baby
Bradley Barcola can score all the Champions League hat-tricks he wants, but will remain the new Stewart Downing until he does it in England.
The Liverpool forward has arrived in Europe but is yet to score or assist in the Premier League, joining Mateus Fernandes (£85m), Ayyoub Bouaddi (£81m), Savio (£75m), Carlos Baleba (£65m) and Iliman Ndiaye (£65m) as the most expensive summer signings awaiting their first goal contribution of the season.
They would all shatter what we believe to be the Premier League record for the most expensive summer signing not to score or assist in the season they moved clubs.
Romeo Lavia (Chelsea, 2023/24) – £58m In his defence, his first Premier League season with Chelsea consisted of 32 minutes between separate lay-offs with ankle and knee problems. But Lavia neither scored nor assisted in that half-hour so our hands are tied.
That’s what you get for turning Liverpool down and joining Chelsea because of “history”.
Kalvin Phillips (Manchester City, 2022/23) – £45m In more than 200 appearances across eight years in the Leeds first team, Phillips only scored 14 goals and claimed 13 assists. That was not what attracted Manchester City, but in a free-flowing side with better players and coaching, one might anticipate at least an arse-adjacent deflection.
Not so for Phillips, whose only goal of his Manchester City career – technically still so far – came in the Champions League group stage against Red Star.
Tyler Dibling (Everton, 2025/26) – £40m While once a £100m price tag and the admiration of Jason Wilcox might have been a sort of accolade, Dibling was damned by those high expectations and valuations at Southampton.
Everton took the plunge after the winger went down with Saints, but David Moyes has had Dibling on a diet of restricted minutes and tough love since. He remains without a Premier League goal or assist in 378 Premier League minutes for the Toffees.
Igor Thiago (Brentford, 2024/25) – £30m A really quite severe knee knack will do that to you. Thiago picked up a meniscus injury in the pre-season he joined, then returned in November only to be sidelined again with an infection in the joint.
The Brazilian came back for the final four games of the season, doubling his Premier League appearance tally, but only one of those were starts and he understandably struggled to make an impact – until the following season.
Ibrahim Sangare (Nottingham Forest, 2023/24) – £30m Having scored a goal of goals in Champions League qualifiers for PSV in the August before signing for Forest a month later, Sangare might have expected to chip in a little more for the Tricky Trees.
It took him until January 2025 to notch a Premier League assist, and another eight months passed before he scored his first goal.
Evann Guessand (Aston Villa, 2025/26) – £26m It is possible to feel sympathetic to Villa’s PSR plight and SCR soreness, while also pointing out they have also had an awful lot of transfer waste.
Guessand was signed for a fee rising to £30m in summer 2025 and less than 18 months later is on his second Crystal Palace loan. The frustrations over his lack of end product at Villa – no league goal contributions in 13 games – would not have been helped by an assist on his Eagles debut, and a winner in his third appearance.
Arnaud Kalimuendo (Nottingham Forest, 2025/26) – £26m In little over a year since leaving Rennes, the presumably quite confused Kalimuendo has played under seven different managers. His best times came with Albert Riera, Dennis Schmitt and Dino Toppmoller on loan at Frankfurt, rather than whoever Mr. Marinakis has deemed suitable to run things at the City Ground in any given month.
Luis Guilherme (West Ham, 2024/25) – £25.5m The first signing of Julen Lopetegui’s reign was always going to be irrevocably cursed.
Sander Berge (Fulham, 2024/25) – £25m After inevitably failing to impress in his phantom Manchester United move, Berge again could not move the attacking needle despite being 6ft 5ins in a competent Fulham side.
Oliver Skipp (Leicester, 2024/25) – £25m
Weird how Leicester are staring blankly into the financial abyss, isn’t it?
Yves Bissouma (Spurs, 2022/23) – £25m In his last three full seasons at Brighton, Bissouma scored precisely one Premier League goal. Then Spurs.
Davy Klaassen (Everton, 2017/18) – £23.6m A Ronald Koeman signing in the same summer Wayne Rooney, Gylfi Sigurdsson, Sandro and Nikola Vlasic joined a side with all the No. 10s and none of the No. 9s, Klaassen was always up against it.
Then Koeman was sacked, and neither Sam Allardyce nor Marco Silva thought much of the Dutch playmaker. In his first campaign Klaassen didn’t make a Premier League matchday squad from late October to early March.
Rhian Brewster (Sheffield United, 2019/20) – £23.5m Back when the Liverpool Tax was at its absolute peak, the Reds banked £23.5m on a player who had featured for them four times since joining as a free agent from Chelsea five years prior.
A 15% sell-on clause and £40m buy-back option was also included. Sheffield United would not have minded if they came into play, rather than Brewster setting the tone for a doomed Bramall Lane stay with a debut season in which he failed to score or assist in 30 games as they went down.
Allan (Everton, 2020/21) – £21m A quiet lynchpin of the James Rodriguez-led Everton side which launched a four-game title challenge in lockdown, Allan was rather too busy with tackling to bother with scoring.
Stewart Downing (Liverpool, 2011/12) – £20m Signed specifically for his volume of crosses at Aston Villa in the Moneyball hope of combining that with Andy Carroll’s heading ability, Downing saw the majority of his chances wasted and was rarely able to venture into shooting positions himself.
Man Utd legend Wayne Rooney hugs Cristiano Ronaldo
Man Utd legend Wayne Rooney hugs Cristiano Ronaldo