What it bought was a replacement rather than an improvement, which is what tends to happen when six clubs are run by a manager who wasn't there a year ago, and all of them are shopping on the same boarded-up high street.
Around 38 per cent of this summer's deals were between Premier League clubs, up from 30 per cent last year, and three of the four biggest transfers never left the league at all: Enzo Fernandez from Chelsea to Manchester City, Morgan Rogers from Aston Villa to Chelsea, Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest to City.
Only Bradley Barcola arrived from abroad, and ultimately, the reason is wages.
Market merry-go-round
Other than Saudi Arabia, barely anyone can match what these players earn, so Barcelona get Rodri and Gabriel Jesus at a discount, Trabzonspor get Mohamed Salah for nothing, Al Hilal get Ollie Watkins, and everybody else trades with each other. Newcastle sell their midfield to northern London. City sell substitutes to Spurs on the seashore and a goalkeeper to Leeds. Chelsea sell to City and buy from Villa.
It is less a market than a conveyor belt with 20 stops on it, and the fees confusingly climb every time a player goes round.
City probably rode the rollercoaster best. Enzo Maresca convinced his bosses to spent £458 million, a record for a single club in a single window, while Rodri, John Stones, Bernardo Silva, Savio and Tijjani Reijnders left.
Rather than hunt for one Rodri, City bought his functions separately. Fernandez at £125m scored 10 goals with four assists in 36 games last season. Anderson at £116m brings the legs: 112 tackles, 44 interceptions, 62 successful dribbles, 68 key passes and 56 shots, the only player in England to clear 40 in all five.
Ayyoub Bouaddi, 18 years old and £85m, already has 30 Ligue 1 appearances and a World Cup behind him. Two games, two wins, top of the table.
Spurs taking expensive risks
Tottenham's window will be misread, because Spurs have lost twice already in the Premier League and have nothing on the board, but look at what they were fixing. They finished 17th last season, two points clear of the drop and safe only on the final day, having finished 17th the year before as well. They churned through three managers last season while doing it, with Roberto De Zerbi handed a relegation fight in March.
A squad like that does not need a bit of tinkering. Standing still was the genuine risk, and £300m feels the cautious option, part-funded by a clear-out that raised roughly £140m, with World Cup finalist Cristian Romero going to Atletico for £34.2m, Luka Vuskovic to Brighton for £46m without a competitive minute in a Spurs shirt, and unsung England hero Djed Spence to Inter for £25.7m.
Several of the buys are sober rather than showy, but it's a full-on overhaul. Jan-Paul van Hecke cost £52m, played 36 league games for Brighton last season and needs no introduction to a system De Zerbi built around him during his south coast tenure.
Mateus Fernandes at £85m sounds absurd for a midfielder relegated in back-to-back seasons with Southampton and West Ham, until you notice he is 20, has started all but four available league matches since arriving in England, scored five and set up five in a side that went down, and was rated the nearest thing on the market to Elliot Anderson, who cost City £116m.
However, the risk sits elsewhere, and it is real. The rebranded Savio cost Spurs up to £85m, and City were long content to let him go. Marmoush arrives on loan with an obligation to buy, but without the healthiest stats to prop him up recently.
Mudryk is a punt on a winger just back from a 20-month doping ban, and the two early defeats suggest 10 new players who have barely met and have a social atmosphere akin to an awkward first school disco.
Still, a club two points from the Championship in May, with Beyonce money to burn, shouldn't be worried about the market turning sensible at this moment in time.
Not as bad as it looks for Newcastle
Newcastle escaped a dangerous summer without ever looking comfortable, though the detail is kinder to them than the headlines.
Eddie Howe left, Matthias Jaissle arrived, and the spine collapsed harder than two big nights out in a row: Bruno Guimaraes to Arsenal for £75m, Tonali to Spurs for £100m, Anthony Gordon to Barcelona for £69.3m. Big losses on paper, but looking at the stats, only one of those should keep anyone awake.
Newcastle averaged 1.8 points per game with Guimaraes in the side and 0.7 in the 16 league matches he missed. That will certainly be felt.
But Tonali left for a fee that can reach £100m, having scored just five goals in 79 Premier League appearances for the club, none of them last season.
Gordon went with his numbers falling for a second straight year, down from 11 goals and 10 assists in 2023/24 to six and two in 26 games last term.
Eight players came in, every one of them aged 18 to 24. Newcastle sold two men at the top of their market values and one they will actually miss, which is a better summer than it looked at the time.
Arsenal may have regrets
The champions are the instructive contrast, because Arsenal spent almost as much as Spurs did, just from the polar opposite emotional position. Out went £198.5m, back came £41.3m, and a net spend of £157.2m is what a club produces when it likes its team and fancies a marginally better version of it.
Guimaraes at £75m, Ezri Konsa at £55m, Piero Hincapie at £34.5m, Christos Tzolis at £34m, Illan Meslier free. Gabriel Jesus - second on the club's wage bill - left for Barcelona for relative peanuts, Leandro Trossard for Besiktas, Jakub Kiwior for Porto, Ethan Nwaneri on loan to Dortmund.
Arsenal weren't forced to sell a player they wanted to keep, but the curiosity is what they chose to reinforce.
Arsenal won the league conceding 26 goals, at least six fewer than anyone else, with 19 clean sheets, 0.74 expected goals against per game, the fourth-best figure in the Premier League since 2012/13, and 8.2 shots faced per game, the lowest in Europe's big five leagues.
The Gunners scored 68, took 28 of those from set pieces and 18 from corners, which is a Premier League record, and their leading scorer Viktor Gyokeres finished on a not-too-shabby 14 for his debut season. The team just needs a more lethal centre forward.
Arsenal chased Vinicius Junior, chased Julian Alvarez, landed neither, sold Jesus anyway and spent their hard-earned money on two centre-backs and a holding midfielder.
Guimaraes is a serious footballer, with 6.1 duels won per 90 minutes, leading Arsenal's central midfielders, and 5.0 ball recoveries per 90, second only to Declan Rice. The Brazilian also fixes something that was not broken. Could they regret their attacking failings come January?
Everton's miserable transfer window
Everton might possibly have had the worst window in recent memory. Iliman Ndiaye went for £65m and Beto for £15.4m, a £40m sale of Harrison Armstrong to Forest was agreed and then reversed under fan pressure, and the striker search ended with Folarin Balogun failing a medical, a swiftly rejected pivot to Joshua Zirkzee, a return to Balogun, and the player leaving the training ground unsigned after feeling mistreated.
It leaves Thierno Barry, who scored eight goals in 41 appearances last season, as the only senior striker at the club. David Moyes said publicly that his squad was short. Jack Grealish's late arrival will at least give fans something to be happy about, but we've all fallen foul of being a sucker for that guy.
The three promoted have also laid out their fruit and vegetables on the table. Ipswich spent about £150m, Coventry passed £100m and broke their record four times, Hull spent roughly £75m on a staggering 18 players - six on deadline day.
Ipswich are the interesting case, because they are the only one of the three doing this for the second time, and the lesson they took from going down in 2025 is that the answer was more money. Around £150m went on twelve players under Gary O'Neil, and the targeting is at least coherent: Julio Enciso at £26m, Emersonn at £24m, Exequiel Palacios at £23.5m from Leverkusen, plus Zian Flemming and Abdul Fatawu at £20m each, who between them know exactly what English football does to a promoted side in February.
Aston Villa had admittedly spent August looking like the summer's likeliest biggest loser after selling Rogers for £117m and Watkins to Al Hilal, then rescued it with a £77m deadline-day double in talented youngster Ibrahim Mbaye from PSG and sensible signing of Southampton's former Manchester City academy prospect Taylor Harwood-Bellis.
Rogers alone gave them eight goals, five assists and 10 big chances created in 30 league starts. That does not get replaced by Christmas.
What happens next?
So where does it all land by January? Here are a few down-the-pub predictions:
City settle by October and are top at Christmas, and the only argument left will be whether Maresca deserves credit for the squad or the chequebook. Arsenal stay fully in it, one striker injury from the conversation they have every winter, with Julian Alvarez's name back in print by Boxing Day.
Chelsea's start is real enough to hold a top-four place, at which point somebody asks Xabi Alonso why he sold a £125m midfielder to a title rival.
Below them, it gets messier. Liverpool become the loudest crisis in the country by November: Barcola's numbers aren't great, Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz trudge along, Anfield still misses Salah, and Andoni Iraola is asked about his future before the Christmas trees go up. United's defence costs them enough points that they spend January chasing a centre-back at a 40 per cent deadline mark-up.
Villa start slowly and finish the year on the fringe of the European places, because that's just what Unai Emery does.
Tottenham get worse before they get better, click in late October and reach the new year as the mid-table side nobody fancies playing. Newcastle enjoy a bright autumn and a cold December, because eight players aged 18 to 24 have never experienced three games a week in England.
At the bottom, Everton spend January hunting a striker they could have signed in August for less money and less humiliation.
Hull will not still be third and will probably be in freefall by the start of December. Coventry have the hardest job and the least room, and if they are still in single figures by Halloween, it turns ugly fast. Ipswich are the ones to watch out for and could potentially help themselves to a few scalps.
The January table will separate the clubs that replaced their best players from the clubs that merely sold them. Then the same names go round the belt again, somebody announces another record, Hull start poaching AC Milan players, and we trusty fans of Premier League football willfully reduce our memories back down to a seven-day limit.