The Athletic FC ⚽ is The Athletic’s daily football (or soccer, if you prefer) newsletter. Sign up to receive it directly to your inbox.
Hello! We’re your one-stop shop for the final hours of Europe’s transfer window. Strap in.
On the way:
🔀 Deadline day live
💰 Liverpool strike £55m deal
🦂 Solanke’s scorpion-kick goal
🔴 Electric PAOK fan tribute
Deadline day: Transfers that should happen
Mateta and Strand Larsen (Getty Images)
The transfer deadline in Europe is nigh, and the risk on a day like today is that TAFC falls out of date almost as soon as it lands in your inbox. Fortunately for us, The Athletic’s live blog is on hand to keep you abreast of every deal as it happens.
There’s plenty stirring in England and beyond, so let’s get to it, starting with a potential new team-mate for Christian Pulisic at Milan:
- The Serie A side have been putting Crystal Palace’s Jean-Philippe Mateta through a medical after agreeing a fee of more than £26m ($35.6m). An earlier bid from Nottingham Forest came to nothing, and it surely suits Palace not to lose the centre-forward to a relegation rival in the Premier League.
- Palace intend to use the income from Mateta to fund the purchase of Jorgen Strand Larsen from Wolverhampton Wanderers as a replacement. The teams shook hands on a £48m package yesterday. It’s a chunky wedge for a striker who’s scored once in the league this season (I’m being facetious — he bagged 14 last term, when Wolves looked like they’d actually seen a football before).
- This came from nowhere and strikes me as a good move for player and club: Ademola Lookman is poised to join Atletico Madrid from Atalanta. The 28-year-old properly came of age in Italy, winning the Europa League in 2024. Atletico are also speaking to Seattle Sounders about top MLS midfield prospect Obed Vargas.
- Liverpool decided to end interest in defender Lutsharel Geertruida, who is on loan at Sunderland from RB Leipzig. But late last night, Liverpool agreed to pay Rennes £55m for 20-year-old centre-back Jeremy Jacquet. That transfer will go through in the summer, rather than immediately.
- Manchester City backup goalkeeper Stefan Ortega has left for Nottingham Forest, a sale worth a weirdly nominal £500,000 (that would hardly pay Erling Haaland for a week).
Deadline day being what it is, there’ll be more besides, which brings us neatly onto the trades that might happen as we head towards the 7pm UK (2pm ET) cut-off.
Transfers that could happen
Arsenal gave Leeds United a pasting in the Premier League on Saturday, cantering to a 4-0 win at Elland Road, but there was bad news at the end of it. Mikel Merino has suffered a suspected broken foot and will be absent for much of the run-in.
With time ticking down in the window, Mikel Arteta is chasing a replacement today, which won’t be an easy endeavour. Merino is exceptionally versatile, to the extent that I think of him as a centre-forward rather than a central midfielder these days. Conor O’Neill cast his eye over viable options for Arteta. Inter’s Davide Frattesi and Leon Goretzka of Bayern Munich were names that came up.
All of Fulham’s work on Ricardo Pepi, however, was for nothing in this window. Realistically, the switch didn’t have to happen immediately — an arm injury will keep the USMNT attacker out until the middle of next month — but Fulham haven’t shown PSV enough money and for now, it’s off. Expect the cogs to start turning again in the summer.
🎙️ Adam Leventhal has answered a stack of questions from subscribers to The Athletic about how the process of wrapping up a transfer really works. His podcast on the anatomy of a deal is also well worth a listen. You can download it here.
News round-up
Solanke stings Pep: Striker saves Frank, City suffer, Liverpool sink Newcastle
Thomas Frank is in one of those cycles where, to coin a favourite phrase of mine, you continually wonder how many pairs of last legs he has. With his side booed off at half-time against Manchester City yesterday, here was another afternoon to test the patience of Tottenham Hotspur’s hierarchy.
And then, without warning, his team underwent a personality transplant. Their midfield was alive with energy. Dominic Solanke pulled the scoreboard back from 2-0 down to 2-2, his second goal a fabulous scorpion kick (above). Spurs had City on the ropes and with one win in six in the Premier League this side of the new year, Pep Guardiola’s squad are dropping too many points to make the title attainable. Tottenham have this inexplicable knack of bringing the worst out of them.
All round, it was a lively weekend. Liverpool trounced Newcastle United despite conceding first. Manchester United are three from three under Michael Carrick, and even Benjamin Sesko is doing the business. Chelsea fighting back from 2-0 down to beat West Ham United means the top four this season is most likely going to come from a clutch of six sides. Spurs are a long way from knocking on that door yet.
Talking a good game: Bompastor “happy” to leave Chelsea, “stinking” rant from Holloway
Chelsea took a 5-1 away thrashing from Manchester City in the Women’s Super League yesterday, presenting us with two staggering stats. It’s the first time Chelsea have suffered back-to-back defeats in the WSL since 2015. And it’s the first time Sonia Bompastor has lost successive games as a head coach, ever. Her career to date spans 181 matches.
Bompastor won a domestic treble with Chelsea last season, but there’s trouble in paradise. They won’t retain the WSL title (City are unbeaten and 12 points ahead of them), and they’ve lost their mojo. Bompastor cut to the chase yesterday, saying: “If people think I’m not the right person to stay for this job at the club, I’ll be happy to go.” Wow.
Somehow, it wasn’t the weekend’s choicest soundbite.
That came instead from Ian Holloway, the ever-eccentric boss of Swindon Town in League Two, England’s fourth tier. Holloway went off on one over a messy disciplinary case involving his captain, Ollie Clarke, urging the authorities to “sort your lives out, every single stinking one of you”. You can listen to the whole tirade here. Enjoy.
Around TAFC
- Various players will be saying cheerio to clubs today (Charlie Davies has written about his deadline-day transfer from New England Revolution to Philadelphia Union in 2016). Some partings will be amicable, such as Antoine Semenyo using a local newspaper to thank Bournemouth. Others will be fractious. Here’s Greg O’Keeffe on leaving a team in the ‘right’ way.
- World Cup ticket prices are off the scale, so it won’t shock you to hear that parking your car at this summer’s venues is going to be expensive, too. Henry Bushnell crunched the numbers.
- Typically good fun from Tifo Football: how Robert Lewandowski almost signed for Blackburn Rovers. Looking at the state of Blackburn today (third-bottom of the Championship, if you were wondering), Lewandowski to Ewood Park must feel like a figment of somebody’s imagination.
- Friday’s quiz answer: the four players who have scored 10-plus goals and received more than 15 yellow cards in the same Premier League campaign were Ian Wright (1996-97), Luis Suarez (2012-13), Diego Costa (2016-17) and Christian Benteke (2016-17).
Catch a match
(Selected games, times ET/UK)
Premier League: Sunderland vs Burnley, 3pm/8pm — USA Network/Sky Sports; La Liga: Mallorca vs Sevilla, 3pm/8pm — ESPN, Fubo/Premier Sports; Serie A: Udinese vs Roma, 2.45pm/7.45pm — CBS, Paramount+, Amazon Prime, DAZN.
And finally…
The death of seven PAOK supporters in a road accident last week was an unspeakably awful tragedy, and one that will hang over the club for a long time. They were killed while travelling to a Europa League tie against Lyon in France.
PAOK’s crowd paid tribute to them yesterday during a Greek Super League match against Panserraikos, and they didn’t do it by halves — lighting up the sky with a mass of red pyrotechnics midway through the first half. Send-offs don’t get more touching.