Arsenal, Aston Villa and Man City to copy champion transfer template, including Bayern-angering raid

Arsenal will infuriate Bayern Munich by signing their crown jewel, but Ethan Nwaneri is off to Italy. Pep Guardiola will finally land his most coveted star.

Those are the headlines from our January transfer window forecast, based entirely on mid-season signings made by eventual Premier League champions.

It should be noted at this point that Premier League champions rarely make such impactful signings in the middle of the season. Jose Antonio Reyes genuinely remains one of the only pertinent examples. But some supporters will still insist their clubs lack ambition when they don’t spend millions to jeopardise carefully crafted squads which are numerous points clear beyond the halfway stage of the season .

Anyway, the 2026 equivalents of the last ten signings the Premier League winners bought and actually played that season are below.

Why? There isn’t a shrug strong enough to answer that question but you’re here now so let’s crack on.

It was hoped that the Club World Cup would provide a shop window for Argentinean youth international midfielder Delgado, whose starring role at the U20 equivalents of both the South American Championship and World Cup have caught the eye.

The same was once said of Maximo Perrone, on whom Manchester City spent £8m in January 2023 in return for 20 minutes of senior football across two appearances before he was inexplicably but also obviously sold at a profit two years later.

First of all: best of luck with that, considering how hilariously rattled Bayern Munich have been by teenager Karl’s revelation that Real Madrid are his “dream club” he wishes to one day join.

If the big, bad Premier League were to come along instead and snare their exciting academy product, Bayern really might self-combust in sheer anger .

Arsenal are known admirers of a player seemingly named by Germany’s biggest fans of The Simpsons . And as the only player to score against the Gunners in the Champions League so far this season he is the only candidate to mimic Takumi Minamino’s move to Liverpool in January 2020.

The Japan forward scored at Anfield a few months before making the switch when his release clause was activated. That obviously made it a Michael Edwards ‘masterstroke’ , even when he scored precisely four goals in 30 Premier League games before being sold.

While speculation surrounds Manchester City’s interest in Marc Guehi with Max Alleyne abruptly promoted to the first team due to a raft of injuries, it has to be taken into account just how tightly Crystal Palace are going to keep hold of their captain this month.

Manchester City do love to spend extravagantly on centre-halves in the middle of a season, with the tradition dating back to Pep Guardiola’s first Premier League title.

Having watched Liverpool shatter the world record to sign Virgil van Dijk, the best response Manchester City could muster was to pluck Aymeric Laporte from Athletic Bilbao. And of all the release clauses floating around currently , the one in Ousmane Diomande’s contract seems most pertinent.

Are Aston Villa in the title race? It felt like the heavy defeat to Arsenal rendered that really quite tiresome question moot but they do remain level on points with a Manchester City that up until recently had been building their usual head of winter steam.

They should be taken into account until the numbers explicitly say otherwise.

It also makes for a far neater parallel with the 2016 Leicester vintage, which definitely needed 21-year-old Ghana international defender Daniel Amartey to push them over the line.

He earned that winner’s medal with five unbeaten Premier League appearances, much like 21-year-old Senegalese defender Diao will for Villa when he arrives.

Unai Emery will not stop there in his relentless quest to be the world’s most awkward third wheel.

Villa have already further compounded Harvey Elliott’s misery by spending £18.7m on Alysson and Brian Madjo of Gremio and FC Metz respectively, with both scheduled to absolutely Jhon Duran it up within the next 18 months.

But they need to emulate Leicester’s capture of Demarai Gray from Birmingham a decade ago, so running a finger down a list of 19-year-old Championship forwards with modest numbers this season eventually lands us on Schwartau of a Norwich side who will presumably be thrilled to take part in this nonsensical alternate timeline.

“It’s not a panic buy,” Jose Mourinho continued to insist as he slowly shrank and transformed into a corn cob. But it is difficult to view the signing of Juan Cuadrado from Fiorentina as anything other than a harbinger of impending Chelsea doom.

It did not knock the Blues off their title course in 2014/15; they topped the table for the entire season. Yet it hinted at a disconnect between the manager and those in charge of transfers, boiling over into a summer when Mourinho was given Abdul Baba Rahman, Kenedy, Papy Djilobodji and Michael Hector to add to a champion squad before being sacked a few months later when those ingredients turned out to be unpalatable .

The retrospective view of the £26.8m Cuadrado deal is not helped by the fact Mo Salah was sent on loan to Fiorentina for 18 months as a direct part of it.

Arsenal and Mikel Arteta are boringly aligned to the extent that they probably won’t farm Ethan Nwaneri off to Napoli in part-exchange for Neres.

It was a solid 2025 for 17-year-old forward Kostov, who made his first-team debut, won the league title, scored in the Europa League and was capped by Serbia across a whirlwind few months.

He might be taken aback to learn he’s headed to Arsenal because Manchester United once considered Zoran Tosic to be a potential successor to Cristiano Ronaldo.

That was certainly the plan but it never came close to fruition; by Tosic’s own admission “the levels were so high” at Old Trafford “that it felt like another sport”.

Tosic played only five times for Manchester United so the purely theoretical bar for Kostov at Arsenal is hearteningly low.

Would Manchester United have won the 2009 Champions League final if Ritchie de Laet had retained the starting place he was given on the final day of that Premier League season against Hull?

It was an especially strong left-hand side with Lee Martin ahead of De Laet, both on their respective Premier League debuts. And Manchester United obviously won with one of those preposterous line-ups supporters now get all misty-eyed over, like when they beat Arsenal 2-0 with a Fabio-O’Shea-Gibson-Rafael midfield.

Manchester United were losing to Barcelona regardless, of course – although not in as humiliating a fashion as two years later . But it must have been fun for De Laet to start the season in Stoke’s reserves before landing in the Conference mid-table with Wrexham and ultimately lining up for the champions.

Oliver Bainbridge, on loan at South Shields from Sunderland, it is your time to shine as officially The Next Cohen Bramall .

Has there ever been a greater discrepancy between a player’s number of appearances and their legendary impact on one club?

The amount of importance Henrik Larsson has been imbued with as a genuine game-changer during a three-month spell at Manchester United has even landed him a place as an Overlap guest to break their embargo on Ferguson-adjacent discussion.

Ferguson was a long-term admirer of Larsson, a forward he tried to sign years previously during the Swede’s peak and was only eventually successful during Helsingborg’s off-season.

No such things exists in the world of Joselu but as a 35-year-old striker well-versed in the ways of El Clasico – and someone Guardiola has surely fantasised about for years – he is destined to be the player who transformed Manchester City for generations to come in six substitute appearances.

Jiri Jarosik called it “the greatest chance of my life”, when really Roman Abramovich just wanted to move a toy from the CSKA Moscow-shaped box he had a £30m sponsorship deal with, to the far shinier and more alluring chest of Chelsea.

CSKA did play and inevitably lose twice to Chelsea in that season’s Champions League but Jarosik featured in neither game so cannot pretend he caught Mourinho’s eye.

So take your pick. Manchester City have a few obvious teams they can pluck a player from, while Villa’s multi-club roster is handsome enough. Arteta will be in the Colorado Rapids dressing room soon to scout anyone over 6ft 3ins.