Ranking the best Premier League signings of last season

EUROPE is alive to the sound of deals being done. The annual yearning for new signings has already seen £1bn spent in the big five leagues, less than three weeks after the Champions League final. The majority have taken place on the mainland, with Real Madrid revamping like only they can, while the biggest sum paid by a Premier League club so far is the £30m that Wolves have handed over for Raul Jiminez. This feels somehow comforting, because Wanderers saw him in action for an entire season before splashing out. In a world where some moves work and some very definitely don’t, a period in which to try out a new signing before a fee is handed over is a gift.

Precisely foretelling the future is something limited to mystics and Biff Tannen so without a reliable supply of yet-written sports almanacs we can only look back and assess how a new influx of arrivals to the Premier League did once a season has elapsed. To that end, the SWOOP (Signings Were Okay or Poor?) Score has been devised by specialists (ok, it was me) using a fiendish combination of metrics (ok, just a handful, but sometimes simplicity results in the perfect outcome). It’s not for me to say that this system will utterly revolutionise how people look back on transfers, but it surely must.

The SWOOP Scores for the Premier League’s newcomers in 2018-19 shows a top three of Alisson, the aforementioned Raul Jiminez (good decision, Wolves) and Lucas Digne. Alisson’s season needs little recap: the best debut term by a Premier League goalkeeper since the mid-2000s with 21 clean sheets and one of the best xG Prevented figures in the division. Jiminez scored 13 goals and assisted seven more, while Lucas Digne both scored and assisted four times as well as creating 13 clear cut chances and being a member of an Everton team whose defence became stronger and stronger as the campaign progressed.

The remainder of the top 10 is a list of names who all had strong seasons. Yes, you might argue that James Maddison should be above Jorginho or that Ricardo Pereira should be above Felipe Anderson but these are minor quibbles. The system even passes the Wolves insider test [ask any non-Wolves fan who their best player was in 2018-19 and there’s a 72% chance they’ll say Ruben Neves, while Wanderers fans will invariably suggest Jiminez, Joao Moutinho or Diogo Jota, all of whom are in the top 10].

*new PL arrival, even though he had played in the Championship for Wolves in 2017-18

At this stage you’ll no doubt be pounding the nearest flat surface and shouting “just what goes into this SWOOP Score, it seems like it should be the basis of all future decisions and judgements I’ll ever make!” and I can reveal the formula is remarkably available: games played x 0.5 + clean sheets + goals + assists + games won + big chances created x 0.75. Hold on a minute, you’re thinking. Is this some sort of post-hoc tinkering to get an acceptable top 10 for 2018-19? Please, sir, do not doubt the SWOOP score, because the top three in 2017-18 was Bernardo Silva, Ederson and a tie in third between Alvaro Morata (no, wait, he was good for a bit in the autumn) and Brighton’s leading creative Pascal Groß. A year earlier it was Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Fernando Llorente (that season when he was at Swansea and scored goals) and Leroy Sane, with future Champions League hero Joel Matip in fourth. SWOOP 7-0 Your Preconceptions.

So, who does the SWOOP Score rate as the best Premier League import of the last decade? That honour goes to Sergio Aguero in 2011-12 with a gigantic score of 87 and I think we can all agree that Manchester City’s all-time top scorer is a transfer that has worked out. In second place on 81 is Santi Cazorla in 2012-13, a campaign in which he scored 12 and assisted 11 more. Despite those numbers, Cazorla didn’t get into the PFA team of the season, a decision his manager Arsene Wenger described as “…quite harsh. Personally, I would have put him in there.” If only the erstwhile Arsenal manager had been able to call upon SWOOP, the clamour to get Cazorla into the XI would have been overwhelming. Modern football may be faster than ever before, but it seems no player can outrun their SWOOP Score.