Premier League transfers graded by meme: Arsenal’s Declan Rice, Man United’s Andre Onana and more

Readers, allow me to draw you behind the veil of the commissioning process at CBSSports.com. The holiday season is fast approaching, we all need to squeeze in some time off where we can find it but your demand for content is ceaseless. Actually that’s a point … shouldn’t you be doing something more festive right about now? Scram, the lot of you!

Still here? Ok fine. Look, we needed some relatively timeless content and the internet loves nothing more than the preemptive assessment of transfers. As we discussed how we might rate them I noted that Arsenal supporters had taken on a view of Declan Rice akin to the “thank you for changing my life,” “I’m just Declan Rice” meme. You can imagine how matters snowballed from there. So, here we are, telling truth to power through the medium of the movie still that best explains Nicolas Jackson’s first months of Chelsea.

Thank you for changing my life Declan Rice

When Arsenal committed £105 million on Rice there didn’t seem to be much of a downside risk even considering the mammoth, club recording-obliterating fee that was being paid to West Ham. In fact, Rice might have served as the template for the safest way for any team to invest a nine figure sum: a young player who knows the league, has experience in high-level competition and whose displays had brought success to his previous employers.

However, few could have imagined Rice being so transformative to a team who had pushed Manchester City for much of the 2022-23 season. That iteration of Arsenal were no longer a team that could be overpowered physically. With their record signing anchoring their midfield, though, they have become a team of bullies. Rice is tormentor in chief, the sort of authoritative one-man midfield who slams opposition into the dustbin that is their own penalty area and keeps the lid on. At the time of writing (Dec. 18), Conor Gallagher and Lewis Cook ranked an impressive second in the Premier League for interceptions in the attacking half with 12. Rice has 16, many of them in the most dangerous areas. Indeed, in the final third, his seven interceptions eclipse every player on Sheffield United and Luton.

Then there is what Rice does when he has the ball, an imposing carrier who for most of the Premier League is almost impossible to keep pace with. Consistency is the watchword where the 24-year-old is concerned; it is hard to think of more than a handful of games where he has been less than an eight out of 10. When he is great though, he has that quality of N’Golo Kante in his prime, that he alone seems to be a one-man midfield, blended with a remarkable tendency to deliver in the clutch. Already Rice has won games for Arsenal in the most dramatic of fashions, downing first Manchester United and then Luton Town in added time. Those are the moments that make a $100 million and change look like a bargain. Given the choice, Arsenal would pay that money all over again. And maybe swing West Ham a few million more for their troubles.

I owe you an apology. I wasn’t really familiar with your game: Thomas Kaminski

In an age where fan communities develop an intimate expertise on Venezuelan 22-year-olds the minute they’re linked in a vaguely credible report in the Italian press, there can be something exceptionally liberating about not having the first clue what to expect from a new arrival. And while it may be to my eternal shame that my knowledge of the Championship is not what it ought to be, (how can they get so many games played by the middle of April???) on the plus side, it has offered me the chance to see the wonders of Thomas Kaminski with fresh eyes.

The former Blackburn goalkeeper probably won’t keep Luton up nor will he win many individual prizes at the end of the season. Guglielmo Vicario and Emiliano Martinez would probably edge him out if the PFA Team of the Year was decided today. However, he has been an almighty positive in a Luton season that has perhaps been more competitive than many might have feared. Sometimes his shot-stopping might only be the difference between the Hatters losing by one goal rather than two. Still, that is not nothing.

Indeed, according to Opta’s post-shot expected goal (xG) metric, Kaminski has prevented 3.98 goals through his first 17 games, the fifth-best mark in what has been an impressive season for Premier League goalkeeping. Against Liverpool in particular, the 31-year-old Belgian was obdurate, his five saves earning Luton one of the most memorable points of the campaign so far. Performances like that might not be enough to keep his club in the Premier League but they might be enough to convince a side in need of a really good shot-stopper that Kaminski should stay in the Premier League regardless.

What’s a transfer opinion that has everybody like this: Nicholas Jackson

You will all have a Jackson miss that sticks with you. Perhaps it’s the time he flicked six yards over the West Ham goal from six yards out. Maybe the tame poke at Aston Villa’s Martinez off a rare moment of incision by Mykhailo Mudryk. If not that, what about the time he ran straight into Willy Boly with the goal at his mercy. I’m here to tell you that it’s actually pretty good that Jackson already has his own wing in the museum of Chelsea’s wasteful strikers. Yes, yes, it’s that time when the stats nerds tell you it’s better for a striker to miss loads of great chances than not get them in the first place.

And here’s the thing. Jackson is getting a lot of chances. His 2.75 shots per 90 minutes is good for 12th in the Premier League, leading the likes of Ollie Watkins and Gabriel Jesus. They are exceptionally good shots too, the 22-year-old with a little over 50 top-flight games to his name averaging 0.67 non-penalty xG. That’s top three in the league behind Erling Haaland and Alexander Isak. The one trait all top strikers share in common is that they consistently get into positions where they can take good shots…and by the way, Haaland in particular is getting those in a far more stable attacking ecosystem than his Chelsea counterpart.

So, yes, there might be a lot of big red bubbles in that shot chart above, plenty more than some of his predecessors at the tip of the Chelsea attack would have got. For now, the sample size is much too small to project outwards to what Jackson could offer his new club over the long term but the start has been more than good enough that it seems baffling that the Blues are in such a rush to supplant their current center forward next month. Given his physical and technical attributes, the bull case for Jackson, who only just shared a Premier League pitch with Christopher Nkunku in the 2-1 loss at Wolves on Sundayt, is that he is an eminently usable forward for a side with high aspirations, perhaps even a starter on a contender. If Chelsea have spotted a player like that from the top of their mountain of wasted cash and secured his services for £32 million it is nothing less than a miracle.

Sickos: Andre Onana

You really do have to have this meme in the mix don’t you, even though it dramatically curtails the options available to you? With all due respect to Bournemouth, no one is taking perverse pleasure from Justin Kluivert’s relative difficulties finding the net. Realistically, there is one team above all others who unleash a wave of schadenfreude across the world: slayers of a generation of dreams, Manchester United.

To really unleash the ghoulish side of millions though, United need to have done something right and still see it backfire quite spectacularly. With Erik ten Hag at the helm, the club finally concluded that David De Gea’s fading shot-stopping and limited on-ball qualities weren’t getting them where they needed to go. They may not have let their four time player of the year go in the most graceful fashion but they at least partially made amends to supporters when they went out and got one of the best players on the market: the hero of Inter’s run to the Champions League final, Andre Onana.

Here was the man who was supposed to settle the debate for the next five or more years. Instead, he has dropped a petrol bomb on the embers with his propensity for howlers, particularly in the Champions League. Already Roy Keane is labeling the Cameroonian the “biggest disappointment” of United’s season. As will soon become apparent, that is a competitive field. 

Onana is not, however, such a disaster that you can just write him off and get yourself another goalkeeper. As Ten Hag noted — to the skepticism of some — the 27-year-old excels at goals prevented just as he did in an Inter shirt, preventing the third most of them through 17 games. His composure and impudence on the ball are of almighty value for any club, the problem he has at United is that while he may be able to distribute the ball effectively to his defenders, too few of them can actually do much with it. No matter how much they might trash his confidence, this team needs a goalkeeper like Onana. For the many, many who wish ill on United, however, his struggles must be delicious.

Confused math lady

If you had only seen United in the Champions League you would both be filled with mirth — see above — and convinced that the Red Devils had discovered Europe’s next great striker in Rasmus Hojlund, the competition’s joint top scorer for now at least. The thing is, they might actually have found something extremely special in the Dane. The raw attributes are very clearly there: Hojlund and Erling Haaland might go down as the first of the unicorn strikers, titanic figures who win gladitorial duels while moving across the ground with the soft touch of sprinters.

Then you see Hojlund in the Premier League. Well, sometimes. So rarely does he see the ball it hardly seems unreasonable that he is not setting the competition alight. But no goals? More than half the xG per 90? How do you go about explaining that?

Is it really that a league that includes Sheffield United and Burnley is more competitive than a Champions League group stage that United should have made look pat-a-cake? Is there something about the physicality and pace of the English game that makes it a challenge for Hojlund, a player that seems to embody those traits? Are we still just dealing with tiny samples and he’s neither as deadly as he has looked in Europe nor as passive as in the Premier League? Hojlund is 20. There is an awful lot of time for these questions to be answered, even at a club with United’s limited patience. But there really are a lot of them though.

“This is fine”

Yes, yes, it’s another Manchester United player. I don’t know what you want me to say here. They just do recruitment very badly. Case in point: Mason Mount. Here was a player signed to play in a position — one of two advanced midfielders in a 4-3-3 — that he had rarely done with distinction in the European game and whose arrival might either inhibit United’s best creator in Bruno Fernandes or, as ultimately transpired, leave Casemiro on an island in what was supposed to be central midfield. In handing Chelsea £55 million, United hamstrung themselves in other positions, unable to recruit the sort of veteran striker who might give Hojlund room to develop out of sight.

All of this might be fine if Chelsea were getting the Mount of years prior, a dynamic press leader who weighed in with an awful lot of scoreboard contributions. The England international, however, had atrophied in the chaos of Todd Boehly’s Stamford Bridge. He needed a stable environment, not a club who turn the corner more frequently than a Spirograph. Reclamation projects can make sense — Kai Havertz might go on to prove that at Arsenal — but if you’re trying to fix a player you need to have got yourself together first of all.

United don’t have Mount the hero of the Champions League. Instead they have another player signed for the specific vision of a manager whose long term standing is, for the time being at least, extremely shaky. There’s four and a half years to go on a contract that already has the look of a millstone. Someone, perhaps even Ten Hag, might rediscover Mount but it might be that 18 wasted months at a pivotal stage of his career is too much for the 24-year-old to overcome.

And that’s not even the real problem. The real issue is that this keeps happening to Manchester United, a club that cannot stop spending tens of millions on players who gum up the path of others. They are at risk of wasting Mount’s talents as they have Jadon Sancho’s, Donny van de Beek’s and Paul Pogba’s. Old Trafford used to be the place where the good became great, where every ounce of talent was extracted by a club that wanted its players to grow on and off the pitch. Now it is a graveyard of promising careers.