Robin Roefs, Yan Diomandé, and SCOUTED’s favourite summer transfers
Llew Davies is fed up with the transfer window. But they’re also fun sometimes. Here are five summer moves to define the season ahead
What a fucking slog the transfer window is. Every year it gets worse, with more sensationalism and nonsense and increasingly incessant coverage. It sucks every drop of fun out of what should be an exciting time for fans as they get caught up in the overoptimism of the off-season.
This summer has seen Liverpool pull off one of the greatest hauls of all time, a huge feat of forward planning and determined execution by the likes of Michael Edwards and Richard Hughes. They’ve pretty much cemented their status as the very best in the game when it comes to squad building. But recent months have also been shrouded in multiple multi-club farces, the most prominent of which resulted in Crystal Palace being kicked out of the Europa League.
If this summer has shown anything, it’s that the multi-club operations are here to stay. More and more clubs are buying in, acquiring historic outfits and further muddying already murky waters. Most of them are US-owned Premier League clubs, even the traditionally modest institutions like Bournemouth and Burnley.
Nevertheless…I had fun tracking the movers and shakers this summer. My trusty Interesting Transfers spreadsheet includes more names than ever, touching 400 in total with a few more to come. The very first was Artem Stepanov, a Ukrainian centre-forward that looks and plays like Erling Haaland, who joined 1. FC Nürnberg on loan for the season. There are about 284 more players on the spreadsheet you’ve probably never heard of—but will do soon.
For this week’s SCOUT NOTES, I’m picking five of my favourite Big Five League transfers. I’ve confined myself to the Premier League, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Serie and LaLiga partly for uniformity, but mostly to restrain myself from writing 11,000 words.
Premier League: Robin Roefs to Sunderland
This is quickly becoming my favourite transfer of the entire summer. We’ve always been reluctant to analyse goalkeepers at SCOUTED, often leaving it to the experts to assess such a specialist position, but I like to think I know a good goalkeeper when I see one. Robin Roefs has the qualities of a very good goalkeeper.
My first watch of him was at this summer’s UEFA U-21 European Championship and I was immediately impressed. First and foremost, he looks like a proper goalkeeper: registered as 1.94 metres tall, he has a stretchy frame with long arms and a big wingspan. Believe it or not, being tall, long and stretchy is actually quite advantageous when you play in goal.
