Every player Tottenham signed in 2025/26 graded: £30m forward and £52m playmaker both get low scores

It’s fair to say that Tottenham Hotspur’s season hasn’t exactly gone according to plan, and once the dust has settled the club will have the unenviable task of figuring out what went wrong – and who’s to blame.

Thomas Frank and Igor Tudor will take a lot of the heat while others will point towards the board… But how much of a role did recruitment play in a dire campaign? We decided to look back at the 10 players Spurs signed over the course of the 2025/26 season and grade each player based on their performances and impact to figure out whether the new faces deserve to cop some of the flak.

Simons and Kudus struggle as biggest signings struggle to get going

Xavi Simons (£52m from RB Leipzig) – D: Spurs pulled off one of the transfer window’s biggest surprises when they gazumped Chelsea at the last minute and stole Simons out from under their rivals’ noses. Nine months later, and they might be wishing that they’d let Chelsea have him.

At his best, Simons showed flashes of the sparkling technique that made his stand out in the Bundesliga, but that best has appeared all too infrequently. Simons started slowly, struggled for consistency even once he did start to warm up a little bit, and failed to produce in the way that a player worth over £50m is expected to, with a total of six goals and seven assists in 43 games representing a rather underwhelming return.

That said, it’s pretty typical of Spurs’ bad luck that Simons was just starting to look more lively when he ruptured his ACL. He was superb against Atlético Madrid and Brighton in the spring, but we’ll have to wait until 2027 to see if he can make those kind of performances the norm. Given the price tag and the fact that he’s now on the treatment table for a while, we think a D is a fair reflection of the value that Spurs got from the deal.

Mohammed Kudus (£50m from West Ham) – C: Spurs’ other big-money buy has also struggled with injury since the turn of the year and hasn’t played since January, making it harder to put together a fair assessment of his season – but we still got 26 games’ worth of evidence that he wasn’t the very best use of £50m.

Never an especially prolific scorer at West Ham, Kudus’ return of three goals and nine assists to date is about par for him based on previous seasons. Like Simons, he has been impressive in patches – he almost single-handedly dragged Spurs to a win over Leeds back in October – but hasn’t been a consistent performer and developed a nasty habit of going missing in difficult matches before a thigh injury curtailed his debut season.

Conor Gallagher (£34m from Atlético Madrid) – C+: Gallagher looked like just about the safest signing Spurs could possibly have made when they snapped him up in January, but it took a surprisingly long time for him to settle in and carve out a role at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium – but the arrival of Roberto De Zerbi seems to have been good for him.

Once arguably Chelsea’s most important player before they sold him for financial reasons, Gallagher has started to look like his old self since the Italian head coach was installed, and his ultimately decisive goal against Aston Villa over the weekend capped perhaps his most energetic and dynamic game for the club yet. Things are looking up after a disappointing start, and it’s difficult to envision Gallagher proving to be a bad signing in the long run.

Mathys Tel (£30m from Bayern Munich) – D+: We’ll admit to having been a little too optimistic about Tel when he first arrived on loan last season. Rightly heralded as one of French football’s brightest talents back when he was making his name with Bayern Munich, Tel seems to have lost the thread since making his move to Spurs permanent over the summer.

Every now and again, we get to see glimpses of his immense potential, but for £30m Spurs would have wanted more than three goals in 28 Premier League games, and they certainly won’t have wanted a player who started shopping himself around in the January transfer window as he pushed to leave for Paris FC. All the talent and ability is there, but Spurs doesn’t necessarily seem to be the right fit for him - and it would be no surprise if he was sold this summer.

Was Randal Kolo Muani Tottenham’s worst signing of the season?

João Palhinha (loan with option to buy for £27m from Bayern Munich) – B-: The experienced midfielder has put together a couple of spells of good form, especially in the autumn and again in January, and has certainly never failed to put his back into his work. The 30-year-old’s appetite for tackles, turnovers and ceaseless running remains undiminished.

It’s fair to suggest that a highly aggressive midfielder who covers every blade of grass but doesn’t have much positional discipline hasn’t always been what Spurs needed – how they could have done with a dedicated anchorman when they were getting hammered by Arsenal in November rather than a player who kept getting suckered out of position – but that’s more of a squad building issue than an indictment of Palhinha as a player. He’s been better than most Spurs players this season.

Kevin Danso (£21.5m from RC Lens) – B: Given that Danso was signed primarily as a back-up to Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven, it’s pretty hard to argue with the quality and consistency of his performances – he may not have the same technical qualities as the players ahead of him in the pecking order, but he makes up for that with his strength, potency in one-on-one duels and his rock solid positional sense. Scarcely a transformational signing, but a reliable back-up when he’s been called upon. Which, given all the injuries, has been fairly frequently.

Randal Kolo Muani (loan from PSG) – E: Perhaps the best thing about the deal which brought Kolo Muani in from PSG is that it doesn’t include an obligation to buy him. The striker has spent the entire season looking like he would much rather be somewhere else – specifically Juventus, where he enjoyed a successful loan spell last season – and has been a pretty major let down from start to finish.

It’s somewhat amusing that the only game in which Kolo Muani really showed up all season came against his parent club, when he scored twice and created a third in the chaotic 5-3 defeat in Paris back in November. When he hasn’t had an obvious external motivator to get him going, however, he has looked aimless and lacklustre. He surely won’t be back next season, whichever league Spurs are playing in.

Souza (£13m from Santos), Luka Vušković (£9.5m from Hajduk Split) & Kota Takai (£5m from Kawasaki Frontiale) – all unrated: Three young future prospects in defence who have just four Premier League appearances between them, it would be unfair to grade these signings based on the minimal sample sizes available. These are verdicts that can’t be delivered just yet

Souza has been handed a couple of starts since arriving and has acquitted himself well enough without startling anybody, while Vušković has allegedly drawn the attention of Barcelona after impressing on loan with HSV in Germany. His signing could prove to be a good bit of business even if he never even plays for the club. Takai, meanwhile, has been plagued by injuries and has only managed a handful of appearances on loan at Borussia Mönchengladbach since moving there temporarily in January.

The final verdict on Tottenham Hotspur’s transfers in 2025/26

For the most part, their recruitment has proven to be just as wayward as their managerial appointments. Only Danso and Palhinha have really risen above the average, and not by all that much.

Simons and Kudus have the talent to be major contributors but the former is now badly injured and couldn’t build up a head of steam until after Frank left his post – the Dane never seemed to be able to work out quite what to do with him - while Kudus would feel like a good buy if he’d cost rather less than £50m.

Gallagher, at least, is starting to get back to his best when he’s needed the most, and he’s a player who often grabbed Chelsea by the scruff of the neck and dragged them towards results during his last stint in the Premier League. If he plays like he did against Aston Villa for the last few games of the season, he’ll deserve a better grade than a C+.

Kolo Muani and Tel were understandable signings but have both been disastrous and neither seems willing or able to make a difference. Whether that was a foreseeable outcome or not is a question for the person who was meant to be doing their due diligence on their characters, or at least checking whether they even wanted to be in North London in the first place.

Ultimately, however, the biggest problem is that Spurs seem to have picked players based on whims rather than buying assets with a plan for how to fit them into their system – not that there was a clear-cut plan for most of the campaign, in their defence. One wonders what the response from the recruitment team would be if they were asked what Simons’ role in the squad was when they signed him, or why they brought Palhinha in when they lacked a proper midfield enforcer. On the evidence of the 2025/26 season, the answers might not be especially satisfactory.