There tend to be two kinds of teams that sign new players in the January transfer window: (1) Teams that are desperate, and (2) teams that are getting lots of money from one of those desperate teams.

Take Aston Villa, for example. They’ve brought in five players in this winter window. They’re four points out of the expected five Champions League places in the Premier League. And after earning a bye to the round of 16 in the Champions League, they have an outside shot at winning the European Cup.

Take all of those factors together, add in the fact that three of those deals were expensive loans, and it certainly looks like Villa are scrambling to both try to get back into the Champions League and to take advantage of what might be their last Champions League appearance until at least 2026.

Except, Villa only made those moves after bringing in €110.7 million from desperate clubs in both the Premier League’s relegation battle and in Saudi Arabia. Only one other club in the world made more money from transfer fees this month, and truly desperate clubs don’t make money in January.

So, if Aston Villa aren’t on the list, which clubs were truly desperate in the winter transfer window that just closed? Let’s identify the biggest culprits and then rank them by their levels of desperation.

All transfer fees cited come from Transfermarkt.

5. Al Nassr

The biggest difference between Transfermarkt’s estimated market value of a player and the actual fee paid to acquire said player was Al Nassr’s move for Aston Villa’s Jhon Durán: they paid €77 million for a player whose crowd-sourced value estimate was only €40 million.

On the one hand, Duran has scored for fun whenever he’s played in the Champions League and Premier League. Plus, he’s only 21 years old and the kind of physically dominant player you can project technical improvement onto. On the other hand, Duran has started seven total Premier League games for Villa since joining from the Chicago Fire in 2022 for €29.5 million.

Even if we treat Saudi Pro League clubs as actual organizations that are attempting to win soccer games in both the near- and long-term — and not state-owned vehicles to create a new image of the nation on a global scale — then this move still doesn’t make much sense for Al Nassr.

Duran is a limited traditional striker, and now he’ll be playing with perhaps the most limited traditional striker in Cristiano Ronaldo. The club also have an increasingly limited Sadio Mané as the final part of their front line. These players don’t make sense together.

Al Nassr still haven’t won the Saudi league since Ronaldo joined the club. He has scored 15 of the team’s 37 goals this season — and yet they’re in fourth place. It’s just the latest example of a team’s overall performance being sacrificed in exchange for Ronaldo getting to boost his goal-scoring statistics.

4. Juventus and AC Milan

The two best teams in Italy … are not either of these teams. Here’s how that shakes out, by what appears to be the best team-strength metric — a combo of 70% expected goals and 30% actual goals:

Not only have Juve and Milan not played as well as Atalanta, Napoli, and Inter Milan — but they’re also both behind that trio in the league table. Throw in the Champions League round of 24 matchups for Juventus and AC Milan, both Italy’s two most successful clubs, and you get two desperate clubs doing some really strange stuff.

Juventus spent €17.2 million on Lloyd Kelly, a backup center-back that Newcastle acquired over the summer for €0 million in transfer fees. Outside of Xavi Simons signing for RB Leipzig — a team he was already on loan to, for €50 million despite only signing a contract through the end of 2027 — this might be the weirdest move of the window.

Juventus also brought in Renato Veiga and Randal Kolo Muani on loan. Veiga didn’t do much at all for Chelsea this season, but he at least gives Juve depth in an injury-battered backline. Kolo Muani takes the place of Dusan Vlahovic, who is still on the team and who Juventus paid €83.5 million for just three years ago. Both Veiga and Kolo Muani started over the weekend, and neither one comes with an option to make the deal permanent after the loan ends.

At AC Milan, the €32 million move for Feyenoord’s Santiago Giménez feels cheap. He’s only 23, and while signing any attacker from the wide-open spaces of the Eredivisie carries with it a massive risk, that risk doesn’t seem to be priced into this deal.

If Gimenez hits at one of the most premium positions on the field, his transfer value would be more than double what Milan paid. And if he doesn’t hit? Well, it’s hard to imagine he’ll be worse than the strikers he’s replacing, Álvaro Morata and Tammy Abraham, who combined for six non-penalty goals across 21 combined starts in Serie A. MIlan also made a few other smaller moves for younger players, too.

While those comparatively tiny bets feel very Moneyball — especially for a team partially owned by Billy Beane — the loans for Kyle Walker and João Félix, expensive short-term acquisitions for players whose names outstrip their performances, feels more, say, “Draft Day.”

Perhaps the 34-year-old Walker’s physical drop-off won’t be as pronounced in Serie A? And while everyone else deludes themselves into thinking Joao Felix might work out for them, maybe it’ll actually work for Milan?

They’re covering the full salaries of both players for the rest of the season, plus paying an additional, large loan fee for Felix. All in all, it adds up to more than €10 million for just three-plus months of play.

3. The Premier League’s relegation contenders

When Leeds were relegated from the Premier League in 2023, estimates said that the valuation of the club was immediately cut in half. Add in the loss of revenue from the league’s world-lapping broadcast revenue, and even the most hopeless relegation battlers will convince themselves that a couple of the right signings could turn things around. What’s another €30 million if it keeps your valuation from dropping by €150 million?

Now, Southampton are one of the worst Premier League teams in recent memory. Even with this past weekend’s win, they’re still 10 points from safety. Important context: Southampton have won only nine total points through 24 matches. And yet, they’ve brought in four new players this month.

To their credit, Southampton’s moves are all in keeping with the club’s overall approach: cheap (€5 million total), young (no one older than 23), not from England (France, Brazil, and Japan). Two of the January signings started in their win over Ipswich Town.

Meanwhile, Ipswich have slipped back into 19th over the course of the month despite their January spending.

They acquired winger Jaden Philogene from Aston Villa for €23.7 million and goalkeeper Alex Palmer from West Brom for €2.4 on permanent deals, and they also brought in Brighton attacker Julio Enciso and Atalanta defender Ben Godfrey on loan. For the club with the lowest wage bill in the Premier League, Ipswich’s net transfer outlay in this window (€25.4 million) was comparatively huge: fifth-most in England’s top flight.

One spot above Ipswich Town, Leicester’s lone signing was 25-year-old fullback Woyo Coulibaly from Parma for €5 million.

The only non-promoted team that’s really in the relegation fight is Wolves, who currently sit one point ahead of Leicester in 17th. It seems like they possibly could’ve moved on from Matheus Cunha at the peak of his value — 11 goals this season from 5.2 expected goals — but they’re instead re-signing him to a new deal through 2029.

Wolves also paid €20 million to acquire 27-year-old center back Emmanuel Agbadou from Rennes. To their credit, Agbadou looked like peak Jaap Stam over his first two matches, but his estimated Transfermarkt value was half of what they paid. They also signed Agbadou’s teammate, 28-year-old defensive midfielder Marshall Munetsi, for €18 million, and they spent €12 million on 22-year-old center back Nasser Djiga from Red Star in Serbia.

With a net spend of minus-€48.81 million, Wolves invested more into the transfer market than all but five other clubs in the world.

2. Rennes

There’s a team that’s right around the sixth- or seventh-richest team in their own league. They’ve been in the first division for more than 30 years. They’ve produced a stream of world-class players who eventually went on to play for some of the biggest clubs in the world. They make it into the Champions League every couple of years.

But right now, they’re experiencing a truly odd run of results that’s plunged them down toward the relegation battle. And so, they’ve spent more money than Liverpool, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich — combined — to get out of it.

Surely some Tottenham fans wish that paragraph was about their team, but no, this is about Rennes in France. (Tottenham only signed a goalkeeper and a center back after an injury crisis essentially forced their hand at both positions, and the deal for Bayern Munich’s Mathys Tel is a rest-of-season loan with an option to buy. That’s the opposite of desperation.)

Over the last 10 seasons, Rennes have never finished below 10th in Ligue 1. They’ve bounced up as high as third, and they’ve averaged a seventh-place finish over the past decade. And that lines up exactly with their spending power. Per estimates from FBref, Rennes have the seventh-largest wage bill in France.

Désiré Doué, Jérémy Doku, Ousmane Dembélé, Eduardo Camavinga, Édouard Mendy, Raphinha, Serhou Guirassy, Petr Cech, Tel — that’s just a handful of names who’ve made their way through the ever-present Ligue 1 club. Propped up by one of the best talent-development-and-identification machines in Europe, they’ve been in France’s first division since Ronald Reagan’s first term.

But thanks to talent drain and a freakish run of results, they were in the relegation zone just a few days ago — until a win over Strasbourg this past weekend gave them a two-point cushion in 15th. That’s with the 10th-best goal differential and the 9th-best expected-goal differential in the league.

While those numbers point to a likely turnaround, you can’t count on regression to the mean with just 14 games left. And so, Rennes have spent €73.75 million — more than all but Al Nassr and the No. 1 team on this list.

But it’s not even necessarily the money that stands out. Despite the club’s long history of developing world-class young talent, they’ve invested a large chunk of that money (€46 million) on three players — midfielder Seko Fofana, goalkeeper Brice Samba and forward Kyogo Furuhashi — whose combined age is 89. The latter two are 30, while Fofana, 29, returns to his old club after two years in Saudi Arabia.

The other major permanent moves were for 23-year-old center back Anthony Rouault from Stuttgart, 27-year-old winger Mousa Al-Tamarifrom Montpellier and 22-year-old winger Kazeem Olaigbe from Cercle Brugge. And then they loaned in Marseille midfielder Ismaël Koné.

In addition to all the spending and acquisitions, they’ve sent six players out on loan this window and let Jota and Amine Gouiri, a pair of capable, younger attackers, leave for Celtic and Marseille. All in all, 16 players have either joined or left the club this month.

1. Manchester City

Who else?

The defending Premier League champs haven’t looked close to repeating, and instead are in a real battle to qualify for the Champions League next season. On top of that, they barely stayed alive in this season’s revamp of the competition format: finishing tied on 11 points with four other teams and avoiding elimination via tiebreaker. Oh, and their reward? A round of 24 matchup with Real Madrid.

They can’t defend — deep or on the counter. And they often can’t score because they’re so scared of being too aggressive and suddenly creating situations where they have to defend again.

The loss of the reigning Ballon d’Or winner would hurt anyone, but City seemed especially vulnerable to an injury to Rodri. Ultimately, this was a strangely constructed, aging squad that finally hit its breaking point.

So, uh, how do you fix both of those things at the same time? City’s answer: spend €218 million — nearly triple any other club — on five players who you hope can help you start winning again now and in the future.

Eintracht Frankfurt‘s Omar Marmoush is the most obvious attempt to thread that needle. At 25, he’s no prospect, but he’s still in the earlier years of his prime. Otherwise, the players who seemed more equipped to help City’s core issue — the utter inability to handle any attack that moves with any kind of vertical speed — might still be a couple years away. Center backs Abdukodir Khusanov and Vitor Reis were acquired for nearly €80 million combined, but the former is 20 and the latter is 19.

Man City finally addressed the red carpet that is their Rodri-less midfield by signing 23-year-old Nicolas Gonzalez from FC Porto for €60 million. He should certainly bring some physicality and size to City’s midfield, but at least at this point in his career, he’s been more of a ball carrier and off-ball runner than someone you can stick at the base of your midfield to settle everything down.

All of which brings us here: City spent more than €200 million on transfer fees over the past month. But for the rest of this season, it’s not obvious that they’ve gotten any better.