EmailPrintOpen Extended ReactionsBefore he got hurt in warmups Sunday at Nottingham Forest, it seemed as if Florian Wirtz had turned a corner. And given how terrible Liverpool looked for the first 85 minutes of that match, his recent uptick in statistics might be underselling just how important he is to his new team. But it's not only him.Since the calendar flipped to 2026, most of the best attacking players in the Premier League were summer signings. In 2026, Chelsea's Jo�o Pedro, Arsenal's Viktor Gyokeres and Manchester United's Benjamin Sesko are tied for the league lead in non-penalty goals with five.Goals, of course, can be noisy: a couple of nice finishes, lucky deflections, or goalkeeper mistakes does not a great goal scorer make. But Sesko ranks fourth in expected goals, Jo�o Pedro is third, and one spot above him is Liverpool's Hugo Ekitike, another summer signing. Wirtz, meanwhile, is eighth in xG, and if we add in expected assists to create a crude measure of attacking performance, then Wirtz moves up to third -- one spot behind Ekitike.Even in North London, where Tottenham are already on their second manager of the season (hello, Igor Tudor) and now trying to fight off a very real chance of relegation, Xavi Simons also has started to improve. He's 12th in the expected goals+assists chart since the turn of the new year.So, with so many summer signings now producing for their new clubs, and with most of them joining from different leagues, it's really tempting to dig into that gigantic bag of English-football clichs and declare that, well, "They just needed time to settle" -- to get used to the pace and pressure of the Premier League, to understand that you're not in the Bundesliga anymore, Hugo.Rather than doing that, though, we're going to question the premise altogether. Let's look back at recent history and answer the following question: Do new Premier League players actually improve once they get used to the league, or is that just hopeful thinking?- Why is Champions League so easy for Premier League teams?- Top 50 USMNT players of 2026 so far, ranked by club form- Ranked: Top 25 manager jobs, from best to worstHow to know which transfers got betterTo get an answer, I went back and looked at every major attacking signing Premier League clubs have made for players outside of England in the summer transfer window since the 2015-16 season. I put the cut off at 15 million (per data from Transfermarkt), but then subjectively added in a couple of players who also felt as if they fit the spirit of the exercise.And to define "attacker," I used players listed as forwards, wingers or attacking midfielders. Why only attackers? And why only summer signings?I chose attackers because their performances are simply easier to quantify. These players are generally playing well if they're generating lots of shots and chances for their teammates, while midfielders and defenders have much more vague and context-dependent responsibilities.And I decided to only look at summer signings because January signings confound the exercise. I wanted to know if players from outside the Premier League got better as their first season in the Premier League went on. Players signed in January get less than half of a season, and then their "second half" would be the following season, after they've been given a full preseason to integrate with the new squad.So, by simplifying things, we ended up with 80 players who featured in at least 300 minutes in both the first and second halves of their first seasons with their new teams. And to judge the progression of their performances, we're simply going to look at what they did over the first 19 games of the season and the final 19 games of the season.This, of course, cuts out players who might not have hit the minutes threshold in either the first and second half because their manager thought they were playing so poorly. And while that would naturally eliminate players who got worse or got better, there's a roughly equal amount of players on both sides of that conundrum, so I moved forward with the 300-minute threshold.Why the Premier League's adjustment period is very realTo quantify each player's performance, I looked at nine different statistics. Here's how much the per-90 performance changed for all 80 players from the first half of the season to the second: Goals: 5.7% increase xG: 11.9% increase Assists: 0.6% increase xA: 5.9% decrease Chances created: 1.6% increase Shots: 4% increase Touches inside the penalty area: 6.3% increase Passes into the penalty area: 5.1% increase Successful dribbles: 3.5% decreaseSo, pretty much everything gets a little bit better: they take more shots, they take much better shots, they get on the ball inside the box more often, they play more passes into the box, and they score more goals. Those all seem like clear indicators of a player playing better -- these are the main ways attackers help their teams win games.But they also double as indicators of players settling into new systems and a new league. They're increasingly finding spaces in the most dangerous areas of the field, and that's leading to increased production.I think that's even true in one of the declining statistics: successful dribbles. If you're struggling to impose yourself within the confines of your new team's tactics and lineup, then one simple way to try to make a difference is to attempt to beat your man with the ball. Perhaps, once you're affecting play around the box more often, you don't feel the need to do that anymore. Or, you start to affect play around the box more often when you stop trying to dribble.The strangest part, though, is the decline in expected assists. This isn't expected goals assisted, which awards the xG value for any shot attempted to the person who passed the ball to the shooter. Rather, xA calculates the value of the likelihood that every pass, whether it actually leads to a shot or not, will turn into a goal.Theoretically, it shouldn't be as noisy as xG assisted, and it should be a better representation of actual passing skill. But it's just really hard to square a near-equal decline in xA with the improvement in passes into the penalty area. Research has shown passes into the penalty area to be way more repeatable than actual assists and xG assisted, so I'm inclined to shrug and just say there's no real change here at all in terms of how new players are impacting games with their passing.The winter of the summer signingsThis past summer, there were six players who moved to the Premier League from teams outside of England for fees of 60 million or more: Wirtz and Ekitike to Liverpool, Sesko to Manchester United, Gyokeres to Arsenal, Simons to Tottenham, and Nick Woltemade to Newcastle.On the whole, they've all improved since the season began -- across every per-90 metric mentioned earlier: Goals: 52% increase xG: 19.2% increase Assists: 12.1% increase xA: 66% increase Chances created: 6.5% increase Shots: 27.2% increase Touches inside the penalty area: 18.8% Passes into the penalty area: 28% Successful dribbles: 1.8%Now, the second-half numbers we're comparing to here are a much smaller sample of matches -- eight or nine, compared to 19 from the first half -- but that should just tamp down our expectations for how much they've improved, rather than make us question whether or not they have actually improved at all.Wirtz, Eiktike, and Simons are up significantly in just about every metric -- and they've all played a lot of minutes so far in the second half. Sesko's passing numbers are all down, but his shot production is astronomical on a per-90 level since the midway point of the season.That said, he has started only two league matches this year and has lost playing time under interim Manchester United manager Michael Carrick. But in his past four league appearances, which added up to about 90 total minutes, he has scored three times and attempted seven shots. There's still lots to work with -- Sesko is still only 22.Woltemade, meanwhile, is the only clear bucker of the positive trend: His previously meager passing numbers have ticked up, but he has yet to score in the second half and his xG production has declined by 76%. This is every shot he has attempted in the second half of the season:With Gyokeres, it's a little less straightforward. After making Tottenham's defenders look as if they were playing for Boavista on Sunday, he has scored twice as many goals per 90 minutes in the second half of the season as in the first, but his xG production is down 36%, his touches in the opposition box have declined at almost exactly the same rate, and his shots per 90 have dropped by over 20%.Maybe Arsenal want him to be on the ball in the box less because that means he's making more runs into space as we saw him do with Sporting Lisbon? It hasn't borne itself out in reality beyond the game we just saw.Most players are not going to be Erling Haaland or Mohamed Salah and dominate the league from the day they show up. As we've seen so far this season -- and as we've seen over the past decade -- we really should be more patient with players joining from different leagues. There really does seem to be a "bedding in" or "settling in" or an "[insert clich of choice]-ing in" period for attackers who join the Premier League from other countries.Based on the historical numbers, though, it's not as if we should expect everyone to improve by the 5% or 6% rates we established earlier. No, we'd expect that slightly more of the new attacking signings in the Premier League would show improvement in the second half of the season than would not. We'd expect that some would improve by way more than the baseline, that others would decline by way more.We should give these players more time to adjust, yes, but that doesn't mean that it's always going to pay off.
