Arsenal flop joins Man Utd pair in ten Premier League summer departees thriving in Europe

The Premier League may be The Best League In The World but these 10 players will surely be delighted with their decisions to leave the green and pleasant land for one of Europe’s inferior divisions.

Scott McTominay (Manchester United to Napoli, £25m)
Anyone with an even slightly football-tilted social media algorithm will have seen Scott McTominay’s performance for Napoli against Juventus, presumably clipped up with the sole purpose of boiling Red Devil p*ss that they sold an academy graduate who – unbeknownst to them – can do things with a football akin to a prime Kaka, to the extent that an Italian commentator claimed the Scot made ‘the Juventus players look like children’.

His first goal for the club came in the next game against Palermo and his first assist in the 2-0 win over Monza on Sunday.

We can only assume given United’s history of selling academy graduates to Serie A that McTominay will return to Carrington a conquering hero as the Red Devils spend £89m on a slice of humble pie.

Somebody should be ‘arrested’, apparently.

Conor Gallagher (Chelsea to Atletico Madrid, £37.5m)
Delighted for him. Treated abhorrently by his boyhood club during a summer in which he also faced a torrent of abuse from England fans for not being a No.6.

Gallagher could have dug his heels in and forced Chelsea to accept a Premier League offer – the easy option – but has instead backed himself to thrive in a foreign league and that’s exactly what he’s doing, under a manager who loves talented grafters, which pretty much exactly describes Conor Gallagher.

Nuno Tavares (Arsenal to Lazio, loan)
Mikel Arteta has made it very clear in his bid to do exactly what Pep Guardiola does in order to beat him to the Premier League title, that there is absolutely no room for bona fide full-backs in his team.

Arsenal’s loss is very clearly Lazio’s gain though, with Tavares claiming four assists for the Italian side, including two in a 2-2 draw with AC Milan on debut.

Che Adams (Southampton to Torino, free)
So many questions, the main one being, why Che Adams? To which the Torino recruitment genius’ answer can now, quite simply be, four goals and two assists in eight games. He’s only started four of them too.

Currently fifth but level on points with both Inter and Milan just above them, we’re guessing Adams has put the “little doubts” he had over a move to Turin to bed, dreaming of Champions League football on drives to Lake Como while Southampton get battered by Bournemouth.

READ MORE: Man Utd bungle Ten Hag sack and four other Premier League summer mistakes

Deniz Undav (Brighton to Stuttgart, £28m)
High-line capitulation against Chelsea aside, Brighton have enjoyed a decent start under Fabian Hurzeler, who certainly seems to know what he’s doing and may not have been handing Undav much game time had he not made his Stuttgart loan permanent this summer, given the excellent start to the season by Danny Welbeck.

Hard to turn down £28m as well, but after 18 goals and ten assists in the Bundesliga last season, Undav had continued where he left off with four goals already to his name this term.

Giovani Lo Celso (Tottenham to Real Betis, £3.5m)
He started as many games for Argentina (6) over the last year as he did for Tottenham and we can’t be alone in thinking Lo Celso was never really given a fair crack in the Premier League.

It could also be said that he never really made the most of his opportunities; something that he’s certainly making amends for this season, having gone level with Kylian Mbappe in La Liga with five goals, having scored on all his four starts.

Michael Olise (Crystal Palace to Bayern Munich, £45m)
A report earlier this week claimed Bayern believe they have ‘signed a £100m player for half the price in Olise’ presumably in the hope of all of us going ‘my word, aren’t you clever’ when in fact they just paid a release clause that anyone who saw him play for Crystal Palace last season knew was significantly lower than his actual value.

It’s still a coup though, no doubt about that, with most of the Premier League Big Boys also sniffing around him and it’s all going swimmingly so far with Olise claiming five goals and three assists. Though obviously he could do nothing against the might of Aston Villa.

Next time on ‘Worst kept secrets in football’: Eberechi Eze is quite good too.

Pascal Gross (Brighton to Borussia Dortmund, £6m)
The most unsurprising success story of all.

Gross has been criminally underrated by pretty much everyone other than those affiliated with Brighton, including the German national team bosses who failed to hand him his debut until September 2023, when he was 32 years old, despite showing his class throughout his seven seasons in the Premier League, arguably saving his best till last when he was just pipped to the creativity gong by Bruno Fernandes.

He’s started all six Bundesliga games for Dortmund, keeping either Emre Can or Felix Nmecha out of the team, and only Joshua Kimmich (49) and Grant Xhaka (47) have completed more progressive passes than Gross (45) in the German top flight.

Mason Greenwood (Manchester United to Marseille, £26.6m)
The new Manchester United bosses didn’t have a choice – his return would have been a PR nightmare – but Greenwood scoring as many Ligue 1 goals (5) as the whole Red Devils team has managed in the Premier League has really got to sting.

Alejandro Garnacho’s clearly a talented boy and either one (or both) of Rasmus Hojlund and Joshua Zirkzee could come good, but Greenwood would walk into the United starting line-up ahead of any of them right now and if you were to pick a player of the four who could be worth £100m in the future, it would be the young forward they let go rather than than the options Erik ten Hag still has in his squad.

READ MORE: Zirkzee 8th), Ugarte 5th): Ratcliffe-era Man Utd transfer decisions ranked from worst to best

Tanguy Ndombele (Tottenham to Nice, free)
On the one hand Tottenham fans won’t be at all bothered by Ndombele pulling up trees in Ligue 1 as he hasn’t played a game for them since an FA Cup win over Morecambe in January 2022, but him seemingly running down his contract before deciding to start playing properly again, after a string of distinctly mediocre loan moves that – had they gone better – could have led to him being reintegrated into the Spurs team, may well be grinding a gear or two.

Jose Mourinho claimed Ndombele was a guy who “never reaches the limit of effort, sacrifice, and even ambition”, but with the 27-year-old once again dictating games as he did in order to persuade Spurs to break their transfer record to sign him for £54m in 2019, we’re left wondering – not for the first time when it comes to Mourinho rejects – whether the fault was solely the player’s and if a less combative coaching approach may have allowed an incredibly talented footballer to show his true worth in the Premier League.