The rumors about Brennan Johnson started a couple of weeks ago with reports that Tottenham Hotspur forward Brennan Johnson was dissatisfied with his role under current Spurs manager Thomas Frank and was open to a move away from the North London club. Crystal Palace emerged as one of the contenders for a potential January transfer, along with other clubs such as Everton and Bournemouth.
Now, according to The Athletic’s David Ornstein, it looks like Johnson’s future has been resolved. Ornstein posted
on Bluesky this morning that Spurs and Palace have reached a transfer agreement in the amount of £35m for Johnson, Spurs’ leading scorer last season. Johnson, however, has options and has not yet made up his mind as to where he wants to go.
Johnson has been Crystal Palace’s top target in the January transfer window, and a move to Palace might be a pretty good place for him to land, if he does leave. He’s a player who could thrive in an Ismalia Sarr-like role where he arrives late to attack the goal. Selling him to Palace in January would mean a £10m loss for Spurs on the whole of his contract, but the club could end up making an accounting profit on the move, or at least break even in those terms.
Brennan Johnson is a weird player. He scored 18 goals in all competitions last season to lead the team in scoring, but as we have discussed and even argued ad nauseum on this blog since his arrival from Nottingham Forest, he can be described AT BEST as a limited player. Signed on a six year deal in 2023-24 from Forest for what was then a staggering £47.5m, he was described as the perfect Ange Postecoglou winger — an incredibly fast player with a knack for popping up at the back post to convert cutback opportunities and crosses, but who contributed virtually nothing else to the squad beyond goals. He doesn’t dribble. He’s not an especially good passer. And yet, he was, actually, extremely effective in that one thing he does well, which happens to be the most valuable thing in football. Johnson, notably, scored the only goal in the Europa League final, a game in which he was otherwise marginalized.
But when Ange Postecoglou left, so too did a lot of his usefulness. How many times did Johnson’s play cause us to pull our hair out, only for him to pop up at an opportune time to tap in a goal? How many times did I refer to him here, and on social media, as the Lionel Messi of Nacer Chadlis? It’s for this reason that he’s something of a divisive figure among Spurs fans, just as he apparently is among the Spurs coaching staff. He will always have his fans because he scores goals and he will always have his detractors because the only thing he seems to do consistently in a match is score goals. Johnson again, olé olé.
This does ask the question of what Tottenham will do if they sell Johnson. Dejan Kulusevski is supposedly returning to the fold sometime in January after a missing the first half of the season due to a knee injury, but Johnson’s departure leaves a hole in the squad on the right side of the attack. Would Spurs find a replacement? Would they instead target, as has been suggested, a left-sided winger and cobble together a suitable rotation option for Mohammed Kudus on the right? Does anyone even have a plan? These are all good questions.
£35m does feel a little low for a player who has a proven goal scoring record in the Premier League and is a homegrown, club trained player in a league that highly values both. But if Thomas Frank thinks he can improve the squad by cashing in on a saleable asset and finding someone else to fill his role, then as fans we have no choice but to trust that this is the correct move. That doesn’t mean, however, that we have to agree.
