Bissouma cost Tottenham 25 million pounds, and Ajax have signed him for nothing until June
Yves Bissouma has joined Ajax on a free transfer until 30 June 2027, with an option for another year. He had been without a club since his Tottenham contract ran out in June.
Sep 16, 2026
Yves Bissouma has signed for Ajax. The deal was confirmed by the Dutch club on Wednesday and runs to 30 June 2027, with the option of a further year, and it cost Ajax nothing at all. Four years earlier, Tottenham had paid Brighton an initial 25 million pounds for the same player.
A free agent at 30
Bissouma turned 30 at the end of August. His Tottenham contract ran out in June and was not renewed, which left him without a club through the whole of the summer window and for a fortnight after it shut. Ajax technical director Jordi Cruijff said the conversations started in August.
“Discussions with Yves began in August and we are delighted that he has now signed for Ajax,” Cruijff told the club website. “We have brought in an experienced player who knows what it takes to perform at the highest level. He is capable of playing in several positions, and we hope he will be available for selection as soon as possible.”
That last clause is doing some quiet work. A player who has not trained with a squad since the spring is not walking into a starting XI next week.
What went wrong in north London
The move to Tottenham in June 2022 was supposed to be the step up. Brighton got an initial 25 million pounds, rising to a reported 35 million with add-ons, and Bissouma signed a four-year deal. He was 25, and he had just come off a season in which he was one of the better defensive midfielders in the Premier League.
He made 111 appearances for the club. That is a reasonable number across four seasons, and it is also fewer than it should have been for a player of his price. He was never a fixture. Managers came and went, and each of them eventually found a reason to look elsewhere.
The discipline did not help. In August 2024 Spurs suspended him for one match, which meant missing the season opener at Leicester, after he posted footage of himself inhaling nitrous oxide on Snapchat. He was filmed doing it again later, and the club handled that internally. Then in August 2025, Thomas Frank left him out of the squad for the Uefa Super Cup against Paris St-Germain because he had been late once too often.
His final season brought 11 appearances, all of them in the league, while Tottenham finished 17th for the second year running. By the end he was not really part of it.
Why Ajax, and why now
Ajax have scored ten goals in their last two league matches, winning 5-1 at Fortuna Sittard on 12 September and 5-1 at home to Willem II on Tuesday. The goals are not the problem. This is a squad that has been taken apart and put back together in a hurry. Cruijff only started as technical director on 1 February and has run through dozens of transfers since. Signing a 30-year-old on a nine-month deal fits that pattern: the risk is close to zero, and on his day Bissouma still screens a back four better than most players available for nothing in September.
Bissouma was born in Issia in Cote d’Ivoire and holds both Ivorian and Malian nationality. He plays for Mali. He started at Lille in 2016, spent four seasons at Brighton from 2018, and now gets Amsterdam at an age when the offers thin out fast.
Nine months is not much of a safety net. It is also, after a summer of silence, a lot more than he had on Tuesday.