Palace and Everton agree a straight swap, and McNeil finally gets the move that collapsed in February

Everton and Crystal Palace have agreed a straight swap. Dwight McNeil goes to Selhurst Park, Brennan Johnson goes to Merseyside, and no money moves in either direction. Both players were due for medicals on Monday.

Deals like this barely happen any more. Clubs price players differently, agents want their cut of a fee, and the accounting is far easier when cash changes hands and everyone can book an amortised number. Two Premier League clubs agreeing that one winger is worth exactly another winger, and leaving it there, is close to extinct.

Six months late for McNeil

For McNeil this is the move he should already have made. Palace agreed a loan with an obligation to buy him permanently for £20 million on deadline day in February. He travelled to London, passed the medical, and started making arrangements to move his family south. Palace submitted the dealsheet before the 7pm cut-off. Then the remaining paperwork failed to go through in time, and the whole thing died at the desk.

He went back to Everton and had a poor season. Twenty-two appearances, one assist, no goals, with a knee problem and a slump in form accounting for most of it. The year before he had 21 league appearances, four goals and six assists, which is closer to the player Palace thought they were buying. He is 26 and in the last year of his contract, which is a reasonable part of why Everton were willing to do this at all.

Palace give up a club record

Johnson is the harder one to explain from Palace’s side. They paid Tottenham £35 million for him on 2 January, a club record, on a four-and-a-half year contract. He made his debut two days later at Newcastle. Seven months on they are letting him go for no fee at all.

The football reason is that it did not work. Two goals in 23 league games, only 11 of them starts, from a player signed to be the difference in the final third. That was also broadly his problem at Spurs before he left, where he started six of a possible 19 league games and played 601 minutes under Thomas Frank.

What sits awkwardly against all of that is the season before, when Johnson was Tottenham’s leading scorer with 18 goals and scored the winner in the Europa League final against Manchester United. He is 25. Players do not usually lose that in eighteen months, and the more likely reading is that he has spent a year and a half in teams that could not work out where to play him.

Who actually wins this

On paper Everton do. They turn a 26-year-old in the final year of his deal into a 25-year-old on a long contract with an established Premier League scoring record, and it costs them nothing. If Johnson gets anywhere near his 2025 form, that is a very good piece of business.

Palace’s case is narrower but not stupid. Pierre Sage has come in from Lens and wants his own shape, McNeil is a genuinely good crosser who fits a left side, and the club clearly rated him enough to try twice. Getting a player they valued at £20 million in February for a player who has not worked out is defensible, even if it looks thin written down.

The awkward part for Palace has little to do with McNeil. A club-record signing made in January and moved on in August is an expensive way to learn something, and the £35 million is spent whichever of these two wingers ends up playing well. The season starts on 21 August, with Arsenal at home to Coventry. Both clubs have eleven days to start looking right about this.

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