If Mac Allister had come off last season and been put on the kind of contract that Szob and Grav got, there would have been fucking riots.
I don’t think it was anything to do with the clubs means, just a matter of expediency. He looked desperately poor last year and simply didn’t deserve a new contract.
I still think if you disregard their age, what they were signed for, the rest of the market etc and you just have three midfielders of which you can give a contract to two based on last season’s performances, you don’t tie down Macca.
@Mascot can you explain how Gravenberch and Szoboszlai deserved new lucrative contracts?
I’m not surprised over Macca even so I’m sad that some of our players are being forced out like this, Jones was another one.
I know hard decisions are necessary sometimes however none of them deserved new contracts imo.
Grav was from the year before and Szob was clearly our best player last season, also, I doubt if either was on a super high contract with where they came from.
Did he think he deserves a new contract at LFC based on his Argentina performances ?
Interesting approach yesterday, it might have been planned with his entourage. It gave journalists a lot of unexpected meat and I wondered how Iraola would immediately react to it. It was fine in the end.
Especially if he feels like he’s on his way to win a starting place in our midfield, so his position at the desk improves in coming weeks and months.
Who knows what happened and all the details, because you have two sides of the story and many things that need to fall in place for agreement over a new contract. Of course that not all players can get new contracts and around the same time. It happened also with our midfield under Klopp. Gini for example never got to that new/second contract.
I saw him strong at the WC, he covered a lot of distance and looked like coming back to his best. I hope to see more of that for us this season.
I seemed to recall seeing a few people mention that Iraola squeezes the play more so the space he has to work in is smaller so easier for him to do his pressing in tighter area
He has been exceptional for 2 of out of his 3 years and only ever fell from that level on a year when the coaching was bad enough that it cost the recent title winning manager his job. While the club might have been reasonable in treating last season as not a great place of leverage for him in negotiations, especially given he’s a full contract length older than the other 2 recently renewed midfielders, his position on wanting better terms would have been based on a hell of a lot more than that.
As crap as he was, if I´d seen Szobo and Grav get put on those contracts I´d be a bit miffed too.
They weren´t very good either and he´s better than them arguably, even if he had the worst season.
They are younger, and frankly over the last 18 months they’ve been better. They are also players that there is simply a greater urgency to protect their value.
There is a simple economic metric at play here that I think is overlooked. Mac Allister is 28, with two years left on his deal. The very worst case scenario is we lose him for free in two years at the age of thirty. Or we sell him in a year for roughly what we bought him for.
But I think it would have been absolutely ridiculous to give a 28 year old, who has looked well off the pace for maybe 18 months, a new five year deal on the kind of money we gave Szoboszlai.
Summed it up perfectly.