The club don’t need to put anything down in writing about any player or potential business. That’s the opposite of how they like to, and should, work. We all know Nyoni is likely to be part of the squad and play even more than last year. Doesn’t need someone feeding that info to Pearce to see that.
And Jacquet is a new signing for this season. I don’t know how you could argue otherwise but I agree on Leoni.
Edwards isn’t even here anymore and when he was he wasn’t looking after transfer business. But I agree with you that more business should have been done by now. My only thought is they’re happy to wait a couple weeks longer to secure Barcola because they’re looking at him as a player for the next 5 to 6 years if not more. They could compromise and get [insert name of other winger here] so he was with the squad a couple weeks sooner but if he’s not as good as Barcola what’s the point in pushing that through when they’re making a decision for the long term.
There’s obviously a chance this all blows up in our faces but you’d hope it’s not through a lack of trying or being blinkered to other opportunities.
I’m getting increasingly tetchy about the window, especially as my main concern - who plays CF when Isak isn’t available - seems unlikely to be answered. I think it’s a certainty that we’re going to go into the window with 2-3 fewer players than I think we need.
However there are a few common lines of criticism that are winding me up a bit, and this ‘why are we spending so much on a left winger when we really need a right winger’ is one.
Chelsea are demanding £100m for Pedro Neto and he is bang average. There just isn’t the player available in this market who can offer value on the kind of investment it would need to get him in. There was a Josh Williams video posted on this very subject a few days ago.
Rayan is interesting, but Bournemouth aren’t going to let him go a few months after signing him. I like Minteh, but is he really worth what Brighton are going to demand?
So if Liverpool want to put the money down on star quality, it makes more sense to do on left wing for a much surer thing than anyone they can do on the right, and fold a solution for the left wing.
If they can do Mbaye as well (and is a right winger) then him and Rio for the Right, Barcola and Munoz for the left is OK.
I just think if this team is now going to go through the Wirtz/Isak fulcrum, I would like to know who is going to cover Isak when he isn’t there. I’m fine with Isak being our main goalscorer, but the alternative really can’t be Chiesa.
That’s my concern as well. He’s got all of the pace in the world and he’s been impactful for his club and national teams, but I question if he has enough end product to justify the fee.
I know people critiqued Mo along the same lines when we signed him, but he also cost about a third of the fee that Barcola is commanding. Even when adjusting for fee inflation, that’s a major difference. Also, Mo had the kind of legendary work ethic that enabled him to improve on that end. With Barcola, that remains to be seen.
Above that, you have the question about PSG opting for Doue over him. That could say a lot about Doue, but it could also speak to Enrique’s faith in Barcola. They went and bought Kvaratskhelia even as they had Barcola and Doue capable of playing on that wing. Again, that could speak to Kvicha’s brilliance more than it can speak to Barcola.
But when you have a club as good as PSG steadily moving away from a player, it gives you pause when they’re commanding an excessive fee for him.
Still, he’s very very talented. Based on the fees we’ve seen for others, the fee being mooted for him isn’t as outrageous as it might have seemed even a year ago.
That is precisely why the talk of moving on Cody this summer is so crazy to me. I know it isn’t his preferred role, but he played there a good amount under Klopp in his first season and a half and did quite well. If Isak flames out physically then we’d probably wish we had a better alternative for that role than Cody while we wait for Hugo to get back (which we have to be realistic about could not be until the spring), but with most situations we’re likely to face he is more than adequate to play enough there to give Isak the breaks that he will need.
He’s also out for 2-3 months. If people are getting annoyed at a couple extra weeks to get Barcola then imagine the fume at buying a lad who’s injured and we might not see before the Christmas lights go up.
Fee inflation is difficult to account for. For me the best way to assess it is to simply compare how expensive a player was compared to other players who moved in that or adjacent windows. And to that point, Mo was our record signing at that point. The fact City were spending more on multiple FBs the same summer makes the importance of that difficult to interpret
Two weeks after we signed Mo, PSG put £200m down on Neymar, and doubled transfer fees overnight. It’s not an exaggeration to say that if we’d signed Mo a month later he would have cost £70-80. Today he’d cost north of £100m.
I agree that fee inflation is difficult to account for, but I’m not sure it matters if it was our record signing. There were a dozen or so signings that summer that went for more than what we paid for Mo, and some that were very close (including our signing of Ox).
I think it makes more sense to compare the fee within the context of the global market at the time of the signing. If we end up with Barcola, it’ll likely be the most expensive signing made in the world this summer and the second summer in a row in which we’ve broken the British transfer record. He could also end up as a top five most expensive transfer of all time.
Mo to Liverpool - 22 June 2017 (approx 40m)
Neymar to PSG - 3 August 2017 (approx 200m)
Ox to Liverpool - 31 August 2017 (approx 35m)
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if swap the Mo and Ox signings around and keep Neymar sandwiched between them, the Ox comes in for about 15-20m and Salah costs about £70-80m
Ox didn’t cost £35m because the club thought he was nearly as good as Salah. They paid £35 because between the two a market shattering thing happened. If I remember correctly, I think Klopp even had a moan about it when we got Ox.
A lot of assumptions being made there, though. Neymar was a world class talent at the peak of his value being purchased for a fee that was deemed to be outrageous even when it happened.
More to the point, you didn’t see massive fee inflation the next summer as a result of that move. That undermines the theory that Salah’s fee would have doubled as a result of that one. It really shows that Neymar’s fee was seen as a one-off.
Finally, Mo had the history of failure at Chelsea that really drove down his reputation worldwide.
So, I won’t say that Mo wouldn’t have gone for more if the sale went through after the Neymar signing, but I’m not sure if he would have been signed for twice as much. You would have needed competition for his signature to drive that fee up, and there didn’t seem to be much back then.
