This, if the club think he is worth it then it’s fine by me.
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I included them because they’re Liverpool players and I was trying to compare them to available options.
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They were included for comparison purposes - as I wanted to see how available options stacked up against our current midfield.
No wonder I was confused. That makes no sense. If others of their age were included it would be an entirely different 25
Which would only make Bellingham appear worse.
So Bellingham is 53rd in your rankings for CMs in top 5 European leagues under the age of 26?
What about <24, <21 etc?
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Correct
6th for U21 - Pedri, Camavinga, Jones, Jacob Ramsey, Nico Gonzales ahead of him (in that order)
As I said, I’m not trying to say he’s a bad player, but Germany is a significantly worse league than England and his current level isn’t that of a world class player. He has the potential to become that, sure, but if you imagine that the worst case scenario is he fails to kick on and stays at his current level then he’ll be nothing more than a rotation/squad player. That’s not an out-of-this-world impossible situation.
Liverpool tend to buy players who are already close to the top of the game and hope to get more out of them from there. Diaz and Darwin weren’t able to be included in my metric as I don’t have stats for Portugal but their CL stats would have them as top 15 forwards in the world (Diaz 13th, Darwin 6th) - although I accept it’s an impossibly small sample size.
Bellingham, in my opinion, would be a change of direction towards going big on players who project to be top players but aren’t all that close just yet. 100m for such a project seems a mighty risk to me. Especially since we just got someone who arguably fits that category (of could be world class but aren’t that close just yet) in Carvalho for a fraction of that price.
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How is that data compiled? Stats?
Pedri didn’t play more than 20 games last season (Jude played 43 times).
Camavinga played 36 times (CL/League), but only played 90 mins once in the CL, and more than 70 mins in the league 8 times.
Jones (as in Curt?!) - again barely played
Jacob Ramsay is probably a decent comparison - played a fair bit (34 PL appearances), with lots of full games, similar to Jude.
Gonzalas payed a fair few games early on last season, but that fell away - no idea why.
I think these lists are always interesting but also tell us stuff from one angle. I’d argue Jude playing as many games as he did as a key player in central midfield and having decent performances is better than say Pedri, Camavinga and Gonzalas that only really came on as subs against tiring teams who have had to graft against the likes of Kroos, Modric, Benzema, Busquets etc.
Also, it’s 100m Euro, not £
It’s pounds
All fair points, there is a lot of subjectivity including which stats are considered important - I value progressive passing pretty highly for example, something which knocks Bellingham a fair bit and you have a point about playing time - my lower limit for being counted was 1000 minutes, which all of them cleared but is certainly a low sample size.
Curtis Jones is incredibly underrated.
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Notable that all the other 5 are older than him (Jones by 2.5 yrs) and played less than half his minutes (apart from Ramsey).
One final thought on this is that if we were to bring in a 100m midfielder - whoever that may be - then we surely would have to change our system to get the best out of the player. I’m not sure where the value is currently with the way we deploy our midfielders. Often I see Naby or Jones and feel like they are handcuffed by the system (which is not a criticism of the system, it’s one that has been incredibly successful).
Conversely Thiago has been very successful but he probably represents the upper limit of what a midfielder can achieve in our current set up and I’m not sure we would be happy paying 100m for that impact.
It’s been spoken about probably every season since Klopp took over but such a large investment in a midfielder, while possibly losing Salah and not having an equivalent attacker to take his place, would suggest that we would be considering changing shape over the next season or two.
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Yeah only Gavi from his age range qualified and he’s undeniably a much better player than Gavi. Not even close.
Who fucking cares about age or minutes played or rankings or price tags or what colour hair or what size boots.
Jude has proven for the past 2 years he is one of the best young midfielders in the world, for me he’s better than Camavinga and Pedri…he fits the bill of our transfer strategy (added incentitive being homegrown.)
Me.
Apart from hair colour or boot size, I don’t care about that.
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If there’s one thing that gives me confidence over our chances here, it’s that he seems really close to Hendo, and I could have sworn I’d read previously that Stevie was one of his heroes.
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Ok…even though it has absolutely no bearing on the success they’d bring to this club?
Milner came for £0 at 29/30 years of age.
Alisson & Virgil came for 70m at 26 years of age.
You think our recruitment care? they care about individual quality and winners.
Yeh.
“Stevie G, all the way, man”
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Changes every day at the moment. But doesnt matter what the fee is…if klopp and co want him and they are happy to pay the fee, so be it.
If they are wanting £100m now itll come down anyway and some parts will be add ons.