Try again.
Is there a fantasy land thread?
Earlier in the season, Liverpool had expected Jude Bellingham to be available for a fee of around £80m, yet the World Cup served to raise both his price tag and profile.
@JamesPearceLFC](https://twitter.com/JamesPearceLFC)
If true then everyone at LFC must be thick as shit.
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Is there a ‘fantasy land’ thread?
Why? I think it’s pretty self-evident at this point. I not defending this approach, but answering your question. Why were we able to get Gakpo over the line, but not a midfield.
We’ve never been in the market for any old fucking midfielder. If the approach has been the same with the attack, we wait until one of the ones we really like is available and then get him.
It’s not too much of a stretch to presume that the midfield equivalent of Diaz or Gakpo has not become available.
I think a legitimate criticism that can be levelled at the club, which encompasses both FSG, Klopp and everyone in between, is that we have moved away from the kind of signings that brought us to the party. Yes we went big for Van Dijk, Alisson and Keita. But there were also players like Robertson, Mane, Salah, Wijnaldum. Unfancied lads that prompted a fair bit of angsting in the fanbase and media, but we saw something in them and worked with them.
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Also I see people saying we should go for Moises Caicedo - but Brighton wanted £70m from Arsenal BEFORE he signed a new 5 year deal in March - so forget that one.
There is obviously a lot in this, but I think you have taken it too far. You are almost robbing us of agency in our deals by simply waiting to see what opportunities present themselves. In the cases you raise we see 2 cases of players we were very advanced in our pursuit of pushed them up due to [circumstances].
For midfield we arent waiting for opportunities to present themselves. We have been waiting for the moment when Klopp was ready to evolve the group.
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K.Thuram or Ramsey - No.8
Ugarte - No.6
Mac Callister or Barella - No.8
Plenty of quality out there who improves this team.
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You do realise this summer we’ll be signing 2-3 midfielders we could’ve easily got in Jan…you really mean to tell me these 2-3 players we’ll be signing will only have been on our radar since Jan? You really mean to tell me we were willing to allow our season to slip away whilst we still had top 4 and a CL to fight for at the expense of not signing a midfielder “we liked and was available”?
There are and I’m pretty sanguine about it. Just, with all due respect to all you lovely people, pay only passing attention to the names being raised here. We have a long history of fans pulling their hair out desperate to sign player x to improve our midfield only for those players to move elsewhere and show themselves to be incredibly mediocre.
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We had a serious tilt at Tchouameni because we thought he was available and we had a good chance of getting him. That the response to him choosing Real was to do nothing suggests that it was less about thinking we needed a midfielder and more about jumping on something that we thought was possible.
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You can’t buy most of them for the price FSG want to pay though.
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Maybe £130m wasn’t on the cards, but he’s acting like the World Cup was a surprise. Everyone was tipping him as one to watch so was likely to go above £100m.
Don’t think we need to panic. He might have been the best option but there’s dozens of midfielders out there better than our current lot, so am confident we’ll get 2-3 that will vastly improve our position next season
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Opportunism is not an alternative to proactively addressing needs.
We can and have been opportunistic when trying to fil gaps. And we can be opportunistic at times when we dont have needs (maybe see Elliott). It is not just where the opportunities are that have impacted the business we’ve done in midfield, but our lack of proactive pursuit of targets commensurate with our view of what we needed.
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Don’t you dare! I’m all in on Gavi on a free, Ugarte and Ramsey by 1st of May or FSG out.
William Carvalho and Renato Sanchez are the future
You’re making a few mistakes here.
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I think you are making the mistake of thinking I’m in defence mode here. I’m not suggesting there hasn’t been a colossal fuck up somewhere down the line. That was obvious when Klopp did his Mea Culpa at the end of the summer window.
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You don’t know that the players we move for this summer will have been available in Jan. We could sign Caicedo but there was no way we were getting him in Jan.
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Berge, Gallagher and Tielemans would be a brilliant summer window.
Of course, but I think it’s safe to say at this point that the whatever assessment of the squad led to the club thinking we were sound in midfield was clearly flawed. We needed proactivity there, but it seems that we were content to wait for the right opportunity.
I think we’ll sign two shit midfielders from League One because THATS OBVIOUSLY THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE TO SPUNKING 150 MILLION ON A SINGLE PLAYER!!!