It would be a silly move for Bellingham to stay another year and sign a new contract of any sort. If he stays, its to wind down his contract a bit more to make the move next summer a bit easier.
But I don’t think that happens. I still think he’s either coming here or going to Real. Unfortunately he clearly doesn’t have a problem with moving to a foreign country with a different language to play football which makes Real a good choice for him. A threat by Bellingham of staying another year without signing a contract will also force Dortmund’s hand I think to try to sell this summer.
I haven’t read anything in this thread before today because normally I don’t have much interest in transfer speculation but I came in to say this very thing. I think we may be banking on Bellingham staying one more year and coming next year at a reduced fee. High risk strategy but it’s obvious that JK aided by agents Trent and Hendo have put a lot of work into persuading him to come and everything I’ve seen suggests he’s our number one choice and the lack of CL isn’t a deciding factor for him. This isn’t another Mbappe pipe-dream.
Obviously money is always going to be tight given the way we’re run and major reconstruction is required this summer but I can’t believe JK is going to be on board with just tossing all the work that has gone into this down the drain for City or United or whoever to just come in and take him from under our noses. I’m sure he’d be going ballistic. If we miss out completely we are going to look pretty stupid but Klopp’s shown he’s prepared to play the long game before and this is what I think might be going on here.
One thing is likely, and that is we have a pretty good idea of what Dortmund want and are trying to do with respect to Jude. To me it doesnt make much sense for Jude to want to stick around another year, but tiing is really important with transfers as sometimes the club where you’re the best fit arent ready to move at that time (which explains why Kane is still at SPurs). So if he is getting those signals, then maybe the best path to his preferred move is to stay one more year. We’ve seen Dortmund structure their contracts in ways that allow their star players to be in control of their path so you wouldnt rule out them extending his contract this summer to one with that sort of structure. It doesnt make much sense to them in isolation as surely forcing him out this summer if the very peak of the market they could ever get for him, but in the longer term maybe dealing with him in a humancentric fashion is what they think they need to do to continue to be an attractive stepping stone for players like him and Halaand.
The thing I keep coming back to, over and over and again, in the midst of all the back and forth and could it be this and could it be that, and that is…
Why brief this? Why make the big show of ending our interest?
It serves nobody’s interests at LFC to put a story out there saying they are not interested. It looks awful.
If we weren’t interested, wouldn’t we just be, like, not interested. Quietly move on to other targets and just ignore the Bellingham thing?
Doing it like this throws massive shade on everyone at LFC. We have a section of support that is absolutely febrile in their hatred for FSG. Why give them the bullets? The PR is a nightmare. You’ve got the Telegraph writing articles that this is our most humiliating defeat of the season.
One thing that was mentioned by Neil Atkinson that I hadn’t considered is that Klopp is going to get grilled about this tomorrow. Why do this to the manager? There are only eight games left. It can’t wait until we’re not putting Jurgen under pressure?
Liverpool are under no obligation to announce their transfer plans and this news is not exactly positive for the club.
If you were Liverpool Football Club, and you had decided for whatever reason to end your pursuit of Bellingham, would you purposely leak that to the press, knowing the hurricane of piss that would unleash on you?
I wouldn’t. I’d just move on to other targets and not mention it.
You’d like to think so but one of the things I’ve learnt from decades of non board level investment in small, mid and even large caps in the stock market: when dealing with prima facie negative things that don’t seem to make sense - don’t convince yourself of a narrative about why this can’t be or you do so at your peril.
But releasing negative information when you don’t have to say anything, isn’t.
Getting ahead of the story when it is inevitable that that bad story is going to come out anyway is understandable. This isn’t.
Liverpool could just get on with signing three quality midfielders, and when a journalist asks about Bellingham, just say ‘What about him? We’ve done our business’.
There just isn’t any need for the club to put itself through this.
When I heard the story first, I was shocked. Making this statement puts Klopp in an unsustainable position as you say, and it was totally avoidable. But I don’t think there is any strategy involved, what would this be?
The answer is probably much more straightforward. Think back about the stupid way how Werner behaved when we tried to get VVD, and how it forced us to lose six months. It was god-awful.
I suspect that the people currently in charge are just not very good, maybe not as terrible as Werner, but still… let’s face it: we are very far away from the likes of Peter Moore and Michael Edwards masterfully pulling the strings in the background a few years ago.
Absolutely this could be. The club may have decided they were better served by telegraphing they were walking away over price now than waiting until July etc. Perhaps to help with the groundwork to convince their alternatives?
If we are genuinely out, and are so without any sort of game play, at some point the reality of that is going to explode and the fan reaction will be bad. Again, it is PR 101 that when faced with that reality, the earlier you can get out the information the easier it is to deal with.
Klopp will deal with this with a straight bat and redirect to talk about the games. By the time he has no games to talk about the desire to keep talking about this will be almost zero because we’ll have defused the negativity over the course of weeks to months.
When bad news exists the worst PR move you can make is pretending you wont have to deal with it at some point. For whatever reason, we have been so tightly linked to signing him that if we dont that will be viewed as bad news. So it really is PR 101 to get it out as early as possible if we are in fact out, or as far ahead of the point in time when the reality of it will bite, to defuse the blow back.
I’m not saying that is what has happened, and Im not ruling out there being other things in play, but that is the rationale for getting it out now if we are in fact out. There is not a credible PR alive who would recommend differently
