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hahahah ok fair @GermanRed but then at least get a right back. Even Vdv at RB would be better than the current situation. Frimpong isn’t even good as a RW because he needs that momentum that a RWB position allows to really excel. And that’s why I feel bad for him because given the right conditions, he has proven himself to be a top performer.
I’m also wondering why he agreed to the deal. He surely knew that we don’t play the wingback system.
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We played 3 at the back as our go to system under Roy Evans back in the late 90’s. There have been occasions since then where we have turned to it (particularly under Brendan).
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Didn’t he come through City’s academy as a right back?
Perhaps he is a Liverpool fan, or has just followed the club closely (we tried signing him when he was leaving City and possibly before even that) or believed that we would have a way of using him successfully.
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I think Slot really wanted him here; the added bonus was surely his close connection with Florian and the fact that he’s homegrown. Slot definitely had a vision at the time—or at least, that’s what I’d like to believe. Now he’s here; as a person, he’s a great guy and certainly valuable for the dressing room atmosphere. The rest is up to Iraola now. I’m just going to trust that we’ll see improvements in the future.
What I find absolutely awful, though, is people laughing at kids wearing his shirts—FFS, that really needs to stop.
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So has he kinda like…you know…packed his shit up and fucked off yet? (Hughes not Frimpong)
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For all the tactical praise Slot got in his first season, the way he started talking about the game in his second season was very reductive. A lot of that was interpreted at the time as defensiveness - “no we weren’t shit, just ignore your eyes and see that we had a low xG conceded stat so we were just unlucky.” But I think it also reflects an actual change in the way he started thinking about the game…as atomized actions not a cohesive. The more he saw the game being played by teams wanting to limit the flow of their own football the more he saw the way to beat them being to maximize the number of individual quality actions your team can perform.
He spoke a lot about the best way to beat the low block we were so often facing was to simply have a player who can beat a defender. That is the one thing that can coax them out of position as they adjust to cover. For as ungainly as Frimpong can look he can be very effective when he can isolate the opposition fullback and there were times last season when that looked like our most dangerous outlet. There is well sourced reporting that our entire approach to last summer’s window was putting together a side better suited to playing this atomized sort of football. I increasingly became convinced that Frimpong’s signing was little more than Slot telling Hughes that the profile he needs is a FB who can get the ball down and beat the opposition FB and Frimpong came out as a pretty understandable top result in that search. And think that sort of atomized approach to our football is a large part of why our game went to shit last year
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Ok this makes a lot of sense. Yeah, if he isolates almost any wide player 1 vs 1 Frimpong is likely to go past him probably 70-80% of the time.
But as you said, that’s rare in the PL real world.
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What I find interesting about this summer is even though we’re all probably thinking we could have done with at least one more somewhere, we’ve still ended up as the highest net spenders this summer (including Jacquet) on top of having the second highest net spend last year.
We can complain about gaps but it’s not due to a lack of spending. It’s partly down to us shopping at the absolute top end of the market these days but also because our selling business has been relatively poor compared to the past.
You think of Mo, Konate, Robertson, Trent (effectively) and Firmino going for nothing. Virg, Gomez and Alisson probably the same next summer. That’s three quarters of a team, and a hugely successful one at that, gone for £10m. Add in Jones and Kelleher sold on the cheap with a year left on their deals. And it’s possible we see the same with Mac Allister and Elliott next summer.
Then we also seem to have run out of the van den Berg, Carvalho, Doak and Morton types where moving on one or two of those in a summer essentially covered the cost of a Munoz type deal. We’re now flogging, or have tried to flog, actual experienced squad depth pieces like Quansah and Elliott to help balance the books. And to a point where someone like Forest think it’s worth a cheeky bid for Nyoni as we might just be tempted by £30m.
Ultimately it feels like the current strategy has run its course. We’ve run out of saleable squad depth pieces and what we have left is rapidly depreciating assets like Chiesa and Endo. We’ve run out of promising youngsters we could cash in on for decent fees without feeling like we might be left short. We’ve run out of time to make anything back on Virg, Alisson, Gomez or Tsimikas. And Mac Allister would be a reduced fee next summer too with this summer having been the ideal time for him to move on.
And what we’ve invested in is a smallish squad where any sale would require a first team arrival. We could try flogging Mamadashvilli next summer but we’d likely need to buy another GK. We could try and move on from Frimpong but if we’re to continue shopping at the top end of the market what does his replacement cost us?
I guess the concern I have is how long can we continue to be amongst the highest spenders whilst always knowing there’s constantly a big hole or two on the horizon the next summer. If we’re just continually filling the holes where’s the incremental improvement of the existing squad coming from? Do we have the budget to step in and buy a Camara because suddenly he’s available and we think he brings something fresh to a midfield that is stale or imbalanced?
It feels like it’s been a weird few years for us in the market, starting with the Darwin transfer that just didn’t seem at all like us at the time. Wildly different profile from previous strikers. A second tier league rather than proven in one of the big five. Coming off the back of one really good season so at the peak of his value. Someone you felt thrived in his own chaos and not a system where he was a part of the chaos the team created. The following summer was the Caicedo/Lavia one which felt distinctly unlike the Liverpool we’d been used to, followed by the summer with Chiesa being our only business. And last summer was like nothing we’ve seen before and yet we went backwards.
Really feels like we’ve lost our way a bit and dare I say fallen into believing a bit of our own hype. An attitude of “we’re back amongst the big boys and so our business should reflect that”. Big money buys, less of the clever stuff, sell off anyone who isn’t a key player for any decent offer and don’t worry about players going for nothing as that’s preferable to being stuck with a less than favourable contract.
We need to rebuild that whole recruitment team from DoF through to analysts and data folk. We need to find our next advantage as this level of spending but still being short can’t continue.
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The net spend has a lot to do with sales and the nature of our outgoings…
For all the attention it garners, net spend doesn’t say much tbh…
Don’t forget Arthur (or maybe try to forget).
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Not sure if net spend is the best measure here.
We have raised very little from sales this year with I think only Jones providing funds. Transfermarkt has us 6th in premier league spending overall (with City leading at 526m Euros), Villa, Newcastle, Spurs and Chelsea all on 300m+ euros and bringing in up to twice as many players as us.
Premier League - Transfer income and expenditures | Transfermarkt
It will be difficult for us to sustain that level of spending while facing quite few people leaving on a free next summer who will need replacing.
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Sadly I didn’t but thought I’d spare us all revisiting that.
Another of those deals you looked at and thought that wasn’t really what a well functioning recruitment team would be doing.
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Here Mo says something similar, and puts it down a loss of forward planning on contract renewals
https://x.com/MoChatra/status/2095220056250540125?s=20
And I am conflicted, because we clearly did run into issue with contract renewals with the churn in DoFs. That was clearly not in Jorg’s remit and that put us a year behind on some big renewals. But look at that list…how many of those were players we would have wanted to resign? Two? And how much of that negotiation was done on the up and up by the players? The rest were all players who for age, form, injury, or combination of all, had no value left. Maybe you can make a case that we missed a trick by not forcing sales for the likes of Ox and Origi for whatever we could get before their contracts ran out, even if we didnt like the fee we got, but I dont know we’re really moving the needle on our net spend by doing that. And a big part of why we didnt do that was Klopp himself, rather than taking our eye off renewals
One thing we have to remember, is one of the best outcomes of a value for money approach is you buy a player and he is a roaring success who plays for you for years and exhausts all their value wearing your shirt. What you lose in the lack of a transfer fee at the end you gain in not having had to spend on a replacement after a few years, sometimes multiple times.
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I get what you mean with the net spend. Ultimately it’s just the simplist of sums.
I was more using it to illustrate that not only has our buying approach changed but at the other end we’re not looking so clever when it comes to players leaving. There’s always a massive hole to fill each window because we continually leave ourselves short or someone has a contract coming to an end.
I think that’s impacting our ability to look at a relatively settled squad going into a window with the mindset of addressing the weakest link rather than the biggest hole.
Tsimikas is a good case in point. A club on top of its recruitment and squad building should have been looking at him coming back from loan, Robbo leaving and Kerkez’s mixed start here and been after a left back this summer. Instead we’re filling Konate, Diaz and Salah shaped holes and making do with Kostas for a year before he goes for nothing next summer. At which point left back becomes a need we have to address. As will centre back. As will left wing, again.
So now it’s three holes we have to fill. So maybe we make do in midfield again and let Mac run his contract down the following summer. Now CM becomes a desperate need.
We always seem to be fighting a fire instead of strengthening from a place of strength.
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Some good posts above, thanks.
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What is actually happening with Hughes is him going to Al Hilal true or is it all rumours?
This is more the point. I think we have had more cases of extending contracts of players with known reoccurring injury issues.
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That’s the crux of it, unfortunately. This summer had a distinctive end of an era feel, and I’m sure it will stretch into next summer as well because we’ll probably be losing the last of the old guard.
While the senior recruitment has, even in hindsight, not been something to be proud of, I think that they timely recognised that some money could be saved by recruiting kids that were said to be among the best in the world in their respective age groups. I hope that those move have laid the groundwork for a brighter and successful future - but the short term will be painful, unfortunately.
That said, they powers that be at the club absolutely have to get the sporting director appointment right. All the contract issues, players leaving on a free, players being signed for humongous fees - they all reek of disconnect that happened somewhere along the way that started when Edwards left his post.
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I’m a bit over the ‘vibes’ guys. I think the dressing room misses the likes of Hendo and Millie to enforce standards.
That said, I agree the abuse he’s getting is over the top