I think if you look at what Everton paid for Onana that might be a decent comparison and benchmark. Although yes, it’s Everton and they’re shit at transfers, but he did look to be a good signing for them and has already been linked with moves to the likes of Chelsea and United.
A season in Bundesliga 2, a season in France and Everton paid £35m for him. Now with one season of Premier League football under his belt the fee for Everton to sell him would probably be £60m. That one season of showing you can cut it here seems to worth an awful lot to the top clubs.
Lavia has bypassed that by being in England from a younger age but has shown himself equally, if not more capable, than Onana.
Our shopping is done in that “emerging but not finished article” market. Lavia represents a risk as he’s not got the body of work to prove that it’s not just a flash in the pan but let him go elsewhere and you risk him being twice that price in a couple of years and into the unattainable bracket. We’ve just got to weigh up the risk of paying for the potential with so little to base our assessment on.
And Klopp has previously suggested he’d like us to take more of these risks. It’s clear we’ve got to conclude our negotiation over the next few days and then pay the ~45m Romeo is going to cost us if we want to keep Jurgen happy. Love don’t come cheap, John!
I don’t think there’s much risk in signing Romeo. Whenever we pay a sizable fee the player turns out fine. It’s the bargains like Takumi and Carvalho that often turn out to be disappointing.
Quality was there. It’s the fitness that screwed us. Right now we are worried if Romeo has the potential to justify the fee. His fitness isn’t a concern.
Bargains are the 30 odd million we paid for Wijnaldum. Good money paid but someone who did the role for us. No one else would have done the wijnaldum role for our team during the title winning season.
The money we paid for Henderson which paid off in the long run also counts as a bargain even if the initial transfer fee was questioned.
And who’s to say Matip , despite his troubles now , isn’t a bargain. There were plenty of times (even including a fit VVD , Matip was the best defender on the pitch)
He hasn’t and he has specifically called that out in his comments. Calling the player who plays next to Trent a 6 is fine as a short hand, but only if everyone involved in the conversation understands the context is different than when used to talk about the role Fabs played for us the majority of his career. Even in the phase of play when we’re transitioning back to a back 4, or we already have and are in a settled shape, most likely when defending deep in our own half against a possession side, even then it isn’t the role Fabs played.
Players who can run around and stick their foot in are a pound a penny. Players who have the mental sharpness to play the game at the pace necessary to thrive in this set up, while still having the legs to do the defensive work is a far more limited set of players, ones who will either come with a big price tag or be a work in progress, or both. This is the discrepancy between the group of players who often get thrown up by fans as players we should be interested vs the group the club will actually be interested in.
Caveat - we don’t actually know what the risks were that he wanted us to take more of. It just as much could have meant paying more for more established players.
wilcox ( southampton director) having a good selling window, sold livramento for 40 million including add ons… if he manages to sell lavia to us that will be 90 million. not bad at all…
30 was a damn good amount of money then and lots of our fans were being pissy about it being not worth it for a player whose role in the team was unclear
