If we put them up for sale at £5m a pop last summer you believe they wouldn’t have been bought? Liverpool last summer stood at the top of a very very very large pyramid in this sport. Its quite frankly pessimistic bollocks to think that just because a player isn’t good enough to STAY with us but has been good enough to be here for years that NOBODY would want them just because the Echo hasn’t done a story about a bid being made. By the time bids are made clubs are 100% aware of roughly what a selling club will be looking for. There are hundreds of clubs players we want rid of would be welcome with open arms at. What sets us back is we are very demanding on sales fees. We got a reputation as a soft touch in the market that overpaid and undersold that stuck with us for years. We’ve done a lot of damage control to walk away, very very publicly, from deals that became too expensive or sales that were just a couple of million too low (like Wilson). If you look at some of the awful players being bought and sold each year the issue isn’t whether we can sell our players it’s whether we can sell them for the prices we have internally decided need to be met. If (and it is a huge if) we decide we will take a hit this summer blaming the market we will 100% be able to trim down an overinflated squad and return to normal policy next year.
I think the wages is the other factor that doesn’t get considered. Origi and Shaq won’t be on mega money by our standards but to the kind of clubs that might be interested in taking them matching those wages could be prohibitive or jus not seen as worth it.
I think the only way we shift those two this summer is by comprising on price and potentially covering some wage costs or paying the players off a lump sum.
The unfortunate thing is we may well have held them hoping things would have improved by this summer when the reality is it looks like it’ll be much the same with a return to normality still a hope on the horizon, all be it a little closer and certain than before.
I still don’t get turning down the Wilson deal though. Even without add ons that looked like a pretty reasonable figure in last years market and one we won’t get close to this year even when you factor in whatever loan fee we’ll have got.
Grujic was another who almost went but a final fee with Werder couldn’t be agreed. Again, i think a lot of us thought what we were asking, in the region of £20m, was pretty steep.
£14m for Wilson and lets say £12m-£15m for Grujic would certainly have been better deals than we’ll get for either this summer. I’m all for standing ground but I think we overvalued both of them giving neither was in line to be part of the squad or the long term future.
Seriously 
I agree. However, I think it is also fair to acknowledge that mistakes will be made. Just as we may lose out on targets because of not wanting to pay the asking price, we will sometimes not close a sale because we in turn ask too much. The important thing is how often this approach works in our favour - and how quickly we can adapt to market changes.
Nah.
But…
It should, as well, rule out competing bids from Premier League rivals – as the player stated himself when Manchester United came sniffing around. Not bad for a rat, eh Reds?
Never understood this hatred towards Emre.
You’ve gone from ‘we had buyers for all our players‘ to ‘we would have if we’d stuck them all on for 5m’. 
I think a lot of it sadly derives from some fans dislike of players running down their contracts.
You think there aren’t enquiries over all our players? Nothing gets leaked from the club till its done. An absence of noise does not equal an absence of activity. I guarantee there is at least one club in the world wanting to take every single one of our players! The two issues are:
1; How much we charge, Wilson nearly went last summer for a deal less than £5m lower than the one we wanted. That’s within our power and how desperate we are to bring in anything for these players whose contracts are running down and we’ll eventually get nothing for. Who are either no or very little help to us but taking up room on the books and in the wage bill.
2; As @rab pointed out wages. In many cases either the player may need to want to make the change enough to accept a paycut or we may have to cover some or all of the wage difference between their new contract and what they are on here for 2 more years. Yet again we can do that. Just we don’t like to appear weak so haven’t been.
But if the decision is made to clear the books there’s a lot of talent that can be moved on. Even at devaluation deals that financial impact would be immensely valuable. If profits are in bad way driving down amortisation helps. Freeing up room on the books for more squad investment and on the wage bill. Then the cash from those deals helps to get a steady stream of cash coming in too.
I don’t get this great player when fit.
How does it help?
Equally, it’s not a void into which you can just insert whichever fiction supports your argument.
Thank you.
Can’t go backwards, can only go forwards. Otherwise we should have bought Maradona in the early 80s. And Roy Evans might have had Batistuta? And when Ronaldo’s price jumped up to 12M, we should have hung in there and signed him instead of Man Utd. Etc.
So the last summer argument is OK, to a point.
The one mistake we did make was in not selling Harry Wilson when decent money was on the table. Grujic too. But it happens. Minor mistakes in the grand scheme of things, and while we could have acted more optimally, especially with hindsight, we need to also be aware of the good money (not last summer) we got for duds like Ibe, Solanke and the portly left back lad whose name escapes me. It’s football. You win some you lose some, but in the market we are doing well, overall.
The question now is what do we do moving forward?
My main hope is we temporarily relax our model in order to buy what we need to emerge from covid with momentum. If we are living to our means, with income way down and the ability to generate healthy funds from fringe players massively diminished in this economy, we might spend too long of a stint on the edge of the big time instead of in the thick of it.
It’s a risk to extend yourself financially, but equally, in the competitive world of football we inhabit, and the unique circumstances of the current time, I see a greater risk in being too cautious.
Write a couple of checks John Henry! You know it makes sense.
As this is the unreliable thread, this made me laugh today. Unlikely as it may be, meaning it’s never going to happen, it wouldn’t necessarily be the worst idea in the world. Similar to how UTD use Cavani. And it wouldn’t cost anything but wages.
The amortisation is how squad investment is shown as an expense along with the wage bill. Hence why it affects the amount of tax that is paid. By driving down the amortisation expense on the existing squad (by extending deals and spreading the cost out on players we want to keep long term and moving others on) creates room for us to add the expense of new players onto the books without the expense increasing and it negatively effecting the chances of declaring a profit.
https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1374272695215517696?s=09
Swiss Ramble showing it on Leicester accounts as an example.
If we brought in say Jadon Sancho for £66m on a 6 year deal for instance our amortisation goes up by £11m a year, however that’s how much our amortisation would drop if we got Keita off the books. So although selling Keita wouldn’t generate the cash to make the deal happen it frees up space on the books for it and Keitas wages wouldn’t be a million miles away from what Sancho would probably want too.
Reducing amortisation, which is a deduction for tax purposes, would suggest that more of your operating profits are now liable for tax and you therefore end up with less cash not more - the cash flow statement already adds back the amortisation (it is a non cash expense) to the clubs net income showing it is available for the club to use.
This example is not demonstrating the benefits of amortisation but how those deals generate cash flows in/out of the club by changes in what I think is classed as ‘working capital’.
I think you have accidentally read something into his post which he was not intending. His September 2020 thread on Liverpool is much more informative - you will notice below he covers both the cash flow statement and the profit & loss to give a fuller picture of the club’s finances.
https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1302860287964569605?s=20
No it’s not. It’s how the expense of transfers show on the accounts. You buy a player for £50m on a 5 year deal the expense of that player is £10m on the amortisation expenses in each of the next 5 years. 3 years in that player has cost us £30m on the books and his value outstanding is still £20m. At that point we sell him and anything over the £20m goes onto the books as profit AS WELL as the amortisation expense decreasing by £10m per year which could be used towards the accounting costs of another player. Or you can extend the players deal, spread the remaining £20m over whatever new deal they sign, say a 5 year deal, making the players amortisation expense on the books drop down from £10m a year to £4m a year which, once again, frees up room for more business without increasing expenses.
It’s how squad investment shows. It’s not just a tax thing.
We can create significant room on our amortisation expenses (extend Alisson, VvD and Fabinho deals, sell Ox and Keita) to mean we can create room to recruit without increasing expenses and therefore making us none profitable.
You’re focusing too much on the tax. It’s more about if the club are running at a profit or not for both FSG and FFP (if it continues).
Liverpool are interested in re-signing Atletico Madrid’s Uruguayan forward Luis Suarez, 34. (Fichajes via Four Four Two)
Yes, just yes.
Please god no. Not bite-em-fight-em McGee. I cant see Klopp and the current squad tolerating Suarez.
You just know that is rubbish.
What a player he was for us but that time has gone.