It says something about where we are as a club and also our fans expectation, that a potential star in the making, who is a first teamer for Barcelona would only be sitting on our bench or shouldn’t be signed at all.
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butterface.
Let’s park his ability and potential.
We’re are not bringing in a 17 year old and immediately putting him on 100k plus. I think there are players in the team who would be furious, and rightly so.
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To be honest, I don’t think it’s untrue.
But do I think it will happen? No.
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I think we are winding them up just to get them back on approaching Salah and tell him they will sign him on a free in the summer of 2023.
As I don’t have any proof it could also be Salah’s agent putting that out there?
sorry, for once in my life I wasn’t actually being sarcastic. I agree with what you say. My point was that it shows where we are as a club (In world Football) where a regular starter for Barca would only be a bench warmer for us.
We are now in a position where we don’t have to make knee jerk transfers and get upset if other transfers don’t happen. I personally believe Gavi would be a great signing and would become a 1st team regular in his second season, but if we don’t sign him Im not that fussed because we don’t need to sell ourselves to players, or upset the squad harmony to satisfy the fans 
. Its all positive
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Is he is a 17 year old, or is he a full Spanish international? Sure he is both, but I feel one is far more relevant to the other in terms of what he can reasonably ask for.
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Representatives of Liverpool were in Cairo to attend Egypt-Guinea (0-1), a match for the qualifications for CAN 2023, last Sunday. They took the opportunity to scout the Guinean Saïdou Sow (19), central defender of AS Saint-Etienne, on the advice of Naby Keita, the captain of Sow in the Guinea selection.
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Player 1
npxG+npxA/90: 0.24
Completed Passes/90: 42.75
Pass Completion: 87.5%
Key Passes/90: 0.68
Progressive Passes/90: 2.91
Players Dribbled Past/90: 1.59
Shot Creating Actions/90: 1.87
Progressive Carries/90: 6.73
Dispossessed/90: 2.26
Ball Recoveries: 7.09
Pressures/90: 24.01
TacklesWon/90: 1.22
Interceptions/90: 1.5
Player 2
npxG+npxA/90: 0.23
Completed Passes/90: 57.11
Pass Completion: 90.4%
Key Passes/90: 1.13
Progressive Passes/90: 4.17
Players Dribbled Past/90: 1.96
Shot Creating Actions/90: 3.12
Progressive Carries/90: 9.20
Dispossessed/90: 2.26
Ball Recoveries: 8.51
Pressures/90: 23.26
TacklesWon/90: 1.04
Interceptions/90: 1.04
One is considered a generational talent, the other is regularly called “not good enough”.
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Francis Jeffers and Naby Keita
Stats are meaningless without context.
Jones is going to look more progressive than Gavi simply because every team we face sits back and defends for ninety minutes; given that he generally gets more playing time against “smaller” teams, this effect is even more exaggerated. Spanish teams actually try to play, so Barcelona don’t just face ten men behind the ball every week- this explains Gavi’s superior defensive statistics in your comparison above.
Jones is also three and a half years older than Gavi, it must be noted. I’m sure somewhere you’ll have his stats from when he was seventeen; at that age, he wasn’t a first-team regular and full international.
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You’re right to point out that context is applied but the difference between the leagues is not as stark as you make out. Barcelona actually averaged more possession than Liverpool - 64.2% in La Liga, compared to Liverpool who averaged 62.8% in the Premier League. Liverpool faced just 26 fewer progressive passes across the campaign (777 vs 803). While Barca did face a significantly higher number of shots - 356 vs 302 - the possession figures imply that most of these are on counter attacks or set pieces. There also has to be an allowance for the fact Barca’s most commonly used defenders are absolute trash compared to Liverpool’s (Araujo, Pique and Garcia vs van Dijk, Matip and Konate)
Barcelona had a lot of control in La Liga games - hence their higher average possession count - and so it’s not like every week they were up against swashbuckling Spanish teams who went toe-to-toe with Barca and made gaining offensive stats difficult. Afterall his fellow midfielders - Sergio Busquets, Pedri, and Frenkie de Jong all averaged over 5 progressive passes per game while Gavi managed 2.92 (La Liga only). They also all managed over 1 key pass per game (Pedri 1.63, De Jong 1.45 and Busquets 1.05 vs Gavi 0.7).
In fairness to Gavi, his shot creating actions per game were higher in La Liga than his total in all comps that I quoted above - 2.00 - but that’s still quite some way behind every other Barcelona midfielder (Pedri 3.98, De Jong 2.65, Busquets 2.39).
With ball rotation once again he is the worst of Barca’s midfielders. He attempts less than 50 passes per game (49.4) while De Jong (61.1), Pedri (62.6) and Busquets (78.8) are all significantly more involved.
He also has a lower pass completion % than any of the others (87.8%) - with the exception of Pedri (85%) - but Pedri does have the caveat that he is the creative midfield player and thus has license to lose the ball more often. Gavi’s % is still good but given his lack of offensive output or creativity it’s a bit strange that he is losing possession on 12% of his passes.
To be fair to him, running with the ball is where he shines. 7.08 progressive carries per game from central midfield is pretty good - better than anyone except De Jong in that Barca midfield (and De Jong has a deeper starting position so gets progressive carries more easily). Once he can add a final ball element to his game this carrying ability will be deadly I’m sure… although Curtis Jones does still outshine him in this area (7.08 vs 8.63).
He’s the best defender of the attacking midfield group. Obviously Busquets is better than him defensively but compared to Pedri and De Jong he averages more tackles and interceptions per game - Pedri is close though. He presses a lot (22.3) although he isn;t very good at it with just a 26% win rate. For context Memphis Depay wins 29.9% of his presses.
All of this is not meant to denigrate the talent of Gavi. For a 17 year what he is doing is absolutely brilliant and I’m sure given three or four more years we will be looking at a midfielder who can be compared with anyone else in the game and he will manage it at an astonishingly young age. The problem though, as far as I see it, is that if media reports are to be believed then he already wants to be paid like one of the best players in the world. £150k per week, or thereabouts, would put him close to the top of our wage structure and be roughly comparable to the likes of Fabinho and Henderson.
His potential is clearly very high but if he wants to get paid like a first team player then he has to judged like one too and based on what he done so far he would not be a regular first team starter at Liverpool. He might actually struggle to make the bench. He simply isn’t yet good enough. He’s Barcelona’s fourth best midfielder and he would be 6th choice - at best - in our squad. I have no doubt he is better at 17 than Jones was but he isn’t better than Jones right now and that’s a problem if he wants a contract that would make him one of our top players.
As for being a full Spanish international already, I’m sorry you can call me ignorant but that’s about as interesting to me as the fact Patrick Bamford can play the violin or Frank Lampard got an A in Latin. Club football is so far ahead of the international game that we may as well be talking about different sports.
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Gavi is a great young player and a pretty terrible idea for a signing.
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Appreciate the TL;DR
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I think of it as if you’re making a longterm investment in his talent. He might not be worth those wages at 17, but if he develops into a world class player in two to three years - which is not implausible - it’s likely he’ll deserve wages that are even higher than 150K a week. But you’ve tied him down to a five year deal, so you’ll have him on a discount for a year or two before needing to pay him a higher wage. It balances out to an extent in the end and no one will be complaining about how much we paid him for those developmental years up front.
Unless all your other players who think they are at higher level than Gavi is now decide to ask for more money relative to what he’s getting inmediately and what they think they’re worth, and it pushes wages up across the board and any future signings no matter what their age think that’s a reasonable starting figure for their negotiations.
If we aren’t breaking our wage structure for Mo, I don’t think we’d do it for Gavi. If he’s that good, give him lower wages with bonus incentives where he can reach that wage.
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Which makes him a bad idea for LFC if that’s the case. We’ve shown we’ll pay top wage dollars on a new signing but they have to be already elite (Thiago).
We may pay a top transfer fee on a new signing but our wage structure will always dictate that an incoming player’s wage will be determined by what heights we’d expect them to reach during the time of their first contract with us. We wouldn’t expect Gavi to come and play regularly over the first couple of years.
Unless the quoted wages are BS, then there’s no way we are actually interested. At best, even with his talent, I’d expect us to offer £60k-80k wages in our structure which is well sorry of what he’s asking.
Let United take massive wage risks on teenagers.
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Oh well! This means we are still need to find a new heir to Gerrard and Thiago!
I read that we had a deal agreed at half the price Madrid eventually paid…
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