Anyway back to Trent.
There are very few clubs who have the pulling power to make people (at their prime)run down their contracts from an already big club.
Real Madrid is one. Bayern is another. Bayern isn’t bigger than us but they have made it a point to make people run down their contracts from mostly other Bundesliga clubs.
Madrid do the same too.
Or Zeige?
I remember this was something discussed on the forum at the time. Off the top of my head I cant remember any links to articles backing it up though
I wonder if we don’t have as much of an interest in doing so simply because the top-end of the market doesn’t interest us.
Certainly I seem to get the sense from all the interviews our recruitment team past and present have done, that transfer fees don’t really bother us because we’d have looked at the overall package as a whole, including wages.
I think one thing that’s being overlooked a lot in this transfer is that while we might have “lost out” on a transfer fee for Alexander-Arnold, we also would have saved on 2+ years of his wages and consequently whoever we bring in as a “replacement” (in the sense of backup/competition to Bradley) would also be on lower wages as well.
Technically its not tapping up. Tapping up is generally regarded to mean break your contract, Trent didn’t do that he fulfilled that.
If its contact without permission of the owning club, and outside of a period that allows for such contact, then yes it is tapping up
Surely they have been over it since quite some time. But it only worked because the player listened to them. If Trent had his heart set out on staying, they would have been mightless.
I love new words 
I never get the outrage about “tapping up”. Pretty sure all clubs at every level of every sport do it. Probably all transfers start with a quiet word in an ear at some stage.
It certainly happens in private industry and even teaching I believe.
After all it takes two to tango.
One thing to consider… If Alonso does go to RM, there is no guarantee he will be any good as their manager… If he gets his tactics and playing style wrong, and it amounts to miserable results, the crowd will obviously vent their frustrations on anybody and anything… could be a shit torrid time for Alonso, and by default, TAA also
It was widely discussed at the time and there were reputable journalists saying that Liverpool believed they had permission to speak to him.
I can’t be arsed trying to dredge up links from six years ago. I’m too busy.
New to me, and I was an English teacher for 30 years. I’ll try to slip it into conversation 
The biggest challenge any new manager has is that the team is very disjointed, and it is the presence of their most high profile players that make it so.
I dont think there is any right side that can be put together that makes up for the lack of work off the ball and positional overlap we see on the left of their attack, but Trent for all he offers certainly doesnt help
Wow reputable journalists..rare as the proverbial rocking horse poop. Well done for finding several though.
Of course Liverpool would say that.. have you ever heard of a club admitting to tapping up. Guilty as charged M’Lud…
Yes, it’s rarely led to action being taken which might due to a lack of evidence but more likely its because it is acknowledged to be just part of the game, with only exceptional breaches considered for punishment
You’d love this woman I went to grad school with. She made up her own words every day. Often without knowing what she thought was meant by it.
One day my I could hear my advisor crying laughing from in his office so I went in to see what was up and he handed me a term paper from her on the subject of “high-intensity bed-rest”. We read through the entire thing and never had any idea WTF she was writing about. We asked her and she was none the wiser.
Great times
It’s always a good thing to embiggen one’s horizons.
Really don’t mind TAA leaving on a free.
I wish him all the success in madrid (as long as it isn’t against us).