Or sensible thinking.
Not to try and find a direct replacement when none can be found but to rebuild and rebuilds can take more than one year. If we tried to find the closest and inferior replacements for Salah and TAA and many of our aging stars we probably would remain competitive but never winning much.
I would buy
Two wingers
A centre half
A midfielder whose name begins with W.
Walex Scott?
Will hughes ? maybe too old already
Wataru Wharton
or the other great W, Ward-Prowse
Man, that is their job.
People are literally paid hundreds of thousands of pounds or more to find players who are just about to make that step up so that we sign them.
Doesn´t have to be Diomande, or Abde (25 is exactly the age you´d expect it to come together) or Muùoz specifically but that is why they receive their big salaries. If we only had to wait until they had a big breakout season even kids on youtube noticed, why bother employing them? There are levels and we are meant to be one of the very highest levels in the world.
Nobody said anything about buying every single promising player.
brexit didn´t seem to stop Bournemouth getting Rayan and Kroupi. Nor did these ´limits´
It´s foresight. It came before the poor season.
Yeah but for every Rayan and Kroupi thereâs at least two Sinisterraâs, Solerâs, Doakâs, Hamad Traoreâs. Same happens at Brighton, everyone remembers the ones that stick but the ones that donât make it get forgotten.
Also had we bought Rayan and Kroupi last summer theyâd have played a hell of a lot less than they did for Bournemouth so you wouldnât be getting the player they are now going into next season. Youâd be getting a relatively untested player you hope could step up.
We have however signed two exciting, highly rated young centre backs. But when you look people want us to sign another experienced head in the area of the field because we shouldnât trust young players with their level of experience. But if they donât play they donât get the experience you want to then trust them.
Comparing our business with Bournemouth is pointless. Itâs an entirely different set of needs, expectations, risks, rewards and strategy. Weâre buying to win here and now and build a squad to compete on four fronts. Theyâre buying to make sure they stay in the league but also to sell these lads on for profit to boost their lower revenues.
Itâs apples and oranges.
Survival bias. Same with other teamsâ players, we mostly only remember their stunning moments.
Yeah that´s the game. You get some right you get some wrong. But you have to do something. We did nothing and now we have to spend massive money and they HAVE TO hit the ground running. That´s what you´re not factoring in. We could sign two wingers now and they have a Wirtz season of struggling. We are buying an untested player right now in Muùoz too.
Rayan would have played plenty for us. And he was good almost straight away for them.
It´s not apples and oranges at all. Arguably it´s even riskier for them because they needed players to come straight into the first team.
There is barely anyone in that category. Most scouts are part time and the full time ones are usually way below ÂŁ50k a year. But even the best scouts will have spotty track records.
Look at our own academy. Lads we see every single day for 10+ years and we still canât accurately predict who will be the best of the group a few years later. Alex Inglethorpe said as much recently - Trent wasnât considered the top of his group, Bradley wasnât, Quansah wasnât. We know these players better than anyone yet we still couldnât know for sure.
Youâve correctly identified the issue. We have so much saturation and so much data that its almost impossible to be the first to identify a player. Professional clubs have detailed advanced stats on the Hondurus second division or the Kazak leagues. The issue isnât identifying which young players are playing well or showing potential, we know all of the players, the issue is identifying which ones of those will be able to make the step up especially when first team minutes are a finite resource. Who is worth the investment financially and with time?
Generally Brighton are considered one of, if not the best, at finding rough diamonds in the league. I did the research on it a while ago and I canât remember the exact numbers but basically the reason is volume. They signed something like 100 players over 3 years, spent a couple of hundred million, and less than 10 of them made a first team appearance.
That time and investment is worth it for Brighton because ultimately their goal is not to win. Itâs to win just enough to be sustainable.
We donât have that luxury, we want to win. So we have to wait for the âfiltersâ like Brighton and Leipzig to separate the wheat from the chaff.
There are no crystal balls. Signing potential is not an exact science and it is, or at least has been, more cost efficient to let others figure out who is capable of the step up and then take them from there. Itâs a methodology that has delivered us two league titles and a Champions League.
The question is whether that system is still cost efficient in a world where 1 season of production gets you a ÂŁ100m price tag.
Mad isnât it. We spent ÂŁ450m last summer. Bought the second best CF in the league, two of the most exciting young attacking players in Europe and what was probably one of Bournemouthâs best players and yet people are lamenting us having not bought a lad from what I think was a second division French team the previous winter.
Would have loved to have seen this place if our replacements for Jota and Nunez were Ekitike and a teenager with 30 appearances and 5 goals in Ligue 1.
But we did do something. We bought Wirtz, Ekitike and Isak. We signed Salah to a new deal on the back of one of his best ever seasons for us. We bought Ngumoha a couple years back.
I think what this boils down to is that everyone gets some right and some wrong. Itâs just you think we should have bought someone elseâs right ones instead of our wrong ones. That about sum it up?
I´m not just talking about the scouts I am talking about the full net work. Whoever is in charge of transfers.
I don´t agree on Brighton. Their goal is very much to win at the level they compete at. And the risk of failure is even higher.
Nobody said it´s an exact science nor that we have to be in every academy in the world. I just said that given the power and resources, we should be well in tune with prospects and their progress and of the many, we should be able to identify a few who we think could step up. We could be right or wrong, but we chose to do nothing instead.
None of them play on the wing in Salah´s position.
That´s the point being debated. How we are now going into this situation with no good wide players.
You could argue we spent all our money on those players and sacrificed the wings. I´d argue that´s poor decision making or planning but hey ho.
OK Iâll do the breakdown againâŚ
Brighton - best in the business most would argue - at discovering talent.
Over the last three seasons theyâve signed these U21 players into their first team (Iâm ignoring their U21 squad and U18 squad signings)âŚ
Thatâs 14 players in three years, for a spend of 248.65m. Of this group only Minteh, Baleba and Verbruggen have become regular starters while Charalampos and Gomez are squad players.
So essentially the calculation that Liverpool have been making is should we spend 250m on a bunch of players and see who floats to the top (because donât make the mistake of thinking we didnât know these players, guarantee we were at least aware of all of them) - or should we wait for someone else to do that and buy the best one for 40m-60m? Then repeat that process across all of Europe and you have a pipeline of top-level players ready to come straight in to our first team.
But as Iâve said a few times that calculation might start to change now as that price for signing the cream of the crop isnât 40m-60m anymore it is getting to be 60m-100m so itâll be interesting to see if that cause a change in our approach to the market.
I think itâs also a financial problem. A couple of bad seasons would harm us much more than a mid-table club like Brighton. Same players, same performance, but very different financial outcomes. Saving ÂŁ50m in the transfer budget but risking ÂŁ200m in revenue is not a game we can afford to play.
Barco has just been signed by Chelsea for big money.
But again, nobody said we have to buy unknowns. There is a big difference between Diomande now at 100 mil plus and some kid from an obscure league of academy. And those 40 to 60 mil players could have been bought a year or two ago. That strategy you said we do doesnt negate what I said at all.