It’s more that we a) grossly over exaggerate both the fees and the interest in our players and b) we seem to think the flaws and faults that lead us towards putting a player up for sale aren’t visible to anyone else. I’m not digging anyone out. We all do it.
Go and look at the Everton Cup threads if you want to see this in action.
We had a few golden years where the likes of Bournemouth and Palace were paying a fortune or our cast offs, but clubs have got wise to that now.
But back to Fabinho. £15-20m tops. He will be 30 by the time he leaves, looks to be on a severe decline, and will be coming off what looks like a personally awful season. There is no way we can claw back the £40m we paid for him. For a club with £30-40m to spend on a midfielder, there are better, younger players with far more upside than Fabinho.
You could point to what Forest gave us for Neco Williams, but the lad was twenty, looked full of promise, and that is also going to command more of a fee than a thirty year old midfuelder with limited mobility.
Look at the fee for Thiago. Wasn’t it £20m rising to £25m? Fabinho will have a extra year on his contract this summer than Thiago did, but Thiago is a much better player than Fab.
Or maybe people just don’t know the market very well.
To say Fabinho is 15-20m is laughable. He’s double that, he signed a new 5 year deal in summer 2021 so he’ll have 3 more years left come this summer. Thiago was signed for 25m yes and he was 1 of the biggest crocks in Europe…you bring up all these factors why we shouldn’t value our players at the market price yet you somehow conveniently left out the fact Thiago was a crock? Also noticed you failed to recognise us signing Ox under the same circumstance…for 35m (I understand he was a huge mistake and the biggest flop we’ve had under Klopp but still) !!! Probably was the biggest crock in England at the time as well.
Williams was full of promise? Was he? I thought he was largely terrible and looked like a championship player other than the few times he looked good playing Lwb for Wales (but who cares about internationals, right?). Same people laugh thinking we couldn’t get the same if not a bit more for the likes of Harvey and Jones…Fact is if we’re pulling 20m for the likes of Solanke and Williams, we can easily fetch 20-30m for Harvey and Jones…nothing to do with “golden years” Nobody is convincing me otherwise.
The way he is playing thats all he is worth. Was listening to a few arsenal fans talking about the PL in general on Friday night in the pub saying they never saw a players form drop so fast and the 34 year old rumour was mentioned.
But regarding the rest, the entire football world is watching him get fucking rinsed week in week out, and it seems quite apparent that he is in sharp decline.
If the club get some legs around him and maybe play him as a double pivot he can recover some value, but you’ll have to explain to me why any club with £40m to drop on a midfielder, would buy Fabinho? Wouldn’t you go for someone younger, more mobile?
Put it this way, Fab was playing for someone else, and putting in the performances he has been this season, would you be happy if we spent £40m to bring him in.
So many points here to pick apart I don’t know where to begin.
It really does depend what a club is looking for, what system they play etc…he’s a quality player still who’s looking bad in this liverpool team at present in this set up…Mo Salah has apparently also declined massively in this team yet people think we’ll get 100m+ for him? Same age as Fab…How so? anyway, doesn’t mean he wouldn’t treasure somewhere else. (after all every league is supposed to be 10x slower and less physical than the Prem, right?) You can’t suddenly decide to discount this perception many have because it’s Fabinho, or because we’re looking to make X amount back on a player who’s out of it right now.
Can you explain why Utd signed Casemiro for 70m or Varane for 40m if they could’ve signed much younger/mobile players? Course you can’t because how can a Liverpool fan speak on what Utd or any other club needs/looking for?
“If Fab was playing for someone else right now given the performances would I be happy spending 40m to bring him in” uhmm, it really depends who else is available for that price tag I suppose (feel free to throw some names about)…like I say you look at the market now and what do you really get? It isn’t 2012 no more where you can sign a Xabi or Masch for 20m. But the real answer is we can’t really speak for other clubs…but you look around the whole of Europe and there are so many eyebrow raising transfers.
Utd are a poor benchmark. Their spending has been ridiculous. They bought Maguire for £80M, so it might be reasonably extrapolated that we would sell Nat Philips for £30M, but the reality we have seen is that even £10M for Nat might not be doable.
My take is if we sold Fabinho, it would be for around £20M.
If we sold Thiago it would be for £10-15M.
In the right teams they would still offer a lot, but they wouldn’t be players you would build around any more, and as Mascot is saying, the whole world is seeing us get overrun each week, and there will be few scouts watching and thinking, “That’s what we need here.”
Edit
Mo Salah, if we sold him I would not expect £100M. Arguably if PSG decided they wanted him, say if Messi departed, and they wanted the best Arab in their team, they would perhaps overpay, but even then I would guess £70M or so.
Goalscorers are always more expensive, so comparing a midfielder of the same age isn’t a direct comparison.
There is also the longevity aspect and value that can or cannot be recuperated 5 or 6yrs down the line. Easier to hope for a ‘full refund’ on outlay when signing a 22yr old as opposed to a 32yr old for example - Same with commercial worth value.
How many would go out and choose a Fabinho shirt over a Salah one… each little aspect of the player adds or subtracts market value
That’s why we should sign Moukoko. He can play Striker or RW and could be the future replacement for Firmino and compete with Nunez for minutes up front.
Could see Joe Gomez asking for a move and we should be able to replace him with the money raised by his sale. Depends of what Joe wants first, of course.
We are are currently on 28 without newly promoted kids.
I know you perhaps don’t count the likes of Berg and Doak as full time first team players, but there’s no way that I see Klopp going with such a big squad next season.
We don’t even know what we’ll qualify for yet, I’m assuming you believe we’ll be in CL. Even in that case, I don’t see it.
Two of them are Ramsay and Doak who are not really first team players. They will be playing for U23s but still be around and might play in the domestic cup games.
Not thinking about CL or EL but Europa League would mean even more games than CL (qualification round before group stage and a possible playoff round if a team doesn’t win its group).
We should be binning off Henderson and Fabinho if anyone wants to pay us half decent money for them, a no brainer really. I get the idea that Henderson is good in the dressing room but we play against teams every week that have two better midfielders than him. I see no reason to keep Fabinho on, he’s not going to get any sharper as he enters his 30s and his current level is about mid championship. I’d sooner see Bajcetic and perhaps even Morton taking up those squad roles, at least we’d see some composure in possesion. When teams like Wolves, Brighton and even Brentford have multiple players that are better than your senior midfielders it’s time to worry.
Maybe the double pivot will finally rear its head next season. With Firmino looking to sign, where do we fit all of these 10s/half space players in?
Ramsay is brought in as a first team player. Whether we judge he’s worth keeping for next season, that remains to be seen.
Doak is the one who might be between U21’s, training a certain amount of time with us and getting some cup appearances.
Nah, playing some qualifiers or EL or the new rule of 5 subs doesn’t make such a difference.
Having such a large squad is not healthy, you cannot work/train properly. We are one of the world’s richest clubs so we’re now in years where we have on paper more than we would ideally want.
On current merit, what benefit would Berg, Carvalho and a few others have from being practically the ‘last’ players of that squad? We’d have so many unhappy players, not good for the group.
I mean, if you count on us having always close to 10 players injured, then that’s an argument.
