And still we are banging on about who to sell and who to buy with the funds raised!
With no sign of any return of full attendance at matches, and clubs still haemorrhaging money, the transfer market is unlikely to return to anything like normality for several seasons. And depending on how long the pandemic continues, it is possible that we may see several clubs going out of business, further destabilising the transfer market as players are released, or sold at fire-sale prices.
With the exception of the state owned clubs, or those owned by Russian oligarchs, no one, including ourselves, will be in a position to buy; most will be looking to reduce costs, so wage bills will be under intense pressure. Consequently even loan deals will be at a premium as clubs look first to reduce the numbers of playing staff before bringing anyone in.
(Young Gini should take heed; he might find that Barca aren’t in any position to offer him a contract better than that on offer with Liverpool, come this Summer.)
At the end of this season, a reasonable projection suggests that we will have lost revenues of at least £120 million, and probably a lot more when TV monies, and potentially commercial revenues are adjusted downwards.
Realistically, we will have nine tenths of bugger all to spend; we will have even less after the stage payments for Jota and Thiago are taken into account, so we might not even be in a position to make Kabak’s deal permanent (always assuming Jürgen wants to keep him).
So, who will we buy this summer? Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed.
You’ve said you’d hope we could get M’Bappe or Haaland if we can raise the money from our ‘deadwood’ (hate that phrase) and Salah/Bobby.
What do you think we can raise from your list of surplus players. In all honesty, I think it’s very little indeed. We’d be lucky to get £20m
Gini is obviously going on a free, so you can discount him.
Behind this is the inconvenient fact that no-one has any money. Everyone is struggling, and the market is in the process of adjusting to post covid finances.
Ox - nobody is giving us anything for an out of form midfielder with a horrific injury record. Clubs will be looking for a loan before committing any money to a permanent deal.
Matip - again, no-one is putting cash into a player that can’t put three games together. Klopp’s recent comments on him suggest to me that he’s been playing through injury for the team and he will now be put through a proper rehabilitation.
Taki - I think the point of the loan is to protect/enhance his value with view to a permanent deal. He’s young and has a decent continental reputation, so a club might be interested in a deal at around £10m
Origi - His reputation has plummeted and he seems far too casual in his approach to the game. Again, I can’t see anyone coughing up any cash for him.
Shaq - something of a luxury player, with another horrific injury record. No-one is paying for that. Probably loan enquires, but nothing of any use to us.
So, maybe a bit more than we got for Taki, plus a few loan fees. I think that’s about it.
So on to Mo. If he was going to go anywhere, it’s going to be one of the big five non-English European Clubs - Barca, Real, Bayern, Juve and PSG. I don’t think any of them can afford the £150m we’d be looking to recoup for him. So unless we can work out some kind of swap deal diddle with M’Bappe, I don’t see him going anywhere. I don’t think he particularly wants to either, and I don’t think you push out a player of Salah’s quality lightly.
In terms of the business I think we’ll do, I think it will be quiet. There is no money, and it’s unrealistic to expect a big summer.
The squad we have is still one of, if not the best in Europe. We have some players struggling with form, and some returning from injury, and some on a come down from the monumental effort of the last two years, but that aside, aside from Div, Wilson, Grujic and Woodburn, there is no-one I’d be actively looking to move on. It’s just the wrong time to break this team up.
There is a saying in Montenegro that “a horse must be loaded on both sides”. I think that we’ll see many more clubs adjusting to the new (temporary) reality, a bit like the deals with Wolves for Jota and Hoever. There are clubs that live off thorough scouting and selling players for massive, often inflated amounts of money (half of Ligue 1 and Bundesliga clubs, for example, I’d even be tempted to say “all of them bar PSG and Bayern”), they know they will have to adjust their requirements if they are to continue living within their means. If that doesn’t happen, I’m afraid that this horse won’t move an inch before falling to one side, especially as money is continually lost in TV deals, absence of fans etc.
I’ve made my peace with the fact that Liverpool won’t get what they think the likes of Origi or Shaqiri or Grujić are worth but I honestly think that their targets won’t be as expensive as they would have been two years back. I take Ćaleta-Car as an example - yes, he’s playing in a crazy club but it’s a big club that made a few big sales recently, he was schooled in a team that is basically the Austrian Liverpool in terms of playing style and he was a part of a team that played in a World Cup final. Fee that was agreed was 20 million pounds, I expected something between 30-40 million pounds.
I think that there will be quite a few transfers like this one to be made in the summer, though I don’t have the slightest clue as to how the pandemic crisis will impact the negotiations of new deals, not just to protect the value of players but to protect the structure of the team. Giving new deals to Alisson, Van Dijk, Fabinho, Kelleher and Elliott protects the structure and future of the team, giving one to Keita protects his value (like with Matip, Origi and AOC before) - but will they accept the terms they are given, considering that they would have got much more just a year back?
What I’m worried about the most, though, more than Liverpool not being able to offload their unwanted players or struggling to conclude new deals for current players, is billionaires’ playthings like Man City and Chelsea distorting the market again. Such clubs will be the biggest sources of transfer money again (why stop spending now, eh?), meaning that UEFA will turn a blind eye to them when it comes to FFP. These clubs will be able to afford to spend big again and again and they are the ones that could again inflate the sums that I expect to be lower this summer. If that happens, I could see them gaining massive advantage over their rivals and Liverpool is a rival, even in this state.
Yeah, there was talk of relaxing FFP during the pandemic to allow the oil clubs to inject cash and provide the market with some liquidity. Thats short term it’s in the extreme. FFP should be tightened in this market.
FFP was dead in the water the moment shiteh got away with false accounting and failing to disclose related parties. There will be no going back; any club similarly charged will use the shiteh case as precedent, and withhold information/prevaricate/filibuster until the statute of limitations expires, and, similarly, get away with it.
Relaxing the rules will at least allow clubs to borrow to survive in the short term. How they will repay the debt in the future, and survive longer term, is a different matter.
André Silva at Frankfurt has 16 goals so far this season.
Under contract until 2023.
Like Diogo Jota and most Wolves Portuguese players he is also a Gestifute client.
Luka Jovic returned to Frankfurt on loan. Still think he will become a world class CF at the right club with the right manager. Think Real might be open to sell him for around €40m.
I think talk of FFPs demise is greatly exaggerated.
City didn’t so much get away with their illegality - they exploited a loophole. And they were damn lucky CAS reached an absolutely batshit conclusion - because they’d broken the rules by hiding their criminality for so long (have a small fine) they could not be prosecuted but the bigger stuff.
But that as it is, I think UEFA have to get FFP working. It’s over for them if they don’t. There are established big clubs in Europe who are looking to UEFA to protect them from upstart clubs like City cheating their way into competition with them. If UEFA won’t do this, then it makes a breakaway super league inevitable.
The other thing I think people get wrong about City and FFP is that City don’t want to comply. They absolutely do, and they want a strong FFP as much as anyone else. Now they have cheated their way into the elite, the last thing they want us another City breaking into the club they now deem themselves part of. They are not against the drawbridge coming up, they just want to be on the right side of it when it raises.
Can’t see more than one of Ox, Shaq and Keita leave. Don’t think it will be Keita but could not decide between the other two.
We tried to sell Origi last year in both windows. No acceptable offers came in.
Wrote it in the Minamino thread yesterday. Best thing that could happen to us would be him scoring a few goals and Saints making a very good offer to buy him.
It’s utterly impossible to offload all the fringe players. As for summer window, I will be happy to see the back of Shaqiri, Origi, AOC and those on loan (except Elliott off-course).
We have a very good core team in Alisson, TAA, VVD, Gomez, Robertson, Fabinho, Thiago, Henderson, Salah, Firmino, Mane and Jota. Then we have some very capable backups in Kelleher, Neco, Tsimikas, Ben, Milner, Curtis and Elliott.
So we don’t need to make any key purchases (VVD, Jota) and only need to add players who provide cover and competition. That will still cost money, but not as much as it would have if it were some key players.
Despite the depressed market, we will make some money in players sale/loan.
The most important thing is, this time we must get hungry players rather than another bunch of Shaqiri, AOC.
Think there’s a huge difference between being able to offload players at the prices we want and being able to offload players.
We’ve created a reputation as a team that sells high. And usually we wouldn’t want to risk that but this summer may be seen as different. For a start the market will be in flux and what might initially seem a low or high fee may turn out not to be 6-12 months later.
I think we could see this as an opportunity to accept what we can get for some players and get them off the books without it harming our reputation long term.
We might get less than we value players at internally but we are at the point where even half the money we wanted for Origi for example is better in the coffers to go towards reinforcements than the player is worth sitting on our bench and in our dressing room.
That might be harsh and I wouldn’t think so in other circumstances but we could find ourselves looking at Origi thinking he’s a £20-25m player and turn our noses up at £15-18m but that may turn out to be a very good price for a player of that status in the new market going forward.
The prices in the transfer market may be roughly halved moving forward or may see a temporary dip for a season or two before going back to normal.
We could benefit in two ways.
First we can have a clearing of the decks of players we really need to move on (who would end up moving on for free by the time the market may potentially return to normal so doubt we’d ever see what we want for them).
Second that could help create room on the wage bill and bring in funds we need to recruit ourselves in a downbeat market where we could find players on reduced fees and possibly reduced initial wages than those players would usually command.
The problem with FFP is that it places certain obligations and restrictions upon owners that are above and beyond the dictates of company law. This means that while certain practices may be in breach of UEFA FFP rules, they are not necessarily against the law in the jurisdiction applicable to ownership of the club, and consequently may not require detailed disclosure in a company’s financial reports.
In any case, a business owner need only to register a company in a state with lax financial reporting (e.g. the Cayman Islands) and ownership, the source and transfer of funds, becomes practically impossible to trace.
Consequently the failure to comply with FFP may only be discovered when the details are accidentally leaked or disclosed by a whistleblower, such as in the case of shiteh.
Even then, by dint of the precedent set by the shiteh case, it is not a forgone conclusion that the owners will be punished.
Yeah, I mentioned it in an earlier post; we have to swallow our pride and be practical in offloading the players in summer window. It’s no use to hold on to a player if the buying club don’t agree to our valuation. Looking back, £12 millions for Wilson looks very decent at this point.
We have to realize two things,
The players we intend to sell are of no use to us.
Their values will only fall with the passing of time.
So clear all the deadwoods, trim the wage bill, build a decent fund and get some proper replacement.
I agree but I would just note that only in this situation in my opinion.
If we always acted like that we would be seen as a pushover of a club when selling our unwanted players.
If we had funds behind us and could carry out any required business without issue and/or the prices in the transfer market were stable/predictable I’d say no. Stick to our guns and get reasonable/good deals.
But we don’t know the current value of players, nobody will be able to predict that for awhile.
It’s no good holding out for another 5-10 million for someone like Origi from a club willing to buy that the player accepts moving to if we don’t actually know if the offer price is reasonable or not.
I don’t see it hurting our reputation if it turns out we are (probably one of many) a club that sold at some bargain prices during the pandemic after effects. We sold high before it and will almost certainly return to that stubborn stance after. We’ll still have a reputation as shrewd sellers.
But its looking like a) we won’t actually need to do much business and b) without player sales we might struggle to complete business.
In that case around £10-15m for Origi we can get is better than the £20-25m we can’t get. Especially if combined with a similar deal for say Grujic. Those two going out on loan or clogging up the squad list whilst not really wanted isn’t going to pay for Kabak or an alternative but reduced sales for them would.
That’s just a lazy example I haven’t really thought out very well but just to try and show my point.
That’s an 19 man core we will probably want to keep. We would need a GK (with Kelleher being so young it should be an experienced level-headed older keeper in my eyes) who would be cheap or free. A CB unless Fabinho drops back or we take another risk of a season on Matip. A CM unless we keep one of Keita, Ox or Grujic or two if Fabinho drops to CB for next year still. Finally a forward unless we keep one of Shaqiri, Wilson or Origi or one of the main 3 guys moves on.
So in all cases even if we are bringing a new player in we are looking at multiple departing or possibly departing players to help fund it. Except CB.
In midfield devalued sales of Keita, Ox and Grujic should still easily cover a devalued purchase of a CM. Same with attack with Shaqiri, Origi and Wilson paying for an attacker.
We might sell in a low market but we should also be buying in the same market and we might need nothing more than a CB and 3rd choice keeper. Possibly an attacker and/or a CM but only if there is a significant number of departures.
Also we kept a larger squad this year than normal and I expect it to reduce again for next year added to quite a few sellable assets out on loan.
Thing is,if the arse has fallen out of the transfer market and player prices are slashed by 40-50%,we now have atleast £60mill worth of unpaid player debt on the clubs books to pay for from last summer,before we even start to think of spending again.
Our normal way of working the market will become a hell of a lot harder,if not impossible,i can imagine whatever we sell the bulk of it will now go towards balancing the books and whatever is left over will go towards buying a new player.