Ah, sorry. Won’t bother you again. 
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That’s all you took from my reply? That’s unfortunate, but ok.
Let’s be honest, @Prolix, you haven’t been the nicest person to me over the years. And you seem to go out of your way to be the moral compass of our forums when you do much of the same thing you rail against.
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I’m not being sarcastic. If you made the choice to hide my posts, I’m not going to insist on trying to direct messages @ you that are unwanted.
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Come on guys! Life is too short.
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One last question, @Prolix, based on your reply. I forgot to ask originally.
If Liverpool is the club you describe in negotiating power, why in the world are they over-paying agents and intermediaries to get players here? That makes no sense whatsoever. And I’m still at a loss for that one year of £30.3 on £10 in transfers. Are you able to explain that? I’ve asked around on the socials and it remains a mystery.
Surely based on all the storied history and world class facilities has to count for something, yes? But yet there we are. Paying the highest agent fees to get people here. Doesn’t compute.
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My take is there’s more info we don’t know. Agents fees are too high, but whether or not that is kinda like an extra ransom we have to pay to get people here, that’s doesn’t completely make sense.
We are a very attractive proposition. OK, this season is difficult, but we are an upper team, paying nice wages. If you can get a gig at Real Madrid or PSG or the like, go for it! But apart from a tiny few clubs in the entire world, we are a very attractive proposition.
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Thinking about pure, traditional, number 9 CF type option who may be OK but not good enough or big enough name to be demanding a starting role at a top club (and also cheap and likely within our price range) I’d be tempted to give Odsonne Edouard a go. He’ll have 12 months left on his deal and he may be available for around £15m according to rumours. I could imagine Edwards getting that as £10m with up to an additional £5m in clauses if they’re all met. I think that might be the kind of value deal we could cover most or all of with a sale of Origi, Shaqiri or Minamino (if he moves on).
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Perhaps this poor run of form is just a plot from the club to avoid paying all the performance related add ons for all those future payment structured type deals we’ve been making. 
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Apparently, Sancho may be available for “only” £50 - £70 million, as Dortmund is facing serious financial troubles.
For our attack next season, I would like to see combinations of Mane, Firmino, Salah and Jota in a way none has to play more than 4000 minutes and 1-2 is available even for early cup games. Then I would like to see two able backups. Ideally, it would be Takumi and Elliott after their respective raging loan spells.
However, if that doesn’t happen (a likely outcome in the real world), I would like see a new attacker brought in. Ideally, it should be either someone like Muriel/ Zapata (not literally them) who will bring in some experience but also happy to play second fiddle to our attackers, or someone young and hungry & happy to fight for his place at the table.
Yeah, I was really pissed off during that summer as well. Our lack of signing any players who would have had no chance of getting in the best team in the world really got in the way of celebrating our 6th European Cup.
Barnes was certainly on the radar back in 2019 but there’s no way he would have kicked on in the way he has had he moved to Liverpool back then. You’re ignoring the fact that Barnes has had the space to develop at Leicester he simply would not have had at Liverpool as he wouldn’t have been able to get in the team. Same with Rice.
Maddison would have needed us to have changed the way we played as good as he is with a dead ball. May as well say we should go for Ward-Prowse. Neither would suit us. So lots of money spent for little discernible upside either for us or for them.
Yes, I may be able to help here. Agents get paid for contract renewals as well and there were a lot of high value ones in the last 18-24 months. But in addition to that I suspect that Liverpool are working with players agents on a dual representation basis. I don’t like them because they are an inherent conflict of interest and mean that the buying club ends up paying agents a shit load of money (and generally I think agents take a disproportionate amount of money out of the game).
What that means is that the buying club (Liverpool) pay the player’s agent to negotiate the terms of their departure from the selling club on behalf of Liverpool (exclusivity, transfer fee etc) and they also negotiate the player’s contract with Liverpool. So the agent gets paid for negotiating the terms of the player’s exit from the selling club and also gets paid for negotiating the player’s terms for joining the buying club.
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Forget Barnes, Maddison… the fact that we could not poach any of the Ajax 2018/19 team is beyond me.
Oh, did we try and fail? Did we want any of them? Any internal communications you have access to, feel free to share.
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I think we traditionally pay a lot on agents, and I think that is probably a strategic decision. If you think about it, we never get involved in bidding wars, player tussles, or anything else that could drive a price up. And we never seem to ‘lose’ a player to another club once we a clearly moving for them.
Once we are interested in signing a player, we tend to have a clear run at them, the player wants us and no-one else, and the club aren’t and to try and drive the price up.
I don’t think that’s lucky, and the investment in agents goes towards this. I think the club probably view it as, on balance, a price worth paying.
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I love to forget Barnes and Maddison, but someone keeps going on about them. 
Whenever things are tough and the team is going through a difficult spell, the place where fans always go, the safe space we retreat to, is the transfer market. Out come the calculators, and thoughts of selling player A for x millions, and buying player B for y millions. It’s always nice and tidy, and adds up neatly. It’s so easy.
The only problem is that transfers don’t work like this. They are not neat and tidy and don’t balance the way we pretend they do. Fees are never as simple as presented. You have structured payments, amortised values, agent fees, signing in fees, bonuses and insurance to think about. A player might have a reported transfer fee of £20m, but then he might want 120k a week for four years, which then adds another £25m commitment onto the wage bill. Then you have to consider what paying a new player that does to the wage bill, and how it affects the morale of players being paid below that who feel that they have more right to that kind of wage than the new boy.
We also don’t have to consider the kind of diligence the club do on signings, which is famously forensic. We fans have the luxury of looking at players on the pitch, and basing their opinion on that alone. The club go a lot deeper than this, not just on football ability, but on character, motivation, attitude. For all we know the club really like Harvey Barnes, but 30 people who have worked with him have all tipped us off that he’s a bit of a dickhead. Fans would continue to scream for his signing, but the club just have more information.
A good, if extreme, version of this dissonance is Adam Johnson. I remember posters getting literally furious at the club for not signing him. But I doubt people in football didn’t have an idea that he had some skeletons in his closet.
So transfers are much more complicated in real life than they are in fans imaginations. And this is before we’ve got to deal with a global pandemic and the state the vast majority of clubs have been left in.
I tend to not get too involved in the ‘we MUST sign this player’ stuff. I have a good idea what kind of player we need, but I’m never going to demand the club sign a particular individual, because I think it’s important to know your limits. I really like Bissouma, but I’m not trawling through his background, phoning up his mates or doing medicals on him. If we don’t go for him, then there is going to be a reason, and I have enough trust in the club that it’s a good one.
The analogy I like to use is that my five year old is convinced he can drive a car, because he looks at me doing it, see not much more than my hands on the wheel, and concludes it’s a piece of piss. He doesn’t see what my feet are doing, what decisions I’m having to make, or recognise there are rules to remember and follow. I think it’s similar with transfers, only we’re the five year old seeing 10% of what’s going on.
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The only one from that team I want to have is de Ligt but he is with Raiola and I don’t think Liverpool does business with him. Besides it was clear from the beginning that he would go to Juventus, he is ‘their’ agent.
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June 2023
Henderson
Shaqiri
Firmino
VVD
AOC
Salah
Mane
Fabinho
Keita
We generally start renegotiating/renewing contracts two years prior to the expiry.
So this summer all these contracts should be subjected to reviews. There’s six key members of our squad and they are also the ones being paid the best. With Corona continuing to punch a hole in our budget, we will have to be really innovative to arrange the fund.
Age is another concern. By the end of the contract period Henderson (32), Firmino (31), VVD (31), Salah (30), Mane (30) and Fabinho (29) will be reaching their respective primes.
Do not sell Phillips means offering him a new contract? He’s nowhere near good enough for us or this level.
13/14 style is too wild to sustain it and win stuff. We conceded 50 goals only in the league. That was not even a style, it was an incomplete circle with some outstanding performers in there, especially Suarez.
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Phillips can play 10-15 matches next season, and that would relieve a lot of pressure on our main CBs.
As for 2013/14, we attacked in a far more diverse approach, from the wings, down the middle, and some long balls as well. Under Klopp, especially this season, we only either (a) cross balls from the wings or (b) throw long balls towards the front three and expect them to fend by themselves via individual efforts - and we stagnated when opponents figure this out. We sorely lacked the down the middle attack - which requires a Coutinho-style player. Players like Coutinho, De Bruyne or Iniesta are able to tear opponent defense apart with sharp short through passes.
He might play 10-15 games, but it won’t be for us.
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