Liverpool Transfer Roundup – Expect Busy 10 Days!

Various ins and out seem likely

Here’s what I’ve felt for weeks now:

Liverpool will make big late moves for players, as they did on the eve of last season for Moises Caicedo (and have bought players closer to the transfer deadline in the past). You bid £110m and people still say you won’t buy big.

But as everyone at Liverpool has said (time and time again, all summer long), only if the players are better than what’s already at the club, and an important factor is always that they will add to the squad harmony, and not detract from it. Slot will improve a young team with coaching, and his unique methods, allied to time and patience.

The no.6 situation has led to a lot of black-and-white thinking; make or break, all or nothing. Such as:

Martin Zubimendi would have been a case of fractionally improving the team, and right now Liverpool’s season “rests” on the collective of Mo Salah, Diogo Jota, Alisson, Virgil van Dijk, Trent, Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister, Cody Gakpo, Darwin Núñez, Ryan Gravenberch, Conor Bradley, Harvey Elliott, Curtis Jones, Ibrahima Konaté, Jarell Quansah, Andy Robertson, Stefan Bajcetic, Caoimhín Kelleher, Wataru Endō, Luis Díaz, Ben Doak and others (for now including Joe Gomez); and the Reds are not going to succeed or fail based on getting Zubimendi, or playing Gravenberch in the role, or having to use different players in there.

The only position in football where a weak link is truly harmful is goalkeeper (such as when Loris Karius lost his confidence completely, and the whole team could not relax). You can always get by without players; you just can’t get by with 10-12 injuries.

Liverpool have a ton of excellent midfielders; it’s not like last summer when there was a gaping chasm of midfielders after a mass exodus, which was filled by the procurement of Szoboszlai, Mac Allister, Gravenberch and Endō, as Bajcetic started a year out with injury, and a kid called Trey Nyoni was signed from Leicester; with Curtis Jones excelling there for England U21s. There are different ways to play the no.6 role and Arne Slot clearly doesn’t want a pure destroyer. If you want a passing no.6, Alexis Mac Allister has shown he can do that, and tackle too. It’s not such an ultra-specialist position that no one else can do it.

And in planning for the future with the apparent purchase of an elite younger goalkeeper (again, the position that matters most), comments underneath an Athletic article were:

**Tom B. • 8h**

**This is bizarre. Goalkeeper is probably the last position we currently need to strengthen.**

**Jesse Z. • 8h**

**This sounds so depressing. We don't need a freaking goalie**

**lan G. • 8h**

**Does he play defensive mid?**

(Yes, it’s so depressing to sign the best U23 keeper in the world. It’s, like, I mean, like soooo depressing, like. I will go to my room and sulk for a week. A goalkeeper! This kind of nonsensical doomerism is all over the internet, rots people’s brains, and I’ll be glad when the transfer window closes.)

But what Gravenberch does is offer a great all-round skillset (including significantly more pace and height than Zubimendi, and at three years his junior could easily have a higher ceiling), so the aim is to work on Gravenberch’s positioning (he spent time as a teen at Ajax in the no.6 role), whereas even Zubimendi, a very clever player, may have taken time to settle and adjust to the physical nature of the league, just as Gravenberch did last summer as a late arrival.

Encouragingly, Mo Salah looks super-refreshed, and also has the team set up to play to his strengths and limit his weaknesses (he’s not quite as quick as he was and can no longer beat a full-back) by having an overlapping right-back playmaker, and Dominik Szoboszlai running beyond at super-high pace, as well as sharing the pressing load. Salah’s genius is in his runs, and in his finishing closer to goal, and in the weight of his through-balls. Diogo Jota is fit and firing.

It now seems clear that Salah can have another great season, in Slot’s system. And while the lack of new contracts may be scaring some fans, Trent should sign (if he wants to be Liverpool captain), and if players aged 32/33 have to fight hard every week to earn a new deal, that’s a good thing; new contracts at that stage can diminish hunger and output.

The exceptional Giorgi Mamardashvili has been lined up to replace the ageing Alisson, who could be sold next summer when he’s 33 (or the year after, when 34), with Kelleher looking the part – but eager to get away this summer, in part due to pressure from his country, but also as he’s at that age.

Kelleher could of course be brought back with a buyback clause, but he may not want that if he settles somewhere else and things are going well; thus having a 6’6” shop-stopping freak (spending a year on loan in the Premier League to adapt), means a Mamardashvili in the hand would be worth two keepers in various bushes, as the old saying goes. It does no harm at all to plan ahead for a year, when Alisson could be on the wane, and Kelleher could be at another club.

Liverpool under FSG went in big on Virgil van Dijk (over £100m in 2024 money), Alisson (ditto), Naby Keïta (ditto, also c.£100m), and Moises Caicedo last summer. Luis Suarez would equate to over £100m too, and Andy Carroll c.£150m.

The owners have never been afraid to make big bids, but Carroll was a lesson in making life harder for a limited player with huge price-tag pressure; had he cost less than he did, he might have found life easier (albeit he was still probably the wrong kind of striker).

I was reading the other day, before the win at Ipswich, about the Reds’ “Disastrous” transfer window, and how Liverpool can “salvage the season”. What utter insanity is this?!

Again, go look at the squad. Plus, look at how many of them are fit (for a change).

Also, do you want £1.2bn spent on new players to the point where none of them fit, and you have to sell all your dedicated homegrown icons (tell them to go train on their own, in a field somewhere near the M25) in order to fund it, then say the rules “made” you sell them? Where does it say that spending a fortune on the feckless Mykhailo Mudryk was essential, and that it’s not your fault, having signed Mudryk and about 50 others, that you must sell the only players who care to be at your club?

People also act like every summer you lose all the talent and shared understandings already accrued. Richard Hughes said, in a major news conference, to expect deals in August. One fell through as the player had a weird change of heart; it happens. Players turned down Jürgen Klopp too. Some will have regretted it.

This season needed no ‘salvaging’; but people have appeared to have had lobotomies.

So, at this point, who might come in and who might leave?

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