Really Bad Takes on Liverpool Signing Dominik Szoboszlai Help No One [Free Read]

Dumb spending arguments are here again

I generally can't be arsed arguing with bad takes on the internet or in newspapers as much these days, as it's like a tsunami of turds at times; but sometimes things stick out and are in need of correction.

It could be a faulty fact, or just a purely illogical take.

I have no issue with Paul Joyce's coverage of Liverpool in The Times – I've rarely seen anything to disagree with and find him a reliable news source – but he just wrote a couple of weird passages in a piece on Dominik Szoboszlai that made no sense from a logical point of view.

As such, this article is also about some bad arguments in general, which I often hear and which drive me mad, and not just the ones raised by Joyce.

But here’s the first thing that I found odd:

"And therein lies the rub for Liverpool. In the last 18-months alone, Jürgen Klopp has spent around £250 million on initial fees [recouping about £62 million] so the cry of being unable to compete rings a little hollow. The focus has to be on extracting more from Darwin Núñez [£65m], Cody Gakpo [£37m] and Luis Díaz [£37m] before we get to new boys Alexis Mac Allister [£35m] and now Szoboszlai..."

While he likely won't have chosen the headlines himself, the:

"Dominik Szoboszlai must ensure he is more than just a highlights reel"

and subhead of:

YouTube montages which don’t tell the full story are all too common... Szoboszlai must buck the trend if he is to deliver value on Liverpool’s decision to trigger his £60 million release clause"

… are pretty dumb.

Anyone should be more than a highlights reel!

For starters, £35m and £37m is getting close to 'peanuts' for a Big Six signing these days. (More on that later.)

Next, "the cry of being unable to compete rings a little hollow" is not something anyone has made since signing Mac Allister and Szoboszlai.

I mean, not much at all has happened since they signed. It’s early July.

That said, spending £95m on two players is very nice, but still very different from spending £105m, £106m and £115m on a single player, to reference Declan Rice, Enzo Fernandez and Jude Bellingham.

Plus, Mac Allister and Szoboszlai's combined wages will be considerably less of those paid individually to Rice, Bellingham, and even Kai Havertz at Arsenal. Erling Haaland's wages are reported to be around six times what either Mac Allister or Szoboszlai will be paid, which is another distortion Man City like to make when claiming to not be big spenders.

So, as I keep saying – but clearly it's not pitched enough to one extreme or the other – Liverpool can compete in some ways, and not in others.

Is that so hard to judge? Must everything be black-and-white thinking?

The Reds cannot compete in the ultimate ways of the petro-doped or venture capitalist insanity of some other clubs; but will spend what is earned, on players' transfer fees and wages at a rate considered healthy by all analysts of the game, but which is ignored by other clubs (as such, do you join the insane over-spenders and risk implosion? Anyone old enough to remember Leeds 20 years ago should give themselves a slap if they forget it.)

In the culture war nonsense over FSG, Liverpool remain neither super-big spenders, relatively speaking, nor penny-pinching paupers. The need to make out it’s one or the other is weird. They spend quite a lot, but not the most, on wages and transfers.

I won’t name and shame the well-followed tweeter, who apparently contributes to the BBC, but her tweet…

“Dreaming of the day Liverpool’s owners show some ambition #LFC

7:23 am · 28 Jun 2023”

… came up on Google when I was researching Szoboszlai, and made me laugh in that really sad, ironic, god-give-me-strength way.

To which I’d reply: Premier League title, Champions League won, 99 points, 97 points, 92 points, two more Champions League finals, a few domestic cups, World Club Cup and the European Super Cup, and of course, a further final-day chance of winning the league that was lost to “honest” Man City in 2014.

Mo Salah, Sadio Mané, Bobby Firmino, Virgil van Dijk, Luis Suarez, Alisson Becker, Jordan Henderson, Diogo Jota, Philippe Coutinho, Thiago Alcântara, Daniel Sturridge, Luis Díaz, Andy Robertson, Gini Wijnaldum, Ibrahima Konaté, Joël Matip, Cody Gakpo, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (until injury) and various others; and even the failed or relatively failed ‘ambition’ of getting Andy Carroll, Naby Keïta and others for big fees, with Darwin Núñez as exciting a ‘flop’ as you’ll see (more on him later). Plus, the ambition of going in hard with data (allied to scouting) before others dared try it?

Have we not been entertained?! Has it been a shit decade or so?

(All from the 2010 starting point of Roy Fucking Hodgson, relegation threatened, and with very few talented players or saleable assets. And yes, Jürgen Klopp was a big factor, but FSG appointed Michael Edwards and others who helped appoint Klopp, with Mike Gordon able to sell the Reds to a manager all clubs wanted.)

Anyway, unless I'm reading it wrong, it seems like Joyce was saying Liverpool have no excuses now:

"the cry of being unable to compete rings a little hollow".

But net spend is a truly terrible argument (albeit not as bad as gross spend), when it comes to transfer analysis.

It's not like I haven't been researching and saying this stuff FOR ALMOST 15 YEARS NOW.

(It's not like I've written or contributed to books, blogs, newspaper articles, an EU report and an academic paper on the topic of transfers and football inflation ... oh, wait.)

Again: net spend is a truly terrible argument.

To mention Liverpool’s net spend in an arbitrary length of time (as is a major problem with all net spend arguments, as I’ve been saying for 14 years since co-creating the Transfer Price Index and writing Pay As You Play, which we began in 2009) is even more odd when 40% of that expenditure has yet to take the field.

Net spend, as a transfer argument, is playground stuff.

It's like looking at pass completion stats.

During his time at Liverpool, Michael Edwards told me in a discussion about stats and data that he'd noticed nearly 20 years ago that players at Portsmouth, where he began his analysis work, fought to take the kickoffs – just to plump their numbers: one more successful pass. Bingo! That stuck with me.

As such, it occurs to me, quite obviously, that pass direction, pass difficulty, pass distance, passes under pressure, pass direction (backwards passes are closer to 100% completion) all radically alter what the stats mean.

Kevin de Bruyne, up there with Trent Alexander-Arnold as objectively the best passer in the Premier League, ranks as a truly awful passer by that metric: a mere 8th percentile (with Alexander-Arnold also low, at the 40th percentile).

Over 90% of players in the top five leagues therefore complete a greater percentage of their passes than that mug de Bruyne.

Fabinho ranks way up in the 92nd percentile for pass completion percentage, so therefore he's a far superior passer than de Bruyne and Alexander-Arnold combined?!

It's a garbage stat. Utterly garbage, sans context.

This is why stats, as a concept, get a bad name – people are too innumerate or lack the IQ to parse them, and/or cannot understand or provide context.

Ditto with spending stats.

What correlates with success is not a short burst of spending (arbitrary net-spend arguments), but the accumulation of players – you know, to form the entire squad – and the fees (adjusted for inflation) and wages paid to those players.

(And, of course, you have to factor in managerial quality, fitness regimes, nutrition, analysts, physios, and all the other things that are also linked in less clear ways to having more money.)

Unless I've missed something, and Liverpool are only going to field Núñez, Gakpo, Díaz, Alexis Mac Allister and Szoboszlai this coming season?

Is that how it works?

This 'logic' suggests that Man City thus will not be fielding Ederson in goal, and none of de Bruyne, Rodri, Kyle Walker, Bernardo Silva, John Stones, Jack Grealish, Nathan Aké, Rúben Dias, Aymeric Laporte and Riyad Mahrez, as all were signed before 2022?

Maybe Liverpool's quintet will only be playing against Haaland, Manuel Akanji, Julián Álvarez and the hitherto underwhelming (...) Mateo Kovačić, who really needs to live up to his price tag pretty quickly, having signed a day ago.

After all, if you only talk about players signed after 2022…

But now. All that accrued talent, which cost more than Liverpool's entire squad and which is paid more than Liverpool's entire squad? That's what Liverpool are competing with. What City go out and spend whilst facing 115 charges is what Liverpool are competing with. The money-making machine Man United became in the 1990s is what Liverpool are competing with. The insane spend-now-worry-later of Chelsea is what Liverpool are competing with. The oily money of Saudi Arabia and more sportswashing is what Liverpool are competing with.

As things stand on July 3rd 2023, and adjusted to 2022 prices (so not taking into account 2023 inflation, which we will calculate this summer), Man City have TEN players who cost more than the £60m Liverpool paid for Szoboszlai; Liverpool have just four others.

Josko Gvardiol will make it 11 for City, it seems, and he will go in near the top, with the deal likely to be over £100m if all clauses are met. (For the Transfer Price Index, we always base fees on maximum potential payable.)

Haaland "only" cost around £54m as a transfer fee, but his is a unique case worth an asterisk, with a special extra £40m in payments to family and agents, which takes it beyond the reach of all other clubs when including a wage of up to £900,000 a week.

Man United have nine, albeit David de Gea is now a free agent, but could remain at the club.

Chelsea had six, before this summer's spending possibly adds more.

(Indeed, they'd have had a few more than six based on last season, but several have been sold this summer, so they've been discounted; some others, like Romelu Lukaku and Kepa, may follow.)

Arsenal have just three, and Spurs and Newcastle have one each (Sandro Tonali could make it two if he has extra clauses beyond the £55m announced as I write this).

But Declan Rice will go in near the top, at £105m, for Arsenal, to join Kai Havertz on the list.

My point here is that Liverpool are what I keep telling people: a fairly expensive side, but not a super-expensive side. It’s all relative. Again, the grey area between extremes just melts peoples' minds. FSG are neither sugar daddies nor tightwads.

The owners have increased income via smart decisions (after some less smart decisions), and they put the money that comes into the club into transfer fees and wages; and they’ve expanded Anfield on two sides. They don't pump money in for players, they don't syphon money out. What’s not to understand?

Of course, it's obviously not just the 10 or 11 super-expensive players Man City have vs the four for Liverpool, but the combined costs of all.

£200m or so is a decent net spend over an 18 month period, but it’s also a fraction of what other clubs spend. And it follows a fallow period where Liverpool were criticised for not spending enough, which included prior to winning the league in 2019/20 – just Harvey Elliott bought – and prior to almost winning the quadruple in 2021/22, which just Ibrahima Konaté bought.

Hence the totally crap nature of net-spend arguments, that are the pass-completion-percentage stats of football finance.

And other clubs are not run sustainably, but are built on debt, loans and lies.

Gakpo Bargain

While Luis Díaz is a £50m player with all clauses met, whose fee can be seen as even higher with around 10% inflation the next season, the £37m for Gakpo seems a strange thing to point out when almost 100 players at Premier League clubs last season cost that much or more when adjusted for inflation (there was no inflation added to Gakpo as he was signed during last season; his fee in 2023/24 will be adjusted once all transfers are completed, to 2023 money).

Looking back across the entire Premier League, to when we began the TPI analysis (Graeme Riley and I had to start somewhere, so started in 1992, even if it would have been nicer to go back to the 1800s! Andrew Beasley now helps keep it up to date), there have been over SIX HUNDRED players who cost more than £37m in 2022 money.

The average price of a Premier League player in 1992 was half a million pounds; last season it was around £20m. Promoted Nottingham Forest paid over £40m for a young uncapped English player last summer – the same age as Gakpo, who'd just starred at a World Cup.

Over half a dozen years ago, Gylfi Sigurdsson cost Everton what was then almost £50m.

So we have to get into our heads the actual cost of transfers and not be anchored to old ideas about £37m being a lot of money. It simply isn't anymore. People are often anchored to old ideas about prices.

Anyway, as a digression, below are a few random players from the database who cost more than £37m in 2022 money and who were still at those clubs (or at least owned by them) within the last couple of years:

• Phil Jones (Man United) £84,572,614

• Baba Rahman (Chelsea) £58,775,842

• Michy Batshuayi (Chelsea) £58,727,418

• Christian Benteke (Crystal Palace) £58,362,652

• Eric Bailly (Man United) £58,362,652

• Sébastien Haller (West Ham) £51,727,832

• Tiémoué Bakayoko (Chelsea) £49,288,283

• Davinson Sanchez (Spurs) £46,823,868

• Fábio Silva (Wolves) £43,650,946

• Danny Drinkwater (Chelsea) £43,127,248

• Lucas Torreira (Arsenal) £39,447,613

• Shane Long (Southampton) £37,140,967

I've also seen criticisms of Gakpo, but after deep-diving the data he comes out as one of the best finishers in world football (based on the goals he scores vs expected goals in all competitions across his entire career), and last season was 99th percentile (and ahead of Roberto Firmino) for the vital Klopp playmaker of gegenpressing/tackling, as well as elite on other 'defensive' metrics; whilst also, as the false nine, excellent for Shot-Creating Actions, Progressive Passes, Progressive Carries and Successful Take-Ons based on Opta data on FBRef.

Gakpo arrived midseason straight from the World Cup, and was thrust into a dysfunctional side. He scored seven non-penalty goals (mostly important ones), but once he moved to the false nine role after a few matches on the wing (which I didn't foresee) I could soon detect the Firmino in him; another player people underrated to my bafflement, before they belatedly cottoned on like sheep. Gakpo scored goals at the rate Firmino did over his career, at a one-in-three rate (albeit Firmino took about 25 games to get his second goal for the Reds).

Gini Wijnaldum was another player I found it hard to believe people couldn’t appreciate for a year or two (I called him The Most Underrated Player in Europe in his early seasons at Liverpool, as subscribers will remember), and whose top-line data was never much to shout about. People struggled to 'get' Wijnaldum. He didn’t need to do more; he didn’t need to score goals when the front three got 90+ in a season.

But I'm digressing again. I just don't see what more Gakpo could have done in half a season, in a relatively new role, in a new country and a new team, as the team itself was being reinvented.

To have expected more is to live in the clouds, and to also not be able to spot a talent when you see one. You might call them “players' players” but I'd expect a journalist to spot them. I worry if you can’t see Gakpo’s quality, and I worry if you’re making a comparison error.

If you're judging Gakpo against Haaland, he'll fall well short in terms of goal volume; but if you judge him against Firmino, which is arguably what the Reds need to balance the team, he matches up beautifully. I think Jordan Henderson named Gakpo as the Reds' best player in the second half of the season. Gakpo played almost every minute.

Núñez

Darwin Núñez was more troubling, in that he cost more than twice as much as Gakpo if all clauses are met (which admittedly would make him a success to do so), had longer to settle (including preseason), and had a half-great, half-terrible season. He blew me away at times, and drove me mad at others.

He doesn't press very well (mediocre numbers), his first touch is erratic, and he missed an absolute ton of Big Chances.

He picked up lots of little injuries, got himself stupidly sent off, and lost his head at other times. Rather than tackle upright and upstanding, as a presser should (the best example I've seen is Jordan Henderson on Paul Pogba at Old Trafford two seasons ago to set up the 5th goal), he dives in; indeed, like Pogba did minutes later in that game.

Pressing should be about narrowing angles, closing down and tackling in a way that retains the ball, not which concedes free-kicks. It also seems that he hasn’t learnt English – and whether or not that’s his fault, we can’t wait 10 years for slower learners to grasp the language (just as we can’t wait 10 years for someone to get fit after an injury, or 10 years for someone to learn to control a football; we can allow some time, but not lots of time).

To counter that, Núñez is explosively fast, created a lot from the wing (he was great at getting to the byline with zero skill but a lot of pace and effort), and got into the positions to miss those Big Chances, which – if you're just judging on goals alone – is better than someone who never gets chances. He's good in the air and works at that side of his game. He causes chaos, which can be great or not so great.

At Benfica he showed that, when confident, he could finish with aplomb, but he looked too hyped-up at Liverpool (not helped by nasty social media mockery that he seemed to get lulled into taking seriously, and which trying to ‘outrun’ can only lead to madness; get off social media and stay focussed).

I can see him thriving with a better midfield behind him and supporting him – so that he can push on more, and not have to drop deep to forage or receive the ball with his back to goal as much.

Better pressing from the midfield can release him more quickly, as last season he seemed to be making runs away from the already deep midfield, when the ball had to be to feet. He can be a real threat in behind, and is deceptively good at staying just onside (most of the time), but at the right time; otherwise the ball was just surrendered.

Equally, Gakpo is simply the better, smarter footballer.

It's nice to have two radically different options – an already elite false nine (based on data and eye-test) and a traditional no.9 who could become elite – but then you have to wonder if Núñez is a square peg in a round hole, or if the hole can be rounded a bit more to fit him.

As I've noted before, Núñez at up to £85m would be an incredibly expensive sub for a club with so few signings at that cost. It’s about a 10th of the overall squad cost adjusted for inflation.

But equally, the lacklustre, slow and sloppy midfield of last season helped no one – not the defence and not Mo Salah (whose stats were down) or Núñez; but also, not Gakpo.

To ask for more from Díaz when he excelled before his serious knee injury, and then returned undercooked (as happens) is also a bit odd.

He's been a resounding success, but he can't offer much more if some brute falls on his knee, just as Virgil van Dijk couldn't offer any more in 2020/21 after Jordan Pickford launched him upfield.

Again, to ask for more from Díaz, Gakpo, Mac Allister and Szoboszlai, because they cost around £200m combined, is asking a lot of someone who had a serious injury; someone who arrived midseason (and actually excelled in my eyes); and two players who've yet to even train with the team. The latter two may need time to settle, too. Wanting instant miracles is not a good level of expectation.

Certainly none of them can be blamed for any problems last season; and Liverpool improved once Gakpo went into the team, as the Reds moved from 10th to 5th.

Which again comes back to Núñez, a mixed bag who mixed brilliance with bad play last season. So, he's the main "jury's out" issue. One single signing.

As happens a lot of the time (as I pointed out a decade ago when I reckoned half of the 20 most expensive signings when adjusted for inflation had flopped), it can actually be the standout, record signing who bucks the trend of paying for players leading to better results.

I found that around 50% of transfers worked, with a 60% success rate at the top end and a 40% success rate at the bottom end; but at the very top – the top 20 – it went back to 50/50, either due to a smaller sample size, or the weight of pressure.

Whether they handle it or not, they clearly have the price-tag pressure; others can go under the radar a bit more, but it's still the procurement of a lot of expensive players that counts; not one or two ultra-expensive players. (Plus, the time to develop younger players if that’s the route you go down.)

Arsenal overachieved last season, in part due to taking time with younger players – but it’s not been long enough for them to have a chance to prove a sustainable success; albeit they’ve already spent close to £200m this summer alone to raise the cost of their £XI (average starting lineup cost adjusted to TPI inflation) and squad, while Chelsea spent almost £600m in 2022/23.

Due to changes in managers, Man United had more expensive deadwood in the squad, whereas due to the financial supremacy (and other methods of paying for things), Man City had the costliest £XI and no unwanted deadwood after years of Pep Guardiola getting his way with mostly smart expensive signings.

YouTube Fallacy

Then, this really poor comparison from the Joyce piece, about YouTube highlights reels:

"Those montages are de rigueur these days. There was one for Naby Keïta back in 2018-19, which whetted the appetite when he moved to Liverpool for £52.7 million. One, too, for Timo Werner which preceded his arrival at Chelsea for £45 million and one for Christopher Nkunku, who is making the move to Stamford Bridge for £52 million this summer."

That Szoboszlai looks great on YouTube is totally irrelevant as a criticism.

So, some flops previously looked good on YouTube?

It’s not a bad thing that someone with great talent, impressive data and a superb attitude looks great on YouTube, because some flops previously looked good on YouTube. It’s a false equivalency.

It seems like an admission of ignorance dressed up as a defence. Szoboszlai looks fucking ace on YouTube. It makes zero sense to hold that against him, or any player who looks good on YouTube.

Jorg Schmadtke and Jürgen Klopp, and the elite scouts, presumably haven’t signed him off the back of YouTube.

Y'know, with Schmadtke a director of football in Germany for many years until just a few months ago, and Klopp, Barry Hunter and Dave Fallows, and Ian Graham and now Will Spearman, not prone to limiting their research to a few minutes on a social video platform (even if that's where I got most of my visual evidence of Szoboszlai, before researching data and scouting reports on various sites.)

Maybe ask some German football experts if, like me, you weren't a close follower of the league and an expert on the Hungarian captain. Don’t make spurious arguments about YouTube, on which Lionel Messi also looks great, and is therefore included in the suspicion of misleading content.

I used to chat privately to well-travelled scout and former Monaco DoF Tor-Kristian Karlsen back in the days when I logged in to Twitter other than to occasionally post links, and his take on Szoboszlai is that he's elite.

Szoboszlai one of the best transfers of the summer. Just a fantastic player.

The analysis on The Athletic backs this up. The analysis from German football writers backs this up. The analysis from fellow players and former managers backs this up.

So it seems a straw-man argument to say that looking good on YouTube means Szoboszlai could end up like Keïta or Werner.

(And I actually thought Werner made Chelsea a more dangerous team, for what it's worth, even if his finishing was erratic.)

YouTube videos are handy to see how tall a player is; how strong he is; how fast he is; how he strikes the ball; what skills he has in his armoury.

What are the best things he can do?

Everything will look good, as it’s a highlights reel – so just how much better than good are his highlights?

It says nothing about each 90 minutes; that's why you listen to scouts, and read reports, and look at data.

For Szoboszlai, the data looks great too. I created this radar based on percentiles (for midfielders across the main five leagues) for the aspects I think are important to Liverpool:

Again, no one is limited by their past data or guaranteed to reproduce it. Every player is subtly (or not so subtly) different in every team and from game to game, as they grow, get better, get stronger, gain confidence, lose confidence, get injured, grow older, and within a career arc, generally rise and fall with the different players around them, and the millions of interactions and movements within each and every game.

No one is just his highlights reel or just his data, programmed to repeat as if a machine.

But bear in mind that Szoboszlai was also one of the fastest players in Germany, the captain of Hungary aged 22, and someone who, by that relatively tender age, has played 250 senior games for clubs and country; which shows a robustness befitting of his physique. Bear in mind that his father was a player and coach, and that he was raised with the right attitude. Bear in mind that he’s a dedicated trainer, a super-hard worker with an obsessive desire to succeed, just like Mo Salah.

Bear in mind that Dominik Szoboszlai is not Naby Keïta.

Keïta Folly

Keïta was in some ways Ian Graham's one great folly; the Reds' biggest data gamble and its biggest failure in some ways.

(A player who, with inflation, cost £92.6m; a lower fee than Virgil van Dijk in 2022 money, but who was signed in a time of relatively lower fees across the league, hence the relative expensiveness.)

A supreme talent, Keïta could dictate games. He did so in Germany, and Liverpool won more often when he played.

But he was short (which as well as being aerially weak made it easier to knock him off the ball), and lost a yard or two (or five) of pace with all the injuries; all after arriving having apparently not learnt the language in a year to prepare for the move – much like Ian Rush before failing in Italy in 1987/88 after agreeing the move in 1986.

Keïta looked unable to run at all by the end, and a once elite presser chased back about as fast as Jan Molby in the mid-'90s while carrying Neil Ruddock on his back.

Keïta was introverted, and while not a dickhead per se, not a strong personality.

Graham's model was right about him as a pure player; but the model didn't measure personality, and it didn't foresee the unforeseeable injuries, which obviously mostly no one can foresee, unless signing someone with a history of a certain injury and it recurs – in which case, more fool you, unless you have the medical mastery to solve them.

(Or you have genuine psychics, which would make scouting a lot easier.)

Even with his lack of social skills, Keïta could have been a superstar. He wasn’t a mirage; he just got injured again and again.

If he contributed to his injuries in any way, by not doing the required exercises and self-care (or the hours of yoga some do to help ward off issues), then he's partly to blame. Could Liverpool have foreseen warnings about Keïta's personality? I think there were one or two warning signs in Germany, such as issues about driving with a fake licence.

But you can't say it was a bad idea to sign him and hint that his YouTube videos were a lie. Just as you can't say that the Arsenal player falling on Luis Díaz's knee at a point where Díaz had been exceptional for nine months at Liverpool was in any way anyone's failing.

Wages

Liverpool have also succeeded, in general, by managing the wage bill.

As reported, "Szoboszlai, 22, will earn in the region of £120,000 a week and wear the No 8 shirt."

Mac Allister is said to be on £150,000 a week, with his transfer fee halved by a buyout clause, which Liverpool used to save money on Szoboszlai.

Costing £5m more than Szoboszlai at £65m, it’s also reported that Kai Havertz, who makes sense to me as a no.8 at Arsenal, has gone in as their top earner, on £330,000 a week (£17m a year) – which is the part that doesn't make sense. That's superstar wages.

How do Bukayo Saka, Martin Ødegaard and others feel about being dropped way down the pay hierarchy by someone who, hitherto – despite clear talent – has been a mixed bag at Chelsea? Saka has just got a pay rise and now has in some ways been demoted.

Szoboszlai and Mac Allister, plus a third midfield signing should the Reds make one, will be earning combined what Havertz has gone in on at Arsenal. Three players' wages for the price of one.

How many Arsenal players will be pissed off if Havertz proves merely mediocre, or doesn’t pull his weight?

And Declan Rice is due to go in on the same money as Havertz, too. Two new players, straight to the top of the pay charts? Arsenal have been smart in the last year or two, but that seems risky to me.

Liverpool never get enough credit for the management of the wage bill, and the hierarchy that means no new player has ever gone in on inflated wages, with perhaps the exception of Thiago Alcântara, who arguably "deserved" it on previous achievements but has yet to quite merit it on performances (again, injury related).

It's not just about keeping the existing high-performing players happy within a previously merited hierarchy, but also stops the next round of contract talks spiralling out of control. And the higher you set the bar, as Barcelona found with Messi, the more the middling-earners want, by virtue of comparison. (“He’s on £2m a week, so I should be on £300,000 a week”, says an average player.)

That's why Liverpool retain an industry-wide gold standard of wages-to-turnover ratio.

I mean, Szoboszlai on £120k a week sounds like a steal.

As with the Reds paying academy players a maximum of £52k a year even if they look like the next Maradona, the Reds don't hand out unearned money and remove hunger from the first team. You excel, you get a pay rise within a year or two; you excel in the U21s, you get a good pro deal, but still not riches. You always come in mid-level on wages, unless there’s an exceptional reason.

So anyway, this is not an attack on Paul Joyce, whose work I've never really found a reason take issue with. But any really bad pieces of logic or lapses in judgement need to be addressed.

Ditto a BBC piece comparing Szoboszlai's data with Liverpool's attackers when noting that Liverpool “may choose to play him in midfield” (!), when that's where a) he mostly played anyway, and b) clearly where he's going to play for Liverpool, whose need is for midfielders.

Szoboszlai is admittedly hard to define as a player as he’s so versatile, but he didn't spend last season in RBL's front line. He's a no.8, and should be treated as such.

And so, the Reds are in a position to ‘compete’ next season. But equally, other clubs have more money, and no one should expect any new signings to be amazing from the first game to their last. What Liverpool should do is prove significantly better than last season; a process that already started with the arrival of Gakpo, the promotion of Stefan Bajcetic and the reinvention of Trent Alexander-Arnold.

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