Season Preview – Plus, Lavia, Caicedo, and My Head Has Exploded

My ZenDen article republished here, after intro about the ongoing transfer sagas

I originally wrote this article (that follows later down the page) at the start of the week for my separate ZenDen Substack, but will now share it for paying subscribers on here, the TTT Main Hub, with some extra additions by way of a big free-to-read chunk of a new introduction, as I try to get my ahead around the Reds’ transfer business.

Season Preview for Liverpool FC – Valid Reasons For Optimism

But things move fast in football.

Or fast, only after moving very very slowly. So even the introduction I wrote this morning has been ditched, for a new introduction this afternoon.

By the time I hit publish, Liverpool may have made a £23m bid for Arthur Melo, and phoned Real Madrid to ask about Jude Bellingham’s availability to play golf next Tuesday.

So anyway, I was about to hit publish just after lunchtime, and the saw that Liverpool had “bid” for Moisés Caicedo, who I understood was due to join the Reds last season until his previous agents (since ditched) began holding the club to ransom, and as such, was why the Reds weren’t going near him this summer.

Reports about Liverpool’s “interest” then said he only wants to join Chelsea, while Roméo Lavia, who hitherto only wanted to join Liverpool, is being bid on by Chelsea; but it seemed that Liverpool were only prepared to pay up for Caicedo, and not Lavia. Or something.

Except Liverpool are also said to have merely enquired about Caicedo (as due diligence), and not made a bid – and still fully expect him to join Chelsea.

What is said to be due diligence could also been seen as utter tomfuckery. (By all means ask to be kept informed, but not at this stage, surely.)

I’ve defended the club’s transfer policy and spending over the years as I’ve felt it’s been smart and sensible; and last summer was a mess where mistakes were not going to be repeated, and anyone can have a bad summer. The key is to not repeat those mistakes.

Yet it all leads to an unholy mess that at least resembles last season, when the club wasted time with big-money players who didn’t want to join (because they got a better offer) or because their club refused to sell; which led to Caicedo at £35m, as I was told (but again, it’s third party info), which fell through when the agents were adding various noughts, and which led to zero consensus on who to buy, which led to … Arthur Melo.

(And resignations.)

If Caicedo was essentially left to dangle by the Reds last summer, even if legitimately so given his agents’ antics, it might explain why he prefers Chelsea; or it could be a longer, bigger contract, the type of which the London club continue to hand out. (The amortisation limit is now five years, but they can still give players longer contracts to entice them to the Bridge.)

Or it may be that Liverpool just phoned Brighton to see what the player’s Instagram handle was, so that they could wish him well ahead of his move to London.

Caicedo would undoubtedly be a great signing for Liverpool, as a similar type of player to Lavia, who is a couple of years older and more developed as a result.

But Lavia would also be great business at £50m, as I see it, given that £50m is not a fortune in this market. To go up to £46m in painfully slow and dithering increases and then tap-out on the eve of the season would be the epitome of ‘hard to fathom’, to put it politely. To me, Lavia could easily be where Caicedo is now within a year.

Now it seems Liverpool are doing everything to undermine their own interest in Lavia, including presumably alienating a player they’d already got to agree terms, back when the summer was young and we hadn’t all aged 15 years by the whole process.

Leaving things late is rarely a good idea. In my article on Lavia and comments underneath I listed the opportunity costs of not getting players in quickly enough. There are almost too many to go through.

I’m hoping that it’s just Jörg Schmadtke being out of his depth and/or going rouge, as he’s likely to be gone at the end of the summer.

Liverpool needed someone to simply make the signings. (Remember, no contracts have been given out to existing players, just re-signing Adrian, and the two new buys, both of whom were via buyout clauses, and the second of which was left to the very last day before hitting ‘send’; so it seems that normal DoF duties are not part of the job description.)

To get someone to work with Jürgen Klopp – the club’s key man – rather than rush in to making a full-time appointment who might not be on the same page made sense.

The ‘chef buys the ingredients’ model, as noted by someone on the site, is fine; but not once the restaurant has opened for the evening.

Klopp has had more say on transfers for a few years now, but he surely doesn’t negotiate deals. Schmadtke is just here for three months, surely to do those deals. And so far he’s had one job, and …

While I think the Reds will have a better season than last year (as I will go into in the article, when I get to it), this feels even worse than last summer in terms of negotiations, in that the point was to specifically not be like last summer (and this summer has seen six midfielders already leave, and further ones remain on the road to recovery after injury).

Last summer was also about complicated deals for high-demand players, like Jude Bellingham and Aurélien Tchouaméni.

This summer, the Reds seem to have had a total mental block on offering £50m for a player who is surely worth £50m given his immense potential, especially to fill a problem position; showing how keen they are by repeatedly bidding and repeatedly wondering why it’s not going anywhere.

To get neither Lavia nor Caicedo, then to fail with the next choices, would be beyond bizarre. Hopefully something will be sorted soon; as it needs to be.

Prices almost always rise dramatically, as our transfer inflation work has shown on TTT since 2010. (That’s aside from when players’ own values rise when they get better and demand for them grows.)

The average price for a Premier League footballer has reason by over 40% per season on three occasions in the last decade; over 20% on another occasion; and one season fell by 17.5%. Mostly they rise, and occasionally they fall.

Overall, average prices have almost tripled since 2015/16.

That’s not including the market within a market for midfielders this summer. So if you set aside £100m for players, it may be that the same players end up costing £150m. As I’ve noted before, FSG never seemed ‘cheap’, just balancers of the books.

The Lavia negotiation has thus far been ludicrously long and baffling in the odd lowness of the lowballing, but obviously if Caicedo was procured instead it would be another big-money deal.

Initially, the Caicedo interest seemed like the club making a firm decision; now it seems like yet more confusion and time-wasting. It’s not the club’s job to play all this out in public, but that’s what’s happening.

While we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, it’s playing out terribly; and the lack of signings prior to what is now almost mid-August, days before the season starts, is a failure of sorts (the window can be rescued, but early signings are always preferable).

Two deals were done early (one very early by the departing Julian Ward), and good signings too; but this will be the first Klopp summer where the majority of arrivals occur after preseason, assuming the club successfully signs the three players apparently still sought.

(If not, then it’s an even bigger failure, if Klopp really wanted signings, as seems to be the case; this is not about me wanting signings.)

Normally they are all signed in July, if not agreed in June. Schmadtke was in place by late May, so not too late to sort deals by the end of July.

It’s not about ‘winning the transfer window’ or ‘acting like a big club’ (I couldn’t give a shit about those), but getting players in early enough so they can settle, and start the bedding-in process.

(The earlier you do that, the earlier they are likely to settle, whether they go into the XI right away or not. Even just training together is part of the integration process all players need.)

There’s still three weeks left to sort deals, which should be enough, but it’s already awkwardly late, and there’s less wiggle-room, as the end of the window looms, and in-demand players have already joined other clubs, or are forced to stay where they are by clubs who don’t want to make sales once the season has started (as they don’t want to be unsettled).

It doesn’t get easier as time gets tighter; only harder.

(But again, there’s no reason to panic yet, as excellent signings could yet be made, so we need to bear that in mind and not totally lose our minds; but there are various signs that seem alarming as to how the Reds have conducted their business this summer, that reduces my usual confidence in the right solution being found.)

Below are the Reds’ 40 most expensive signings of the Premier League era in 2022/23 money, so not taking into account what players will cost in 2023/24, as that’s not yet calculable.

As you can see, quite a few (in grey) are FSG-era buys: over half of the 35 most expensive (19) are from the past 13 years; the other 16 are from the previous 17 years.

Which is why I worry that whoever is negotiating this summer is not keeping up with the going rate for players (or how the English market works), especially midfielders in a market where lots of teams want no.6s.

Plus, you can’t remain consistently interested in a player and then also think he’s not worth the price. You move on, or you pay up.

Jordan Henderson was 21 when Liverpool signed him for what would, once 2023/24 money is calculated, will be closer to £100m. He had two seasons in the Premier League and one international cap. Lavia has one full season and one international cap; but is ahead of where Henderson was at 19.

So many fans and pundits seemed to think Henderson was overpriced at what was then a huge fee, but he proved great value. (The less said about his exit the better.) The point of factoring in inflation is that now, £20m is the average price of a Premier League player; so just looking at the fee from 2011 gives no sense of its size at the time.

(Prices for players in 2022 money are dependent on the market the season they were signed, so some players signed soon after others – for lower fees – may have cost more relative to that year’s overall deals.)

Aside from the very un-FSG-like behaviour of not paying up for a player who is gettable (which is why I think Schmadtke – a logical short-term appointment to work with Jürgen Klopp to act purely as a deal-maker – has thus far failed), my biggest concern of the summer is perhaps people panicking about Liverpool’s ‘leaky defence’ – when half the time it’s been kids in the team; including two late goals to lose to Bayern Munich when by that stage it was mostly the Reds’ U18 side.

(Plus, at least two goals the Reds conceded this summer would have been ruled out by VAR, as playing the high line will continue to be risk-reward, but VAR will spot these clear offsides that linesmen can’t; officials now don’t like calling offsides as VAR does the job, but VAR wasn’t there to clean up their obvious mess).

Equally, in Liverpool’s incredible title-winning seasons full of tons of clean sheets, they conceded either two or three in each of the four meaningful friendlies (the other friendlies were against really weak opposition).

Of course, Liverpool’s defending as a team will not be helped by the failure to land a specialist no.6. (And once Fabinho was sold for an excellent fee for a player about to turn 30 and on the slide, the money and impetus to act quickly were there.)

Making bold statements based on preseason remains as insane as ever. It’s great if players look sharp, but results cannot be judged. Klopp overtrains players in preseason, to build stamina, and they can all be leggy in games.

That said, while I think the players Liverpool have are excellent, including half a dozen youngsters (and everyone had a proper preseason this year, unlike last year), the squad is clearly not quite big enough.

My preview of the season remains optimistic, as I think it’s an especially good group of players now with the ideal age profile (as I discuss, especially in the distribution of ages), but while the season will not be made or broken on the 2-3 deals yet to be done, it’s clear that being 2-3 players short is a problem.

I analyse what the Reds have, and beyond that, it’s hard to say what additions will be made and how that will change the outlook.

Anyway, the final part of the Introduction, and my season preview, follows below.