The Midweek Maxi #15: Transfers Madness, Tiny Todger & The Chelsea Carbon Copy
Our new Liverpool FC weekly compendium. News. Stats. Views. Debate. Links. Data. Insights. Delights.
To read about why we’ve replaced Free Friday with The Midweek Maxi, see the intro to the first edition.
So far the bumper weekly roundup is going down extremely well with paying subscribers:
This week:
Excerpts and links to the different pieces we've published across the TTT Substack network, prior to the paywall kicking in;
Then, some of the best comments from the site this past week;
Next, Daniel Zambartas’ bumper LFC News, Media & Transfer Round-Up;
And then finally, bit of Midweek Moby (the TTT stalwart, not the beautiful bald middle-aged man), for the third mini-article of new writing within this week’s Maxi.
Job done! (Oh, and it’s also a discussion thread for the issues raised.)
Note: the Maxi may exceed the email size limit on Substack, but the whole piece can be read online by paying subscribers.
TTT Network Roundup
Links and excerpts to articles on the various TTT sites, which are run by different people and require separate subscriptions to this, the TTT Main Hub.
The Main Hub
Well, well, well, what a few days since the last Midweek Maxi! The season started; but before that The Caicedo Situation started, and finished. The Lavia Standoff ended in with a 23 year contract and £4.5m wages a week, kind of. Here’s the timeline of articles on the Main Hub…
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.)
Erm…
Wasting time with a phone call about Caicedo, who was set to join Chelsea, looked a fool's errand. Especially when it was noted that no bid would be made, and the Reds were almost just casually enquiring.
I also said yesterday (as I've noted on the site for a year) that Caicedo may be tough player to procure, in addition to being set for Chelsea, as I was told after the 2022 window closed that a deal for the player had fallen through due to agent demands, and I worried that he might still be be unhappy about being jilted. It now seems like there was indeed some attempt to sign him in 2022.
[Edit: rumours of deal falling through. Who knows! All I’d hope is that Liverpool knew Caicedo was willing to join before making this bid, otherwise it’s a waste of everyone’s time. Often see twists and turns, but you’d hope Liverpool can see it over the line. If the deal falls through we can revisit; Caicedo remains a great player, but so is Lavia, if he’s still on the market after all this. At least the Reds are trying to conclude at least one deal right now, so things are at least moving, even if it may now be harder to tie up other deals. But we’ll see. I won’t keep updating this piece but I have given my assessment of developments in the comments section, and will continue to add thoughts in the comments section if there’s any definitive news.]
So, that went well.
I'm just hanging about in limbo, waiting to write something about the player/s Liverpool sign; or maybe not writing anything about the two players who end up at Chelsea.
Any time I write and publish something, the situation changes.
Will the Reds be signing Moisés Caicedo, or Roméo Lavia, or ending up seeking to bring István Kozma out of retirement?
With the Reds' bid accepted (and Chelsea having failed with their deadline bid) you’d expect to have seen Caicedo at Liverpool by now, undergoing a medical. Or at least talk of it happening.
Maybe that is taking place. But it doesn’t sound like it is. And Brighton can only accept a bid; they can't force a player to join the highest bidder.
A player can dig his heels in, and force his club to accept an alternate, lower bid (and for Brighton, getting over £100m from anyone for a player they never want to see again has to be a priority, so they can move on and rebuild.)
The trouble is, the longer Liverpool hang on for Caicedo – as Chelsea presumably try to find ways to hijack the deal, with yet more money possibly found stuffed behind some virtual sofa from the year 2037, as they borrow against a future that hasn't even happened, as they burn money like the KLF on steroids – the worse it gets for the Reds in all senses if it falls through.
And yet none of that means it has to be a disaster for the window itself; time is running out, players are off the market, and it would be a huge blow; but deals can still be struck.
The Reds can’t worry about Todd’s tiny todger, and how he’s wildly over-compensating. Liverpool need players, not dick-swinging.
Football was played! Here’s Beez’s thoughts:
A stupid article about some bonehead billionaire has been widely shared on Twitter this weekend. The tweet promoting the piece stated “I’m 45, a billionaire, obsessed with staying young — and hard to date”. Well, I’m 43, skint, trying to stay young — and supporting Liverpool gives me no chance.
But the stress inducing nature of the Reds’ performance today was nothing new. We saw it throughout pre-season and for most of 2022/23. It was summed up today with a passage of play in about the 70th minute. Having been under the cosh for much of the half, Liverpool finally had sustained possession in the final third, looking a little dangerous, and then conceded a clear-cut chance about 10 seconds later.
But then nothing is new in football. If not a carbon copy, this match was very reminiscent of the Reds’ 2-2 draw at Stamford Bridge in 2022. In both games they started very well, took the lead, crumbled shortly before the break and were then somewhat lucky to escape with a point.
Then there’s the substitution of Mohamed Salah mid-way through the second half. It seemed odd, but Jürgen Klopp withdrew him after 72 minutes at Manchester City and 75 at Arsenal last season. A big move in a big away game it might have been, but not one without precedent.
And don’t forget good old Anthony Taylor. His reasonable record of giving Liverpool big decisions is accompanied by maddening inconsistency. If I know he gave 16 yellow cards for time wasting last season, at least seven more than any other referee, the players should too. Trent Alexander-Arnold was unlikely to get away with dallying on a throw-in, not that he was alone in doing so.
It wasn’t all bad; the new lads were bright, as was Harvey Elliott in his cameo, and I’m excited to see more of Alexis Mac Allister linking up with Salah as there were encouraging signs.
It was as you were in many ways, though, as is often the case in the first game of a new season. There is much work to be done, both on and off the pitch.
The Fallacy of Unearthing Hidden Gems
The notion that Liverpool, in the Michael Edwards period and beyond, 2015-2023, constantly unearthed hidden gems is a weird one.
Andy Robertson, who'd just played a full season in the top flight?
Joël Matip, excelling Germany? Like James Milner (signed just before Klopp arrived), hardly unknown, and on a Bosman.
Brighton, like Southampton before them, can unearth hidden gems for South America or Africa or Japan.
Much smaller clubs. Low-pressure environments. Time to have those players settle in a low-key situations, albeit the better they start to do as a team, the harder it is to just find the next gem and give them game-time, unless they are constantly selling; like Southampton found, it may soon fade, and that's part of the cycle of football.
Brighton are the best-run club in England right now; their team was the best to watch last season. They are doing remarkably well; but it's a different game for them. Look at how Graham Potter crumbled at Chelsea, beaten by the pressure.
Liverpool simply have no way to integrate some obscure foreign signing. And no time; a draw for Liverpool, even away at Chelsea who have just spent £1bn, is seen as a disaster.
Sadio Mané prior to two seasons at Southampton – as people often use as an example – would have come to Liverpool with zero experience of the madness of the Premier League, and wasn't the player he became by 2016; and he may not have got game-time to become that player.
A clone of the younger Mané (lets call him Mané B) arriving any time between 2016 and 2022 gets almost zero game-time, because Liverpool have the actual Mané, as well as Mo Salah and Roberto Firmino.
Mané B could go on loan, but if you send players on loan when they've never really spent time at your club, they are very different to homegrown players going out on loan. They become pawns, almost; commodities, not Liverpool players. But they may develop (see Taiwo Awoniyi, but who probably still was never good enough for Liverpool).
However, if it's a loan overseas, they won't adapt to English football and they may not learn English.
A loan aside, they could play U21 football, but that is beyond a joke.
It is basically U18 football, because ... all the best U21 players are either in first teams or out on loan.
Even a 17-year-old like Ben Doak may not be playing U21 football this season, as he's so good he may now be above that, unless he needs minutes.
Stefan Bajcetic, 18, is well beyond U21 football, unless for minutes on his recovery from injury. Harvey Elliott just turned 20, but has been beyond that level for years. So what the hell is the U21 league?!
There's no second-tier Liverpool B team for Mané B, unlike what exists for clubs in Spain, Germany, Holland and many other countries.
Cheap, fairly hidden gems? (In other words, not playing in a top division of a top league, or young, or at an unfashionable club.)
Let's list them:
Taki Minamino. Fabio Carvalho. Calvin Ramsay. Divock Origi (albeit after a goal at a World Cup). Kostas Tsimikas. Ozan Kabak. Ben Davies. Marko Grujić. Sepp van den Berg. Steven Caulker. Loris Karius. Dominic Solanke.
Go back further, to just before Klopp, and it's Oussama Assaidi, Iago Aspas and Luis Alberto.
Origi – deserved cult hero – won the Reds trophies but never nailed down a place. Carvalho needs to bulk up a bit, and just develop in general, as the step-up was too great. Ditto Ramsay, who had a bad injury. Sepp van den Berg had a bad injury on loan in the Bundesliga last season, but remains a good prospect.
Assaidi was a bust. And when Steven Gerrard first saw Aspas and Alberto in 2013, he saw them as too lightweight; zero upper body strength.
Both have gone on to have great careers, but neither was Premier League-ready. Alberto's career took off four years after joining Liverpool, in his second season at Lazio.
Kabak, too young, and Davies, too mediocre, were not ready for the Premier League, as gambles. Grujić was a good player, and still is a good player. He was not quite good enough for Liverpool; ditto Solanke. Caulker was a loan, and the player had serious personal issues. And Karius … well, the less said the better.
Aspas went back to the smaller Spanish club at which he felt comfortable, having admitted that he struggled to settle (and was behind Luis Suárez and Daniel Sturridge in a season that left little chance for him to shine and to actually take a good corner, even). Brendan Rodgers also didn't really want him, which didn't help; but he also wasn't ready.
I loved Minamino from the moment I saw him in the flesh in the 4-3 game against Salzburg (a game in which I can't recall Dominik Szoboszlai, who was so young at the time and thus doing well to be involved, but did notice Erling Haaland as a sub, and was just dazzled by Minamino) … but Minamino ended up little more than a handy reserve striker, who never quite handled English football.
Kostas Tsimikas has been a decent backup: poor first season, good second season, mediocre third season. He was bought as backup, and backup he has been.
You could add Ragnar Klavan, as a pretty good 4th-choice defender.
Which, excluding youth-team signings like Harvey Elliott, Ben Doak and Stefan Bajcetic (peanuts, some old coins and a bag of tracksuits) basically leaves ...
Andy Robertson, Joël Matip (free, and hardly obscure) and a teenage Joe Gomez?
So to me, Robertson is mainly the confirmation bias that people use to prop up a myth.
This is a kind of vanity for big clubs; they mythic notion of the unearthed gem. That if they just picked up these later-proven stars, they’d all still end up as proven stars. Except there’s no pathway.
A hidden gem? What the actual…
His stats for the past year remain excellent, so this is no Arthur Melo or Ben Davies, arriving either undercooked and injury-prone, or from the second tier. It's too easy to look at the timing of the deals and make that false equivalency.
I don’t think this reeks of desperation, whereas Melo arrived on deadline day with no preseason, and a history of injury concerns; with his best football played way back in 2019. He tried his best, but his body was failing him.
Endo, by contrast, is still at the very peak of his powers. He’s not part of some trolley-dash.
Via Squawka, Wataru Endó vs Bundesliga midfielders since the start of the 2020/21 season:
◉ Most possession won in defensive ⅓ (254)
◉ Most aerial duels won (219)
◉ Most clearances (175)
◉ Most headed clearances (105)
◎ Second-most touches (6511)
◎ Second-most passes completed (3940)
◎ Second-most possession won middle final ⅓ (404)
◎ Second-most tackles (208)
Endo is clearly a fitness freak, and not melting as some might be. To rank 7th on ground covered in the Bundesliga aged 30 shows he still has a great engine. Again, this is a player who simply never misses games.
Versatile, he can defend, but also create and score. There's a slight İlkay Gündoğan vibe about him, from what I've seen in the videos and data.
The Zen Den
Chelsea have ... the bigger-spending owners, and that's about it. Plus, a project based around high-risk gambles.
Liverpool will now surely buy the 2-3 players still needed ASAP (Gonçalo Inácio looks a great defensive signing if he's procured for a £38m buyout).
Although fairly organised and unified (it's the first game, at home, and who wouldn't be buzzing?), they still remind me of Southampton at the start of last season.
As soon as I saw that their team was averaging an age of just 24, and they were fielding the shortest XI in the division, and that hadn't been together long, they I could tell that they lacked, a) sufficient experience, b) height (and likely some heft as general physicality), and c) shared cohesion.
As such, their "clever" recruitment was as if someone had read a book about what makes for transfer success, and forget about the bigger picture of the actual team. They bought no fewer than nine players aged 18-20, many of them for the first XI, out of the 13 purchased overall – excluding two backup keepers.
(They bought three older players in January, and two aged 19 and 20 respectively, but by then they were in a hole. They belatedly bought a giant player, but he was 6'7" and didn't look very good.)
They can now sell those young players, as they likely always had good sell-on values. But will do so from the 2nd tier. So, not so clever, huh?
I felt that a short, young team in the Premier League would get battered. And so it proved.
There was a lack of maturity from a lot of the squad, and zero sense of unity. These were young kids, with the male brain for maturity and decision-making not fully formed until 25. (Chelsea's young new signings last season apparently spent most of the time taking the piss out of "Harry" Potter.)
Arsenal were also young last season, but the younger players had mostly spent years together, and spent years with the rest of the players. It was an emerging side, growing together; not a collection of totally new players.
You still can't win anything with kids; or not **just** kids. You never could. Man United in 1996 had half a team of older stalwarts and some kids who grew up together after years in the academy. They weren't a bunch of strangers.
This Red Planet
As Aki notes, indeed I did, from 2005 to 2010. I also co-wrote a purely statistical Liverpool FC book with Oliver Anderson in 2006, The Red Review, which included a lot of things that became mainstream a few years later (hockey assists, adjusting everything to per-90, distance of shots that led to goals, with/without comparisons, and so on). Of course, since the big data revolution, much of it (and anything I could do now) is miles behind expected goals and, further ahead, the AI algorithms analysing football. It all became very professional and gigantic data in the interim.
“Your texts provided clarity to what was happening and I was hooked. At the time I was also finishing my Masters thesis in 2009 after spending six months in University of Sheffield year earlier. And oh, the first child was born. Career-wise I somehow ended up becoming a researcher and stayed at University of Oulu further six years until 2015 when I completed my dissertation.
“A sort of book also, that. But honestly, I have presented my chapter in These Turbulent Times more proudly and way more broadly than my academic output.”
[These Turbulent Times is a 2013 anthology of some of TTT’s articles since the site’s inception in 2009, by, other than myself: Lee Mooney, Andrew Beasley, Dan Kennett, Daniel Rhodes, Graeme Riley, Bob Peace, Krishen Bhautoo, Daniel Geey, Mihail Vladimirov, Paul Grech, Neil Jones, Ted Knutson, Simon Steers and others, many of whom now work within the game, if no longer writing for TTT.]
“By the way, it was a Commodore 64 game called FA Cup that made me a Red. The idea of the game was to choose a club and a tactic for each match to simulate through the match. Options were A, B or C meaning attacking, balanced, defensive and once I figured out that A works for Liverpool FC I won the cup nine out 10 and was so happy about it. It was 1990 or 1991 so I was eight or nine years old. I still own the cassette.
“Nowadays I still watch every LFC match but reading and analysis are almost limited to browsing through Twitter before going into bed. Yet I still dream of finding enough energy and courage to make a career shift towards data and analytics. It is also nice to think ifs and buts regarding my early work and to notice how relatively advanced the models and thinking were back then.
“I see my ‘deserved goals’ in 2010 as the same concept as xG nowadays but of course with less advanced model and assumptions. If I recall it correctly, in that luck article I only separated normal shots from clear-cut chances and valued them with a single number. For betting I based my model to shot maps which was enough to beat bookies in most leagues bar the Premier League.
“Without coding skills it was just too time consuming to maintain as I manually entered each shot from each match over multiple leagues to 8x5 matrix table. That was the accuracy, the field was divided to 40 parts that each had a unique value i.e. probability of scoring, aka deserved goals aka xGs. These days as daughters are grown up I have more time that I am allocating to local football.
“After Covid restrictions in early 2020 we registered our team to northern group of the Finnish 5th division. Everyone was just eager to get out and do sport again, and I ended up making a comeback after a 20-year break. Not that I ever played in the senior team or any division even when younger. I just quit when I was 18.
“Last year we were promoted from the 4th to the 3rd division and I have given up a playing role as training has intensified. My role in the first team is now to look after money that we don’t have, and as team leader handling all the general or administrative stuff. No one is paid a penny and my deal is that I am allowed to participate training anytime!
“To secure playing minutes at more appropriate level I gathered another group of players and registered the reserve team to the 5th division again. There I am also a treasurer and team leader but it seems also a manager. I am still undecided whether I should play as a 10, 9, 8 or 6. Maybe I will choose that Juan Riquelme role as we are both slow.
“Anyway, I live in a city of Kemi, just at the southern border of Lapland region, with 20,000 habitants. The club Kemin Palloseura has quite a nice history and in the summer we celebrated our 90 year anniversary. In 1985 the club won bronze in the ‘Finnish Premier League’ and 1986 was runner-up in the cup. I guess the glory part ends here, but I am fine with that and learned to be patient with LFC. The most successful player from KePS as the club name is abbreviated, is Hannu Tihinen who played eight games for West Ham in 2001. I watch basically all games comfortably from my own sofa. Locally there is just one bar that shows football, but there is no real following behind any club so one must bring his own friends to raise atmosphere.
“In bigger cities and especially in Helsinki there is a good following and multiple sport pubs to watch matches with other Reds. I used to go to those when my work required weekly travelling couple of years ago. The official LFC supporter club Finland is also more active in south where cities are bigger.”
Dynasty
In this instalment, Anthony examines the increasing conflict between owners and manager and the growing dissatisfaction of the fans.
Originally written by TTT Subscriber Anthony Stanley, this major series was first serialised on The Tomkins Times and then published by TTT as a book, called A BANQUET WITHOUT WINE - A Quarter-Century of Liverpool FC in the Premier League Era.
As the 2008/09 season dawned, a strange atmosphere surrounded Liverpool Football Club. The hugely disturbing and disrupting noise in the background continued to gather pace and there was a veritable split in the ranks of the fan base. Whereas previously there had been massive support for Benítez in the face of practically untenable conditions, there was now the spectre of civil war – not just in the boardroom, but also on the terraces. While the Liverpool manager retained the support of the majority of fans, there was now an increasingly dissident voice at Anfield; a voice that would not be quieted and, despite evidence to the contrary on the pitch in the campaign to come, would lie in wait and eventually become deafening.
There had long been a crusade waged by the British media – one you might charitably describe as verging on xenophobic – against Rafa Benítez. The facile bleating of some of the more exposed members of this august body had unfortunately filtered down to some of the fan base and a number of myths had become taken as gospel. As Paul Tomkins noted in Dynasty:
“visionaries in life – be they in sport, art, music or politics – tend to be more greatly appreciated retrospectively, when their ideas have proven inspired and their influence can be traced.”
What cannot be argued with is that Benítez had delivered a Champions League trophy and the FA Cup, was about to achieve his second eighty-plus points total in four years and had made the Reds the number one ranked side in European competition.
The Transfer Hub
Well, it's been quite a weird few days if you are following the transfer activities of Liverpool football club. Ultimately, trying to go toe-to-toe against an entity that is financially superior and morally inferior did not make sense.
As a result, the club has missed out on two top defensive midfielder targets to Chelsea - Roméo Lavia and Moisés Caicedo. Had they got either or both them, it would have instantly made the team better.
To be perfectly honest, even a decent number six makes things better because of the fact that we don’t have one in the squad barring the young Stefan Bajčetić, who has been out of action since March.
Moving on, with the season starting last weekend, this is not a time for Liverpool to sign a raw, young talent and hope to develop him over the course of the next 6-12 months. They do not have Fabinho to start games now and then phase him out later while readying the successor.
The club has the money to fork out. The sale of Fabinho and Jordan Henderson has swollen the pockets, which was on display when the Caicedo fee was agreed with Brighton.
Now, it is high time the recruitment team decides whether they want to sign one elite defensive midfielder at whatever the price, or try and get two at a mid-range price (between £30m-£65m) and let Jürgen Klopp have the options to choose from.
Before jumping on to have a detailed look at the options below, I would ask you to go through a few scouting reports on this website on the defensive midfielders who could be great additions to the squad. I am linking those articles here -
Right, let's take a look at the four others Liverpool can look at before potentially making a move for them in the next couple of weeks. The list had five players in it initially, but Tyler Adams is now off to Bournemouth.
Martín Zubimendi (Age - 24, Contract until June 2027, Height - 1.81m)
Martín Zubimendi is a highly-rated defensive midfielder currently playing for Real Sociedad. He started as a youth player there before making his senior debut in the latter half of the 2019/20 season.
The Spanish international has made 144 senior appearances for Sociedad, most of which coming as a lone number six. Aside from four games, the 24-year-old operated in that position in a three-man midfield last season.
Zubimendi is a technically strong player - as most of them are in Spain, who possesses the tenacity to be as effective off the ball as he is on it. Arsenal wanted to sign him earlier in the summer and were very close to doing so before turning their attention towards Declan Rice.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Tomkins Times - Main Hub to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
 | A guest post by
|