Liverpool FC Team Talk, Gossip, Rumours 2024/25

I agree as in its really unlucky for Griezmann but it he can't complain ,

Even if he had of kicked him with the front of his foot he might have got away with a yellow but with it being studs first the ref had no choice but to show a red ,

I get the impression that both Liverpool & Firmino would be happy to ride out his contract. If he leaves on a free transfer, at nearly 32, he will have given 8 seasons to the club. That's good service to be fair. Maybe they give him a one year extension, on the same terms and everyone is happy. He is happy to be at the club he likes, and becomes a squad player. I haven't ever seen him kick up a fuss and no talk in the media of him leaving or even asking for parity with contract renewals.

I don't think that Firmino is a player that will be sold. Is he worth selling for ~10m - ~15m, when it is hard to find a replacement for the skillset he brings? I don't think so. And even if he was to be sold, the 2 clubs that I think would have bought him for any sort of decent money are well passed the period of time where the transfer would have suited both the player and buying club. I think that Pep would have loved Firmino at City when he first came in. They ended up buying Jesus that winter instead, but Firmino would have worked brilliantly with Sane & Sterling, Mahrez too in time. A great foil for Aguero. Bayern would have liked him too I think, around 2018, as Lewandoski & Muller were aging but Lewandoski has kicked on another level again, and Muller has stuck around at a high level still so that was a non-runner in the end.

Organic money perhaps. The club should be self sufficient, in theory. We can see a direct correlation with most transfers the last 5/6/7 season with incomings & outgoings balancing each other out. There are a couple of outliers such as the 18/19 summer and summer of 2021. 18/19, the club were coming off of the big CL final run and had CL again. partly funded by this, and partly funded by Coutinho sales, they spent big and gambled on getting a large return for their investment. They did - CL winners. Summer of 2021 was after winning the PL so had a bit of prize money to spend.

The club bought Mane, Salah, Firmino using their own funds either by CL participation or selling players. Sterling & Borini -> Benteke & Firmino. In turn Benteke -> Mane. Then CL qualification was secured and so was the signing of Salah. Brewster -> Jota.

Now that fans are back in the stadium, and there are no TV rebates to be paid, there should be an increase in revenue for the club. We might see a somewhat normality with more transfer money flowing around in the summer. Contracts have increased too tho, but you would think that there will be a flusher transfer fund to allow spending next summer, for some eventual forward replacements in tow. The increase in money flowing around means that more clubs will be comfortable in spending again, and maybe there are sales within the current squad such as Origi or Taki to partly fund the transfers. Teams like a Southampton will say 'yeah we can afford the £20m for Taki now' etc. Maybe the club will do what they did in the summer of 2018 and push the boat out for a few transfers and gamble that they will be top quality, like that summer was, and get the rewards again.

Who out there has a disposable 3/4 billion to buy Liverpool football club then pump in another billion over the following seasons on transfers that those fans who insist the club will be sold will then demand from the new owners

Buying a club for £300m and turning it into a revenue making machine worth £3/4 billion is an investment, Spending £3 to £5 billion buying a club is not an investment for guys who have that kind of money unless they are a state trying to sports wash.

There comes a time when a clubs value is so much that it becomes virtually impossible to sell. Using ''metrics'' to come up with a magical 3.2 billion valuation is silly though. They always say what its worth on paper, and what it's actual value is in the real world is very different.

1.3b - 1.7b realistically

I'm not sure that day is gone, yet. It will come, but not yet.

I know it was a different era, but for years, clubs used to buy players off of Man Utd just because they were English and came through their academy! Frazier Campbell's, Keiran Richardson etc seemed to leave the club every year for decent money relative to the time. There's always a lower half PL team ready to take a punt on a player.

Of course they should be better prepared in the era of data analytics as you mentioned but the same Man Utd are only starting to really establish their analytical department within the last few weeks. in 2021! They are meant to be a top club. What are the chances that the rest of the PL clubs are using analytics? Man City do, Liverpool do. Brentford do. But to be honest, I can't see a lot of clubs currently relying on analytics, more so on scouts, agents etc still. Newcastle is the obvious choice, but they will need established PL players to build their squad over the next 2-3 years before targeting top European names. Southampton, Palace, Brighton, Villa, Wolves won't say no to players like Neco, Philips, Ox, Origi, Taki if they end up selling their star players in the summer. Ojo, Williams & Davies might impress enough on loan to move permanently. Sometimes transfers do come out of the blue that surprise us all - like the Hoever to Wolves transfer that helped to balance off the Jota fee.

There are some good young players in the Liverpool u23 set up too. We don't always need to buy players to facilitate a rebuild. Elliot showed great promise in his early season, and there is still Curtis Jones too. Kaide Gordon, Kelleher, the Polish kid who's name I can't spell & Leighton Clarkson too might have something about him. I see Liverpool linked with Musa Barrow (CF) the other day. Maybe he comes in for £20m (his transfermarkt value) while Origi & Taki are sold for £20m. The front options for next season are Salah, Mane, Firmino, Jota, Barrow, Elliot. And for no perceived extra cost. It gives a year extra and maybe the club moves towards a Jota-Barrow-Salah front 3 in time and beds them in.

Do you ever be positive about anything liverpool related?

Added these together, even if you take the conservative value from Toby here, that is still a lot of money for anyone to spend to buy a club. But I don't think we will be sold as one, it will be with someone buying stakes into the club and in the end I think it will be closer to the £3b though. RedBird (including Lebron James) invested $735m into FSG for 10%. That means FSG is worth around $7.35b, that is how you work out how much we are worth. FSG own a few teams, but the two main ones are us and the Red Sox. The Red Sox are thought to be worth around $3.5b, so you expect us to be around the same, if not more.

What in the history of FSG makes you think this? They just sold a 10% stake in FSG to immediately sell the most valuable asset they have? We have to forget about some billionaire coming in to buy is, we had our chance, twice, and we are where we are now. We are worth too much for anyone with sense to come in to buy us and to be honest, I wouldn't want an owner who can spaff £3b on a football club, that person will have more money than sense and would not want them at the club within 100 miles.

There is no reason why we will not be competing with United financially in 5 years time if we continue to compete. We were on track to overtake them on revenue before Covid struck. The reason why United are able to spend a lot is that they have a base of 10 years of making a lot of money for the club. So cash in hand was a lot more than we had, but we will get there.

Did you see the Rondon v Soucek incident last week? Not even a yellow issued for - what appeared to me - a deliberate attempt to injure using a boot. Soucek required plastic surgery on his face as a result. Firmino was uninjured.

FSG want the club to be turning a health profit every year, while those we compete with are happy to pay interest on massive loans to buy the best players. Most of Liverpool debt is in house, owed to FSG, I'm sure FSG wants to get the club to be debt free ideally . The likes of United own half a billion, Spurs nearly a billion. I don't think we'll be going down that road of being happy just to service interest on loans ongoing.

With 100 million plus fans worldwide, the potential for more revenue streams is there. We don't tap it, no club does. We need some tech savvy person to fill a role at Liverpool. The Likes of Apple have their ''sheep''

Liverpool have no sheep, a few billy goats but that's about all.

What football club in the world as been sold or bought for 1 billion let alone 2/3 billion?

Chelsea was bought for £140m

City was bought for £210m

PSG was bought for £100m

Newcastle was bought for £300m

United being the biggest ever at £800m which was about $1.4bn in US dollars at the time. Big (I'm talking billions) takeovers happen in US sports but that's due to the closed shop they are in and the owners being able to take a large percentage of the revenue for themselves every year.

Liverpool generate over half a billion a year but every cent of that needs to go back into the club to just to try and compete. Why would you buy an asset for billions that you can't even take money out of without running the value of the asset down. Take money out, you become less competitive, CL money and sponsors disappear.

Until European soccer can guarantee a minimum amount (we're likely talking hundreds of millions) of revenue can be taken out of a club year on year and not see a reduction in revenue I don't see any multi billion deals going through.

The big difference between PL (or any other Euro) clubs and US sports (American Football, Baseball, Basketball and Ice Hockey) clubs is that an annual profit for the owners to extract is baked into the US model whereas it's very much not baked into the European model and this is achieved in the US model primarily by three things:-

1. No relegation, there's a fixed number of clubs or "franchises" so regardless of how rubbish you perform on the field/court you are always guaranteed your place.
2. Salary caps keep a lid on expenses.
3. TV revenue is AFAIK shared equally amongst all teams in the league.

Predictability of revenues and profitability plus mitigation of risk (relegation) massively increases value hence US sports teams can change hands on purely commercial terms for huge valuations but Euro / PL clubs don't unless its a hobby / vanity project by one of the worlds wealthiest people or a sports washing project by a country.

What greater indictment of a manager is that when certain players will turn it on only in big games? Can you imagine Klopp tolerating that? It would never occur simply because of his stature as a coach and man manager. Players admire,respect and trust him and,importantly, know never to challenge his authority or behave in any way unprofessionally. This is the antithesis of the relationship Solksjaer seems to have with many of his players whom, I think, seem to regard him as a joke of a manager.

I don't think many fans thinks this Sunday is going to be walk in the park. UTD have been terrible for pretty much all of Klopps reign and we still have only 1 win in OT against them with him in charge. Sunday is going to be another massive test, UTD have some very good players and regardless of how inept Ole is those players can turn it on when required. Also we are not helped by the fact that we haven't looked at all convincing at the back against any team that looked remotely threatening going forward. This game is going to be tough and we may need to score 3 away from home again to seal the points, 1 definitely wont do it anyway!

I'd be more worried about having to cheer when United score. That would make me feel... unclean.

Hopefully they have nothing to cheer about 😉

I agree though. I've sat in the home end for loads of our games but there's a few places I just couldn't do it, that being pretty much top of the list

Good luck though, hope you have a great time!

Bruno a doubt for the weekend. I'd imagine he plays though as long as his two legs are working as Ole has no issue playing injured players.

Absolutely, my first thought as soon as I read that.

Ole ''Captain Obvious ''

'' Bruno is injured everybody, he's injured''

Come Sunday

Ole '' Bruno is fit''

.............in Ole head........... ''WINNING'' as I said he was injured but he's not

Much like how there would've been outright mutiny at Utd if the board had let Ronaldo go to City, I think this Salah thing is the same for FSG.

If he is let go, as the best player in the league, after saying he never wants to play for another club, and if he leaves because he isn't treated the same as other superstars in the game, the fans won't have it.

Mo speaks