Liverpool FC Team Talk, Gossip, Rumours 2024/25

I've not mentioned any players, so i'd say that's a discussion you can have with other people. I'd be hoping they'll move for next season's version of Enzo, whoever that may be - someone right on the cusp of kicking up a major level, but who is not yet a household name.

Think VVD has dropped behind Konate as our key CB these days - if Konate is there, we look better than with any combo without him. For midfield I'd also say it's Thiago is the important one now. We look a lot better with him on the pitch than with Fabinho - but with his continuous injuries, Fabinho's collapse, Milner and Hendo getting older, and Naby and Ox leaving, the money just obviously needs to be spread around a few midfield additions. There's no way around it. If we have 300 million to spend, then great, get Bellingham and a few others. If we only have ~150m to spend, well, that makes the decision for us.

Klopp was very arrogant in his treatment of the journalists that dared to question his decision not to sign a midfielder two years ago. That wasn't the club telling him there was no money to spend, he didn't want a player.

The same thing happened when Tchouameni decided to join Madrid last May. According to Watzke, Klopp used to sulk if he couldn't get the player he wanted but the other members of the Dortmund transfer committee used to talk him around. Deciding not to make a signing last summer with a view to a splurge on Bellingham in 2023 strikes me as a Klopp decision. That is exactly what he wanted to do in the hope of signing Julian Brandt, when Edwards was making the case for Salah.

I've said it previously and I'll say it again - Klopp should not be trusted on transfers, he has repeatedly made the decision to stick with what he has rather than bring in a new player. The team has stagnated because of the manager's decisions, we are now in a situation that goes against what FSG were about when they took control of the club.

Q: Can you name the worst Leicester player on the pitch against City?

A: Yes, Ndidi!

Can't believe he was mentioned earlier in the thread. A mid table sicknote and exactly what we don't need.

While no one was expecting this drop off. The midfield options are Fabinho, Thiago, Henderson, Milner, Elliot, Jones, Kieta, Ox and Bajcetic.

Fabinho dropped can absolutely be deemed as unexpected. No one expected Bajcetic to do as well as he did. But how are the others such a big surprise? Did people think 52 year old Jame Milner was going to be our midfield lynch pin for the next three seasons? The rest of midfielders have done exactly what was expect of them, spent most of the season injured or just be too old to be good enough.

Generally being nowhere near top 4 was unexpected with the midfield available to us, which Fabinho forgetting how to play football has been a big part of.

It just feels a bit revisionist to say this outcome was obvious. I think an upgrade in midfield would have been considered ideal but with Mane leaving we also needed to get a new forward in.

It has been a disaster but I don’t think it’s down to inaction from the club.

Klopp is definitely going to back fabinho to come good again.

Gravenberch, Mount, tielmens and 1 other for the price of a Bellingham would be a very good transfer window, if the one happened to be mccallister I'd be ecstatic, I'd gladly take nunes as well.

In reality, Milners getting a 7 year extension isn't he.....

Tielemens is someone I would really not be happy with. Can't run

This.

I swear it’s like half the players people clamour for are ones they’ve never even seen play.

Tielemans couldn’t be a worse candidate to solve our midfield issues, he has everything we don’t need and nothing that we do.

I'm convinced most of the Bellingham fans have never seen him play.

Go and watch

England vs France

England vs USA

Dortmund vs Bayern (recently)

Chelsea vs dortmund.

completely ineffective in those games.

Any game I’ve him play when he’s playing against a team that’s on par or better than the team he’s on. He’s not in the game.

He was great against Iran, Senegal and in that awful German league.

Maybe he will go on and be a world beater, but at the moment for me, he’s done nothing near being worth 150m.

Bellingham 2024 here we go 😁

Michael Edwards was in a garden centre when he took the call telling him that Liverpool would have to break a world transfer record for Virgil van Dijk. He was businesslike, not wanting the person ringing on behalf of Southampton to know his true feelings, but was silently punching the air, standing there amid the birdseed and potted plants.

That was Edwards at the top of his game. Liverpool’s former sporting director possessed detailed reports on 30 centre backs and had analysed the market. He knew that Van Dijk, by a distance, was the best Liverpool could sign and a price of £70 million plus £4 million add-ons, although unprecedented for a defender, would soon be regarded as a bargain.

So it proved. Joining on the first day of 2017-18’s winter transfer window, Van Dijk became the colossus Jürgen Klopp constructed a great team around. Before long, Manchester United would be paying £80 million for Harry Maguire.

Van Dijk’s home debut was the same game in which Trent Alexander-Arnold began his run as Liverpool’s first-choice right back. That was Klopp at the top of his game, re-imagining a youngster who played in the midfield for Liverpool’s under-18s as a buccaneer who would spring forward from his back four.

To return to where they want to be, Liverpool need to return to what they were. Which, for a time, was the smartest club in football. Never the richest but the smartest, whose ability to add value in recruitment and coaching won them every prize in a cycle that began in that 2017-18 season and ended with defeat in the Champions League final last May.

The club have not been portrayed as smart since Tuesday evening, when The Times’s Paul Joyce broke news of them withdrawing from the chase for Jude Bellingham. Supporters took it bitterly. Bellingham is that very rare commodity, a player whose ceiling is simply higher than the rest, giving him potential to transform any team. One imagines that in Liverpool red, he could have been Steven Gerrard-plus.

Aborting the Bellingham chase makes sense in the here and now but in macro terms the decision cannot be dressed up as anything other than a failure of strategy. While it is a misconception that Liverpool’s midfield rebuilding plans only ever revolved around Bellingham (they were close to signing Aurélien Tchouaméni last summer), it is true that Bellingham was near the top of their list for at least 18 months, and their understanding, earlier in the season, was that Borussia Dortmund would sell this summer for about £80 million plus add-ons.

However, Bellingham’s rapid development during a campaign in which he has become the Dortmund captain and starred at a World Cup — at a tender 19 — has redrawn his value and two clubs of a higher spending power, Manchester City and Real Madrid, are now strongly in the fray.

With Manchester United interested and Paris Saint-Germain (despite reports) also considered to be keen, Dortmund can anticipate an auction. Bellingham has no buyout clause and his price is expected to be north of £130 million once fees are factored in. However, his destination will be Bellingham’s choice, not his club’s. It is understood that he would rather stay at Dortmund and reassess in 2024 than be pushed towards a move that’s not absolutely right for him.

In further contrast to perceptions, there was never any indication that he preferred Liverpool. His father, Mark, is a Liverpool fan, but the player and his family have plotted his career to date flawlessly by taking all factors other than what is best for his development out of the equation. So, with no special levers to make the deal happen, Liverpool pulled out to avoid the risk of allocating a huge chunk of their budget and summer to a bidding war they were not favourites to win.

Doing so offers a good chance of delivering what Klopp wants: several signings that arrive near the start of the window. That’s the decision dictated by common sense, but would Edwards, with his knack for the market, have stopped Liverpool getting to this position?

We’ll never know. Much of the expertise that made Liverpool such good recruiters remains. A new sporting director is being sought but the outgoing Julian Ward (formerly Edwards’s right-hand man) is contracted until the end of the season and continues making plans.

On Tuesday, as the Bellingham news was emerging, a representative from Liverpool was arriving in Amsterdam for a meeting with Ryan Gravenberch’s father. Gravenberch, 20, is under serious consideration. An athletic and elegant midfielder, he can play at No 6, No 10 or even as a left-sided No 8.

Frustrated by a lack of game time since joining Bayern Munich from Ajax last June, he is valued at about £25 million and would leave Liverpool scope to pursue other targets, including Mason Mount, for whom Chelsea are likely to want about £70 million.

Liverpool are also now linked with both Alexis Mac Allister and Moisés Caicedo, both thought to be valued at about £80 million by Brighton & Hove Albion, and cheaper options such as Wolves’ Matheus Nunes and Chelsea’s Conor Gallagher.

Klopp is thought to be sanguine about the budget allocated for new players and though away form remains feeble, the fire of the old Liverpool has flickered at Anfield since victory in the Merseyside derby on February 13. That came after a week in which those close to Klopp saw him regather his energy, and he has cut a different, more optimistic, steelier figure since.

His buoyancy coincides with the return to day-to-day club involvement of the cerebral Mike Gordon, the president of the owners, Fenway Sports Group. Gordon and Klopp is the key relationship at the club, the one that underpinned the era of success. The news gives cause to think that renewed dynamism with decision-making is in store.

There is value for Klopp to add on the coaching side too. He and his assistant, Pep Ljinders, have a saying that “training is our transfer” and it’s time to show it with regard to Darwin Núñez, who seems no less rough a diamond than when signed last summer for £64 million rising to £85 million.

Erling Haaland scored more Premier League goals in August than Núñez has all season, and Klopp declined to start him against Arsenal last Sunday — just like in both league games with Manchester City and against Chelsea back in January. Moved to the left after appearing to struggle with the pressing work Klopp requires of his central forward, the Uruguay international’s future in a rebuilt Liverpool team is surely back in the middle, but Klopp faces either changing his attacking style to accommodate a striker who wants to gallop in behind, or adapting Núñez to one who can come towards the ball. Or a bit of both — like Pep Guardiola with Haaland.

The long-awaited return of Luis Díaz against Leeds tomorrow should be a starting point in the redesign. On top of the penetration and unpredictability he provides with the ball, the speed and aggression of Díaz’s pressing hauls team-mates up the pitch by making them go quicker and harder to keep up with him. Díaz is pivotal to a revamped Liverpool’s game. With Salah on one side and Díaz back on the other, Klopp can audition candidates to start in the middle of his front three next season, whether that is Núñez, Diogo Jota or Cody Gakpo.

It is time to reimagine Alexander-Arnold. After six seasons in defence he is still to develop basic elements of defending such as sensing danger and body positioning, and perhaps it is time to accept he never will. However, in possession he is more important to Liverpool’s game than ever. Per 90 minutes he has the most touches of the ball for the club and he still produces moments of magic, such as his nutmeg on Oleksandr Zinchenko and cross to Roberto Firmino for the equaliser against Arsenal

However, there is a shift in Alexander-Arnold this season. He has fewer touches in the attacking third than in any campaign since 2018-19, and more of his work is done in deeper areas (see graphic). This seems partly an effort by Klopp to use his long passing. In possession against Arsenal, Liverpool switched to a “box” midfield with Alexander-Arnold as a playmaking pivot alongside Fabinho.

One key signing has already been made in Jonathan Power, the new club doctor. Addressing the worst injury record in the Premier League this season is key to a rebuild and the hope is that with a fitter team, stalwarts like Andy Robertson and Van Dijk will find their old form. Just maybe, Liverpool can do the same.

The midfield issue was stated here ad nauseam in the summer. It's not a case of "I was right" blah blah either. It was a universal opinion among posters.

I’m not saying everybody thought our midfield was grand, and it did(and obviously does) require new players, just that I could see the logic in waiting a season to get a player they thought could upgrade the team for years, because most people would still think we would at least get a CL spot with the options we had anyway.

We aren’t going to be in a position to continually add new first team upgrades in the same way as Man City because it doesn’t matter to them if they don’t work out, we are going to have to pick and choose our moments and I do think that means looking 2 or 3 years down the road most of the time. Numerous reasons have caused this to backfire and have put us back a bit, but it hasn’t been inaction or negligence.

It just feels to easy to look at where we are now and say it was obvious this was going to happen. It was clear we needed upgrades in midfield but it certainly wasn’t clear we would be struggling mid table for the season.

I don't know, I think they'll most likely win the champions League this season finally and possibly the league too. Pep seems to have found a set up that's clicked with playing haaland.

Mad that they only paid 50m for him (insert wink wink here)

Sancho looked world class at Dortmund too and look how he's turned out. I know different players but Dele Alli was also looking like world class player who would go on for a decade at the top level.

Only proper annoying thing is that the club basically put all their eggs in one basket by not signing a cm at the start of the season to wait for Bellingham and now nmvery unlikely to sign. Granted Fabinho's form was unexpected but we were always going to need a new cm last season as all others are injury prone to go with Bellingham 'this summer'.

Still haven't replaced Gini which was 3 years ago who played nearly every game which the blame is on Klopp included.

No player is worth 100m in reality, unless we're talking once in a generation players, like Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappe. Jude in reality is a 35m pound player, like Gakpo was.

Grealish cost 100m, Gakpo 35m, and in his few appearances has 4 goals, Grealish in 80 appearances for City has 11, and 5 from 40 appearances this season, Gakpo has 4 from 17.

It's all about the squad in reality, we need 6 x 35m pound players.

Again PL need to get on and relegate City , over 100 charges over 9 years, they've ruined football, and make a mockery of fair play rules. If on the back of these charges they pluck 150m out of thin air for Bellingham then it's two fingers up to the PL. At least in La Liga they apply the rules, even to the mighty Barca and Real

Obvious to the dog in the street that our midfield wasn’t up to it - up to what exactly? Competing with City? Yes, without midfield reinforcements we were never likely to go for another 90+ point season and compete on all fronts.

But ending up with a 60 point season, nobody saw that coming.

I do agree though that something should have been done in January when it had been known for months that the team was underperforming.