Florian Wirtz! Hugo Ekitiké! Milos Kerkez! Jérémie Frimpong! And soon, possibly, Alexander Isak! It’s vital, Bob Paisley always said, to build from a position of strength, and Liverpool this summer have certainly done that.
If Isak does join, Liverpool’s transfer spending this summer will be approaching £400m, which would be the second-highest figure paid by any club in a single transfer window (behind only Chelsea in summer 2023) – the lack of signings last summer coupled with some canny sales has given them significant profitability and sustainability rules headroom.
If there is a giddiness on Merseyside at the prospect, it’s understandable. Liverpool suddenly have a range of attacking options the like of which no Premier League club has had since perhaps the early days of Roman Abramovich at Chelsea. If pre-season games are anything to go by, it would seem there will be a shift from the 4-3-3/4-2-3-1 hybrid of last season to something more overtly 4-2-3-1, with Mohamed Salah, Wirtz and Cody Gakpo operating behind a centre-forward – at the moment Ekitiké but maybe later Isak.
There is a clear sense of Arne Slot taking full command, as Jürgen Klopp’s rejig of the forward line is swept away. Which itself must be thrilling to Liverpool fans: if he could win the league, have them play as they did last season, with somebody else’s players, what could he do with his own? And it is exciting, there is a sense of a new era for the Premier League, of the battle ceasing to be Manchester City against Liverpool or Arsenal and becoming Liverpool against perhaps three challengers, if Chelsea’s performance in the Club World Cup final was indicative of the heights they could reach.
But football is an endlessly complicated game; nothing is ever as straightforward as it appears it might be. With any change, there is doubt. In this era when so many coaches have a philosophy, a platonic ideal of the game towards which they are striving, it is one of football’s ironies that often the most successful sides are those that embody a tension.
Slot won with Klopp’s players. Arsène Wenger constructed some of his best football at Arsenal on the foundations left by George Graham. Pep Guardiola finally won the Champions League after the arrival of Erling Haaland, whose reluctance to involve himself in midfield represented a significant point of difference to previous Guardiola centre-forwards. A pure manifestation of a theory without friction seems often less effective, perhaps more predictable, than a system built through compromise.
That’s a vague, abstract concern, of greater relevance to future historians than the here and now; it would, after all, be absurd to…
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