I won’t say ‘I told you so’, but Liverpool have finally caught up with my recent column suggesting it’s madness to spend their entire transfer budget on one player.
Ok, I will say that…but I take little satisfaction in pointing it out. The fact is, they have a glaring weakness in their team, and that can’t be fixed by signing Jude Bellingham on his own.
I have a question for you. What is Liverpool’s first choice midfield? Even after a shocking season, it’s probably Henderson-Thiago-Fabinho. Second question: how many goals have they scored between them? The answer is a big fat zero. Yep, you read that right. No goals from a midfield trio that so very nearly wrote history. In any competition. So far, they have made a combined 99 appearances so far, and not a single goal.
It gets worse. In all those appearances, they have three assists between them, two for Henderson and one from Thiago. And that is where the disaster of this season stems from.
You look at the Premier League table, and for all the criticism of Liverpool’s defence, they still have the fifth best record, better than Manchester United and Tottenham, and not much different to City and Arsenal.
Yet goals are a massive problem – despite Mo Salah having another inconsistent season. Nunez has done okayish, they’ve been without Diaz and Jota for long periods, and Gakpo, well, not great but he’s new.
From midfield though, it’s nothing. Keita hasn’t scored either, neither has Jones or Milner; Oxlade-Chamberlain and Bajcetic have one apiece. That’s two goals from seven midfielders. Only Harvey Elliott has a half-respectable total.
It’s the same with assists, seven from 11 midfielders used this season. Compare that to Manchester City, and you see the problem. 35 goals from midfield, 40 assists.
So there’s no way Bellingham alone will transform that. I think they need five or six new signings, but that’s not going to happen…so Klopp will have to settle for three or four. And three of those need to be established, ready to go, top class midfielders.
He’s losing three this summer, maybe five players in total leaving, and it’s clear that the likes of Fabinho and Henderson have struggled at times, while Thiago has missed a lot of games once more. So many can justifiably argue Klopp needs a new first team midfield.
So is it wise to spend most of your money – and remember Liverpool under FSG have never spent more than £150m in a single summer over more than a decade – on one player? Not a chance.
Even if they spend more than ever before this summer, if they signed Bellingham it would leave them with about £30m to buy three more players. You aint doing that in the Premier League and getting away with it.
So spread it around. I’m not being disrespectful when I say Mason Mount isn’t worth more than £20-30m. Not because he’s a poor player, but because he only has a year left on his contract. No way should any club pay more than that.
I know the likes of Mac Allister and Caicedo will cost more, but combined it probably would only be around the fee Dortmund are asking for Bellingham.
I think Klopp needs to evolve his team a bit now. When we’re talking of assists, Alexander-Arnold and Robertson have 13 between them in all competitions all season, when usually it’s more than three times that.
So have sides worked them out? If so, then they need to work a way around that, and the answer is to provide far more creativity from midfield as City do – goals and assists.
Mount will provide that, Mac Allister too. Spend the money on those two, and you still have change to buy a holding midfielder. It’s just financial reality, and I think maybe Liverpool have finally got real.
Jürgen Klopp just admitted three Liverpool plans ‘didn’t work’ but the fourth may be different
And it’s true that he’s broadly tried to maintain his team’s identity this season despite its collapse, drawing criticism from Reds legend Jamie Carragher (via Sky Sports).
But it wouldn’t be fair to say that he’s shied away from bold experiments. The problem is that they just haven’t the desired effect.
“The things we tried so far this season didn’t work out properly and especially not consistently,” Klopp reflected in his press conference ahead of Monday’s trip to Leeds United (via LFC).
So, let’s review the changes he’s made to the shape of his team over the course of the season, where they succeeded and where they failed.
Formations can be a misleading, overly-restrictive label, because a team’s set-up will often vary in and out of possession, or in different phases of play.
But Klopp’s tweaks were still significant because they changed the balance of midfield and attacking players in the starting line-up.
4-2-3-1
In the wake of a dismal 3-3 draw at home to Brighton, where Liverpool went 2-0 down, fortuitously turned the game on its head and then surrendered its lead, Klopp decided he’d seen enough of his established 4-3-3.
When the Reds hosted Rangers on matchday three of its Champions League campaign, Klopp excited fans by switching to a predominant 4-2-3-1, with Fabinho and Thiago forming a midfield duo, and Mohamed Salah, Diogo Jota, Luis Díaz and Darwin Núñez deployed as a front four.
This helped Liverpool produce one of its most dominant displays of the season, racking up 2.93 expected goals (xG) to 0.42, 23 shots to six and 64 per cent possession. Rangers was completely smothered by a reinvigorated press.
Klopp felt compelled to stick with this blueprint for the subsequent visit to Arsenal, though Jordan Henderson came into midfield for Fabinho.
But the Gunners were a whole different beast to Rangers, which finished bottom of Champions League Group A with six defeats from six games and just two goals scored.
Mikel Arteta’s side, by contrast, was the best team in the Premier League, and it out-played Liverpool in a game that wasn’t as close as the 3-2 score-line suggested, as demonstrated by the xG (3.09 to 1.13).
Klopp felt compelled to stick with this blueprint for the subsequent visit to Arsenal, though Jordan Henderson came into midfield for Fabinho.
But the Gunners were a whole different beast to Rangers, which finished bottom of Champions League Group A with six defeats from six games and just two goals scored.
Mikel Arteta’s side, by contrast, was the best team in the Premier League, and it out-played Liverpool in a game that wasn’t as close as the 3-2 score-line suggested, as demonstrated by the xG (3.09 to 1.13).
4-4-2
For the next game, a return trip to Rangers, Klopp changed things again.
There were still two central midfield players and four attackers, but this time the formation featured two strikers — Núñez and Roberto Firmino — up front together, rather than one playing off another.
And instead of Salah, Díaz or Jota, Harvey Elliott and Fábio Carvalho, previously used as number eights, took up the wide positions.
Again, there was an immediate uplift as Liverpool delivered a devastating 7-1 victory, but further caution was required given the weakness of the opposition and the manner in which it collapsed in the final 15 minutes, conceding four times. Before that, Liverpool had toiled.
Still, the 4-4-2 formation returned 10 days later at Nottingham Forest, albeit with a few personnel changes.
Curtis Jones replaced an ill Thiago alongside Fabinho, while Salah came in for an injured Núñez alongside Firmino.
However, the balance never really looked right. The fundamental problem of opponents playing through Liverpool far too easily wasn’t resolved, and the visitor only consistently created chances when Forest dropped back to defend its 1-0 lead. It wasn’t able to find a goal, and fell to a grim defeat.
Curtis Jones replaced an ill Thiago alongside Fabinho, while Salah came in for an injured Núñez alongside Firmino.
However, the balance never really looked right. The fundamental problem of opponents playing through Liverpool far too easily wasn’t resolved, and the visitor only consistently created chances when Forest dropped back to defend its 1-0 lead. It wasn’t able to find a goal, and fell to a grim defeat.
4-3-1-2
When Firmino played alongside Salah and Núñez in the autumn, some labelled it a 4-3-1-2 rather than a 4-3-3, with the Brazilian operating as a number 10 behind two split strikers.
But in truth, that wasn’t too dissimilar to what we’d seen before, given Firmino’s tendency to float between the attack and midfield. It was a fairly conventional Liverpool set-up.
But one game where Klopp did shift towards a more defined 4-3-1-2 was Brighton away in January, when Thiago was surprisingly deployed as a number 10 in front of Henderson, Fabinho and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, and behind Salah and Cody Gakpo.
It was so audacious that had it worked, it would have been labelled inspired. But if it backfired, Klopp was bound to face heavy criticism.
Regrettably, the latter outcome came to pass. It was quite frankly a shambles, perhaps taking the cake for the worst performance of a wretched season. There was no control, no cohesion, and no cause for optimism in the 3-0 loss, and ever since, 4-3-3 has been the order of the day.