Why Liverpool are on a spending spree in this transfer window

A year ago, no one was excited about Liverpool and the fan base was ready to panic.

The club just lost its beloved and iconic manager, Jürgen Klopp. The Reds were coming off a bounce-back season where they were top of the table in April, but a slew of injuries pulled them back into third place, behind Manchester City and Arsenal, by the time the campaign was over. And yet, somehow, the response to this near-victory and a new coach from ownership was: “Let’s just run it back.”

After being turned down by Real Sociedad midfielder Martín Zubimendi right before the contracts were due to be signed, Liverpool ended the 2024 summer transfer window by signing Giorgi Mamardashvili, a goalkeeper who wouldn’t even be joining until this summer, and Federico Chiesa, an affordable former uber-prospect who would, at best, play backup minutes behind Mohamed Salah.

Beyond the Liverpool fan base, no one else took Liverpool’s summer seriously. This was the clear third-best team in the league in 2023-24, and they’d done nothing to significantly change that. In fact, more pundits picked Liverpool to miss the Champions League than to win the Premier League.

Well, fast-forward to today: Liverpool moonwalked to their 20th Premier League title, and they’ve followed it up by spending more than €300 million on player transfers — so far. By the end of this summer’s transfer window, that number could surpass €500 million.

So, uh, how are they able to spend that much money? And perhaps more interestingly, for a club that’s built multiple title-winning teams by acquiring mostly undervalued and underappreciated players, why are Liverpool suddenly investing so much into such an irrational and inefficient market?

How Liverpool can spend more than anyone else

So far, per Transfermarkt, Liverpool have acquired four players for significant fees. These numbers are not exact, but they at least provide a uniform source from which to work:

• Florian Wirtz, attacking midfielder, from Bayer Leverkusen for €125 million
• Hugo Ekitike, striker, from Eintracht Frankfurt for €95 million
• Milos Kerkez, fullback, from Bournemouth for €46.9 million
• Jeremie Frimpong, fullback, from Bayer Leverkusen for €40 million

Meanwhile, they’ve parted ways with three players for significant fees:

• Jarell Quansah, center back, to Bayer Leverkusen for €35 million
• Caoimhín Kelleher, goalkeeper, to Brentford for €14.8 million
• Trent Alexander-Arnold, fullback, to Real Madrid €10 million

In terms of more incoming players, there appears to be legitimate smoke behind what would likely need to be a Premier League-record deal to acquire Alexander Isak from Newcastle United. With the team quite thin (and injury prone and/or old) at center back, there could be an addition there, and depending on more outgoings, there could be another left winger brought in.

As for those outgoing, Luis Díaz looks like he’ll be heading to Bayern Munich for somewhere in the €75 million range. Liverpool seem to be holding out for something similar for Darwin Núñez. If Harvey Elliott leaves, he’d likely go for somewhere in the €40 million range. And then a couple of academy products like Ben Doak and Stefan Bajcetic would likely go for double-digit fees were they to leave.

But let’s just say that the spending and shifting stays where it is — or at least remains at the current proportional rate. And just to make things simpler, let’s just say that all of the incoming players are signed on five-year contracts.

If so, those transfer fees would get amortized at about €61 million a year, across the five years. Meanwhile, the three outgoing from-the-academy players would bring in about €60 million of revenue. This is accounted for as an immediate profit, as opposed to transfer fees paid, and so for the next accounting year, the current level of transfer spending would basically net out at zero. (It’s not quite as simple as that, but the general point still stands.) Throw in a huge fee for Díaz and potentially Núñez and at least when it comes to accounting purposes, Liverpool have room to spend a lot more money this summer.

That’s without even considering the financial situation at the club. Over the past three years, the following Premier League teams have spent more money on transfer fees than Liverpool: Chelsea, both Manchester clubs, Tottenham, Arsenal, West Ham United, Brighton & Hove Albion, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, Newcastle and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Chelsea, in particular, have spent, yes, €1 billion more than Liverpool on transfers over the past three years. And if we look at net transfer spending (acquisitions minus departures) over that same stretch, then Chelsea, Man United, Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal, Bournemouth, Forest, Newcastle, West Ham and Man City are all ahead of Liverpool.

So, the club itself has literal money to spend and then they’ve also built up a massive buffer against the Premier League’s profit and sustainability regulations (PSR), which essentially allow clubs to lose €120 million over a rolling three-year period.

Amazingly, in an era when most soccer clubs don’t make money, Liverpool are expected to end the financial year during which they won the Premier League with a profit. They earned money on the transfer market, and 2024-25 was the club’s first full season with the newly expanded Anfield, which produced an average attendance of 60,000-plus for the first time ever. There are also millions in bonus money for winning the league and millions more from a return to the Champions League.

On top of that, the team just signed a new sponsorship deal with Adidas starting this season, so that should add even more revenue and wiggle room for spending. As the club’s CEO Billy Hogan recently put it, this summer has “been years in the making.”

Why Liverpool are spending more money than everyone else

Liverpool needed to rebuild before the last World Cup. In the 2021-22 season, they nearly won all four major trophies. They ended up only with the Carabao Cup and FA Cup, but the simple metrics I used to rank the best club teams of the past 25 years landed them at number 18. To be that good, you almost always need a team of mostly pearl-age stars. And that is what Liverpool were. Per the site FBref, the team’s average age weighted by minutes played in the Premier League was 27.7 — the fourth-oldest mark in the league.

Players typically peak between the years of 24 and 28, so this meant that Liverpool had a team of players who were all playing at their best at the same time. But this also meant that they had a team of players who were all about to get worse at the same time. When you were as good as Liverpool were in 2021-22, it can be really hard to accept that you might need to significantly revamp your roster. But this is why teams have front offices; these people can monitor the long-term health of the roster while the manager focuses on maximizing whoever is on the roster.

Unfortunately for Liverpool, the head of their front office, Michael Edwards, had stepped down at the end of the 2021-22 season. The owners, Fenway Sports Group, had turned their focus toward selling the club, rather than running it. And then Julian Ward, who replaced Edwards, suddenly announced that he’d be leaving the team at the end of the 2022-23 season. So, from the summer of 2022 through the spring of 2024, when Edwards returned to be FSG’s CEO of football, there was no consistent figure overseeing the long-term health of the roster.

play

Van Dijk: Liverpool’s new signings have settled in well

Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk believes their new signings have “settled in well” after a busy start to the transfer window by the club.

Now, they did completely overhaul the midfield in the summer of 2023, adding Alexis Mac Allister, Dominik Szoboszlai, Ryan Gravenberch and Wataru Endo, while letting both Fabinho and Jordan Henderson leave for Saudi Arabia and Naby Keïta run down his contract. Midfield was the team’s obvious weak point during the disappointing 2022-23 season, but no such overhauls were ever made to the rest of the roster. Their average age this past season was 27.0 — the fifth oldest in the league and not too different from where it was three years ago.

Rather than trying to flip the roster in their first year back in charge, Edward’s group seemingly focused on the bigger issue of the team’s three best players all entering the last seasons of their contracts: Salah, Virgil van Dijk, and Alexander-Arnold. It’s hard to make any major investments in the roster when you don’t know which of your stars will even be on your team in a year.

However, the signing of Mamardashvili was a recognition that things needed to start to turn over. Alisson Becker had struggled with injuries in his age-30 season, and the 22-year-old Valencia goalkeeper was coming off one of the best shot-stopping seasons we’ve ever seen from a player his age. It wouldn’t help Liverpool immediately, but they now had their goalkeeper succession plan in place.

And now, this summer. If midfield was the team’s weakness two summers ago, fullback was the area to upgrade this offseason. Andy Robertson and Alexander-Arnold are the two best attacking fullbacks in Premier League history, but one of them is 31 and frequently struggled last season, while the other one decided he wanted to get paid more by a different team in another country. Kerkez is 21 and Frimpong is 24. Along with 22-year-old Conor Bradley, this is who the club is betting on to be the starting fullbacks for Liverpool’s next great team.

With the record outlay for Wirtz, I think the right way to look at him is basically as the team’s short-term TAA replacement (creativity) and the long-term Salah replacement: a do-everything superstar whom you can build your attack around.

This chart combines the expected goals (combined quantity and quality of your shots) with the expected possession value (how much everything else you do increases your team’s chances of scoring) for all 22-and-under players across Europe’s Big Five top leagues since the start of the 2023-24 season.

He’s so good already — and potentially so great in the future — that if you can sign him, you do it. And this is apparently what happened. Liverpool didn’t sign Wirtz because he played the right position for their roster; they signed him because Liverpool rarely get to sign 22-year-olds who are already superstars. These players, Jude Bellingham, Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, usually go to Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain or Manchester City.

Liverpool had never spent this much money on a player before, but that’s not because they didn’t want to. Rather, it’s because the handful of players they deemed worthy of those fees ultimately weren’t interested in joining the club. But because of dysfunction at Bayern Munich and the individual circumstances at those richer clubs this summer, Liverpool had the opportunity to acquire the best young player on the market, and they jumped on it immediately.

While Wirtz can play at the top of a midfield or as part of a front three, the club remains somewhat thin up top. Díaz, Cody Gakpo, and Núñez were all signed as part of a process of rebuilding the attacking line, but they’re all acquisitions from an era when the coaching staff was heavily influencing recruiting.

Signed at 25, Díaz was older than most Liverpool signings. He has been an effective and important player, but he’s almost through his prime years already. Gakpo has been an effective sometimes-starter but has never played a heavy minutes load. And while Núñez’s attacking production has been fantastic on a per-minute basis, he’s played fewer than half of the available minutes since joining the club. Unfortunately, the tragic death of Diogo Jota has to be included here, too.

Without Jota and with Díaz and potentially Núñez also leaving, that leaves Salah and Gakpo among attackers who played meaningful minutes last season. Jota, Díaz and Núñez played pretty much all of the available center forward minutes last season, too. So, that helps explain the acquisition of the low-floor-high-ceiling Ekitike, who played primarily as a center forward in Germany.

And maybe — maybe — it helps explain Liverpool’s continued pursuit of Isak. But this is where I start to get a little confused. Ekitike and Isak are strikingly similar players. They both can play on the wing — and they both love to peel off into the left channel — but I don’t think either one maintains the value their transfer fees suggest if they’re primarily playing on the wing. Although the fee was expensive, Ekitike still felt like a classic Liverpool signing: a young player with a world-class data profile who at least has some characteristics that suggest positive regression is in his future.

Turning 26 this fall, Isak is right on the edge of the age range of players Liverpool usually sign. His value will never be higher, and there’s still a good deal of risk associated with the move. He has played only 2,500 domestic minutes in a season one time — and that was this past season.

At the very least, it’s interesting and confusing that Liverpool just won the Premier League with an elite attack that frequently didn’t feature a traditional center forward — and now they’re potentially spending more than €200 million on two traditional center forwards. At best, it feels somewhat redundant; even if they’re both great, then can they really be great together? Why not a left winger and a striker? At worst, it feels misguided.

With the departure of Quansah, the only non-makeshift center back depth behind Van Dijk and Ibrahima Konaté is Joe Gomez, who is (A) always injured and (B) currently injured. Van Dijk will be 34 at the start of the season, and Konaté has his own long injury history. This is playing with fire.

In the midfield, Gravenberch was last season’s breakout star. He went from being a bit-part No. 8 under Klopp to a play-every-minute-of-every-game defensive midfielder under new coach Arne Slot. But that was his first season playing such a heavy minutes load, and yet there’s no real depth behind him in this role. Endo is a great come-on-and-kick-people option at the end of matches, but he can’t play significant minutes if Gravenberch goes down with an injury.

Given the presence of Salah and the arrivals of Wirtz and Ekitike, it really doesn’t feel like “another center forward, just like the other center forward” was the button to press to increase the team’s chances of winning more titles. Especially if it prevents you from pressing the “center back and midfield depth” button. And with another €100 million-plus coming from potential player departures, perhaps it won’t.

Liverpool’s lack of recent spending, coupled with their on- and off-field success, has left them with an aging roster and lots of room to drop lots of money. So, the simple answer to why Liverpool are spending so much? Because they can and because they have to.