agreed it is low risk - but one the beancounters will have in mind all the time. if they know he wants to leave they can cash in now and move on to a replacement.
Well I HOPE you're right. I don't really think you are. I think they know they're out a player for 48M next season, so how much more is he worth to them for the upcoming campaign? More than an extra 5M or 7M or even 10M, I'd think...
I'd rather have Keita's teammate - Timo Werner..21 goals - 8 assists (31 matches), striker who can play on the wing, only 21. Kick Sturridge to the curb and upgrade already! Might even be an upgrade on Firmino too.
i think you may be right, and it would raise the question of where to play Firmino if the team sheet includes Lallana, Coutinho, Mane and Henderson, along with Werner. the logical move would seem to be to drop Lallana, but he had been playing so well. a good problem to have, for sure.
Lallana getting dropped anyway due to Salah arriving. If we're going with Firmino as striker, he needs to improve on his 11 goals/season average. I don't know if he can get to 20 but that's what we need.
More logical would be to ease Salah in games so he features mainly in Europe/cup and as a sub.....lallana starts epl Games
wow. completely forgot about Salah. abundance of riches. Sturridge is really good when healthy. is he a 65th minute sub next season?
This caught my attention on twitter this afternoon. Centre-back Jan Bednarek is flying to England for medical tests at Southampton FC. Deal almost done. I wonder if this will mean anything re the VVD saga?
I'd take Werner in a minute, forget the Mbappe pipe dreams. But I really think we're still light in MF and Keita is the type of player that would complete the Klopp "architecture" for lack of a better word.
well, that's fairly obvious. He's more steven gerrard than mascherano, that's for sure. But there have been cases of similarity in rampaging DFM's Fernando Redondo, Vieira, early Hamann, demetrio albertini, olivier Dacourt..... even Henderson, I suppose.... I'd see him in competition with Lallana and GJ and Hendo/Can for dynamisim in all the spots.
well, we're not soft when Hendo, GW, Lallana and Coutinho play there... but this guy looks a real WC gem, and I'd like that very much ta
I'd keeo him. I guess it depends on if he wants to go. He looked like a guy with farewell in his eyes on the last gameday... but who knows....
Nobody has to be "dropped." It's okay to have more than 11 good players in the team. We have so many games next season, and how often do we have our first eleven available anyway? These things always seem to work themselves out and I can't remember a time where we have ever had too many good players. Plus we have the perfect man to manage a big squad. Klopp is a master at keeping players motivated and getting the best out of them. Even the players like Moreno who never got to play seem to genuinely like the manager.
It seems that there may be FFP issues for Leipzig now that they’ve been admitted to the CL. They had the biggest net spend of any club in Germany over the past three seasons, around £90m, which far exceeds permitted losses under FFP. There are also questions regarding the size of the loan that Red Bull have provided to the club and whether Red Bull are overpaying for their sponsorship deal. So even though Leipzig have money to burn, UEFA regulations may still force them to balance the books, which could work in our favour. This is true. Our squad could barely cope with no Europe and one cup run of note last season.
I really can't see Soton selling him to us given their anger over our behaviour. it'd have to be a hell of a price, and with Chelsea in the mix - they'll outbid us any day of the week.
Since I haven't seen any rumors for other CB 's, perhaps we're playing our pursuit of another one a little closer to the vest than we did with VVD? One can only hope...
Now Pearce is saying no loan. James Pearce has been in touch to provide an update on Joe Gomez - who is not set to move on loan to Brighton, contrary to reports. The Seagulls are interesting in a loan move, but Jurgen Klopp wants to assess him first.
That's the thing, Chelsea are not willing to pay over the odds for VVD so it will be a reduced price as only Chelsea have shown genuine interest at an inflated price With all the attack minded players linked, I really want more defence minded players bring sourced (kieta would be 50/50)....Keane may end up at Everton @ 25 mill? I think klopp placed all his eggs in the VVD basket
RB Leipzig’s £70m Liverpool target Naby Keïta says he’s going nowhere, until he does, and even then it won’t be Liverpool. “I love Leipzig,” he tooted. “I hope, however, in two, three years to play for one of the very big clubs. This includes Barcelona, Real Madrid or Manchester City.”
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/jun/28/tapping-up-part-of-game-stoke-chairman-peter-coates Three weeks on from the Virgil van Dijk tapping-up scandal and the predictable news has emerged that Liverpool are expected to escape any punishment from the Premier League. Southampton had kicked up a storm by complaining about an alleged illegal approach and Liverpool were forced into making an embarrassing apology for overstepping the mark, yet the dust soon settled on a row that was never likely to go anywhere. The reality is that at the time the tapping-up story broke, on the back of newspaper stories about Van Dijk being won over by Liverpool’s manager Jürgen Klopp, the majority of people working in the game will have wondered what all the fuss was about. “So what?” pretty much summed up the football world’s response to reports that Liverpool had been sounding out Van Dijk without Southampton’s permission. “I think that’s absolutely true – what’s new?” Peter Coates, the Stoke Citychairman, says. “And I’m not against people trying to do something about it. I’m just very cynical about it changing. I just think that’s how it is. And when it happens against us at senior level, I never complain because we know ‘everyone’s at it’ type of thing. You could almost say it’s part of the fabric [of the game].” Plenty of agents, managers, players and boardroom executives would be nodding in agreement at Coates’s comments. What happened with Van Dijk has gone on for decades in one way or another and to such an extent that senior figures who have worked on the other side of the fence, trying to enforce regulation and deal with disputes, say it would be a conservative estimate to predict that 90% of transfers involve an element of tapping up. The number of complaints, however, is minimal, which tells a story. “We know it goes on throughout the game and I suppose we turn that Nelsonian eye,” Coates says. “But I am making a distinction with young players and I think we should do – 12-year-old kids, for God’s sake. What are we coming to? With senior players it’s different. I think there’s a big distinction.” In April Liverpool were found guilty of tapping up a schoolboy who had been registered with Stoke, leading to a £100,000 fine and a two-year ban (the second 12 months is suspended for three years) from signing academy players from English league clubs. The following month Manchester City received the same length suspension and a £300,000 fine on the back of a similar breach of the rules. Those cases underline how the Premier League is trying to adopt a more stringent approach to tapping up at academy level, where there is arguably a moral obligation to intervene because of the age of the players. Another reason behind that shift could be the longstanding frustration among some Category One clubs that poaching is going on among themselves. “The original concept was that you couldn’t do that,” Coates says, referring to the elite player performance plan introduced five years ago. “They seem to think what’s happened to City and Liverpool is going to curb it.” At senior level, however, there is little appetite for change. Mike Rigg, the former technical director of Manchester City, spoke about the need for a new code of conduct in the wake of the Van Dijk fiasco, yet Coates believes he would be wasting his time if he tried to get the Premier League’s member clubs to tighten the rules around tapping up. “I’m not sure there would be much traction because there are other things,” he says. “It’s like me wanting to try to do a better job on regulating agents – and I don’t find that easy to get any traction. I wish we could regulate them better. And I don’t think we try hard enough.” Agents and regulation – or the lack of it – is a major issue in the game, far more so than tapping up. Fifa washed its hands of agents a little more than two years ago, deregulating an industry that it had little interest in policing in the first place. There was no compliance unit within Fifa that actively sought to enforce the rules around agents, creating what one former senior football administrator describes as a regulatory vacuum. What has followed, though, is an absolute mess – as many predicted it would be – with each national association tasked with supervising a multimillion-pound business in which the number of people trying to get a slice of the cake has gone through the roof. “Lots of bulls in china shops” is how one leading agent describes the current landscape. The list of Football Association registered intermediaries – which is how agents are now known – was published in full on the FA’s website this month and makes for extraordinary reading. It is 36 pages long, starts with Aaron Akakpo, ends with Zoubaïda Bouzou and includes more than 1,600 names. They are all authorised to act on behalf of players and clubs in English football and it is little wonder that the industry feels out of control. “It’s a shambles,” says a director of one of the major football agencies in England. “We’ve got the AFA [Association of Football Agents], but self-regulation doesn’t work. There needs to be an independent body that gets hold of the industry and deals with it. If there was a breach of regulation, nobody will take action at the FA unless it’s a contractual thing that they see. But anything that goes on in the background regarding being an agent is not regulated. Nobody is checking on players getting payments or parents getting payments. The only people checking on us are HMRC.” Inducements paid to parents or footballers, in some cases to break contracts with other representatives, are part of the mechanisms at work in a chaotic industry where agents are sending text messages to clubs with extraordinary demands for teenagers that stretch way beyond salary and bonus packages. Another recent trend shows a hike in the number of family members seeking to become intermediaries – take a look through that FA list and plenty of surnames will jump out. In some cases the reason for doing so will be entirely legitimate – to protect the interests of someone close to them – but with the others the motivation is money. It is, in short, easy to see why few people within football were wrapped up in the Van Dijk tapping-up story and instead preoccupied with far more pressing concerns around transfers and agents, especially as the Dutchman is unable to leave Southampton without the club’s consent anyway. That is not to defend Liverpool’s actions and claim they did nothing wrong. They clearly made a pig’s ear of things. Yet Liverpool’s crime was not to break the tapping-up rule that appears on page 205 of the Premier League handbook, under the heading “Approaches to Players”, and is widely disregarded; it was to be so brazen and ham-fisted about things that they provoked Southampton into waving a red flag. “Everyone sounds out players one way or another to see if they would have any interest in coming to their football club,” Coates adds. “There’s no point in pursuing something if the player doesn’t want to come. You want to find out: ‘Would he be interested if we were interested?’ You could waste so much time and money otherwise. But it’s how decent you are about how you do things. You’ve got to have some sensitivity.”