The physicality of the Premier League now rewards prioritising depth over making a handful of big-money signings
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It is hard to know precisely when, but at some point between lunchtime on Monday and 11pm on Tuesday, the theory of how Liverpool were spending the final few hours of the transfer window diverged sharply, wildly, from the reality.
The theory: the club’s current sporting director, Richard Hughes, was frantically calling Chelsea to try to take Malo Gusto on loan. He was also rekindling moves for both Ismaïla Sarr and Yankuba Minteh. And whispering in the ear of the Monaco midfielder Lamine Camara, suggesting that he should refuse a move to Chelsea and wait, instead, to come to Anfield next year.
The reality: Liverpool were doing none of those things. There was no move for Gusto. There was no last roll of the dice for Sarr or Minteh, both targets earlier in the summer. Camara is on their radar, as he has been for a while. The club’s future talent department had a couple of loose ends to tie up, moves for a pair of teenage prospects who will join the club in 2027, but that was it. They had made it clear that their business, in this transfer window, was already done, barring any unexpected and significant sale.
And they were, all told, pretty happy with that. They had, at last, landed the player who had been their absolute priority all summer, the France winger Bradley Barcola. Liverpool had eventually parted with a fee that might rise as high as £123 million to entice the first reserve in the best attack in the world from Paris Saint-Germain. It was the culmination of months of negotiation, and a year of background work.
And, crucially, it had been done when they determined that they were not going to sell Cody Gakpo. The Dutchman had been a victim of one of those chicken-and-egg transfer sagas: Liverpool could not sell him without signing a replacement, but they could not sign a replacement until they had sold him. In the end, time ran out. Despite interest from Tottenham and a late £80m bid from Manchester City, Liverpool decided the club needed him to stay.
That apparent inertia, it is fair to say, did not go down well with many Liverpool fans. Andoni Iraola’s first two games as manager have made it abundantly clear that many of the shortcomings that derailed the team in Arne Slot’s second and final season in charge have not been addressed. Liverpool do not have a defensively minded midfielder, or any defensively minded full-backs.
They still have the softest of underbellies; under Iraola, as under Slot, they crumple as soon as anyone runs straight at them. They have seen Curtis Jones, Andy Robertson, Ibrahima Konaté and Mohamed Salah leave this summer. Only one of them earned the club a fee; losing players for nothing has become an unfortunate habit at Anfield. Only one of that most recent cohort, Konaté, has been replaced, and that was with a player whose signing was agreed in the January window.
And yet somehow, they have still managed to have the highest net spend of any team in the Premier League this summer. Maybe more remarkably, by some estimates they now have the most expensive squad – by transfer fee paid – in the league. They have only one fit senior centre-forward, and zero natural right wingers.
The blame for this has been laid squarely at Hughes’s feet; even leaving aside the torrent of overblown and occasionally disturbing social media abuse he has faced, he has been cast as a sort of cowboy squad-builder: the man who dismantled a title-winning side, botched a half-billion pound remodel, and shredded Liverpool’s hard-earned reputation for foresight, patience and planning.
That is the theory. The reality is different. Liverpool’s strategy in this transfer market has not been markedly different to how they have operated for most of the last 10 years. The idea that, other than in specific circumstances, it is better to commit more resources to one difference-maker than to split it among three or four reservists is hardwired into the hierarchy’s thinking.
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As a club, they have made a point of refusing to overpay for what they see as the insurance policy of a stacked bench. It is why Liverpool waited for first Alisson and then Virgil van Dijk, and paid record fees once they were available. It is also, in part, why Liverpool won two Premier League titles and made three Champions League finals between 2018 and 2025.
Hughes has not changed that approach. Barcola, like Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak before him, is seen as the sort of talent who can repay such a colossal investment. He is also, like many of Liverpool’s signings over the last two years, young. Hughes has only commissioned a fee for two players, Isak and Federico Chiesa, over the age of 24. That Liverpool signed two teenagers on deadline day, both for next summer, is not a coincidence; the club are not blind to the fact that their most successful modern squad are not, in a technical sense, immortal.
What is different, though, is the context. Liverpool’s approach might have been consistent, but the circumstances in which the club are operating have not. The workload on elite teams’ squads seems to grow by the season, a factor amplified by the shift in the nature of the Premier League, with its pronounced emphasis on athleticism and physicality.
It is, as Arsenal seem to have identified, now basically a war of attrition: teams hoping to succeed need bodies, and plenty of them. Liverpool’s belief is that the defining factor is the height of a team’s talent. But the Premier League, in its current iteration, is geared to reward depth more than anything.
Liverpool might, just might, have been able to defy that, but then their method has always been something of a high-wire act. It relies, in effect, on the players signed for eye-watering fees working out immediately and spectacularly; if not, the flaws their talent is supposed to disguise become painfully obvious.
And it is there that Liverpool have fallen down. Wirtz has flickered, at best, since arriving in England; Liverpool fans could claim still never to have seen Isak fully fit. This season now seems to rest on Barcola having a more pronounced, and more rapid, impact than either; if not, Liverpool will be condemned to yet another year of drift, a club long built around a theory discovering what happens when that runs into cold, hard reality.