The Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah Fire
Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah, who are both over the age of 30, have contracts which are due to expire in 2025.
Alright, don’t panic. I know this is your first day on the job, but there’s a fire spreading in your office and everybody has been ignoring it. Now that you’ve been officially appointed, you better think about extinguishing it.
Now, I doubt Michael Edwards will introduce Richard Hughes to life at Liverpool using the above statement, but it isn’t too far from the truth. Before the new Reds sporting director will even begin to think about incomings and outgoings in the transfer market, he’ll have to deal with the flames surrounding his laptop.
The fire that I’m referring to, of course, relates to the futures of Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah. The duo will leave the club when their contracts expire in 2025 as things stand, and that’s a bit terrifying considering most supporters would label them as Liverpool’s two best players.
So now that Fenway Sports Group have installed Edwards — with Hughes sitting underneath him — what might happen at the negotiating table in the coming months?
Contracts are a tricky subject. As supporters, we naturally grow attached to the players who provide us with so many meaningful memories on the pitch, and we never want to let them go.
The guy in charge of the players naturally follows a similar path. You develop relationships with the people you work with, yet when engaging in contract negotiations with players who could be over the hill, you basically need to act like you’ve never met them.
Jürgen Klopp is no different. Roberto Firmino and Robert Lewandowski are just two examples of players who have labelled the German as a ‘father figure’ to them. That bond is one of the reasons why Klopp is so good at what he does. He can convince his players to empty the tank for him, and before doing the same again three days later.
The Liverpool boss has proved to be a master recruiter all the way through his managerial career, but he thought it was a good idea to extend Jordan Henderson’s contract in 2021. The Englishman was 31 years old at the time, and he got a four-year deal.
Klopp worked with him every single day on the training ground, and he knew everything about him, yet he still managed to get it wrong. In his final campaign at Anfield, Henderson fell off a cliff, and the worst part about it? His original contract was due to expire at the end of that season.
Liverpool made the classic mistake when the ex-Reds skipper was presented with an extension. They based their decision on what he had done for the team in the past, rather than what he will do throughout the course of his next contract.
Forecasting the future is a skill, and sentiment often interupts the cold decision-making process that is required to make optimal choices regarding who to retain, and who to cut ties with. You essentially need your sporting director to be a robot. The manager can’t do it, and neither can most supporters.
Given that, Hughes is entering the game in a pretty healthy position. As Liverpool’s brand new sporting director, he won’t have much of a relationship with anybody on Merseyside, so he should have no trouble removing emotion from the process.
And in terms of the process, the bottom line is determining whether the player involved will provide a return on his investment in the currency of points. In Henderson’s final season, for example, Liverpool basically paid him to cost points for the team. You obviously don’t want that.
The same logic applies when signing players using a data-driven approach. Is Alisson Becker, who is just a goalkeeper, definitely worth £65m? Well, check how many points he’s probably going to win us in comparison to his peers over the course of his contract, then you’ll realise the answer is yes.
Another different sort of example is Liverpool’s failed bid for Moisés Caicedo last summer. I mean, he’s a good player, but how can you expect him to repay £115m in points while occupying a self-sacrificing role on the pitch? That was a big indicator that Klopp was running the show. It wasn’t necessarily a bad move, but it certainly wasn’t a data-fuelled one.
Van Dijk, then.
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