The Platonic Ideal of a Liverpool Transfer ❤️

For reasons that are slightly unclear to me from this vantage point, I managed to allow myself to be persuaded to spend my Saturday afternoon at not one but two Premier League games: a Merseyside derby straight, followed by a Manchester United against Chelsea chaser. 

There was something oddly low-key about the former. It was as though a narrow 2-1 win for Liverpool almost suited everyone. Even the traditional attempts to infuse the game with some sort of hindsight controversy – in this case because the referee booked someone for taking a quick free-kick, and then added not quite enough stoppage time – fell sort of flat. Even David Moyes couldn’t quite bring himself to be truly irate about either.

Old Trafford was unreconstructed chaos. Football in the pouring rain – the sort of pouring rain that you only really get in the northwest of England, rain so constant you forget it is happening, rain so thick that it doesn’t feel like it’s falling, it just is – is fun, but it is also meaningless. No sweeping conclusions can be drawn from a game played in that weather. 

The contrast between the two was instructive, though, because it is Liverpool that probably provides the best template for how United can begin to recover. And there is one player, I think, who encapsulates that more than any other, the one who may well have been the best player of the nascent Premier League season. Let’s celebrate Ryan Gravenberch.

A merch collection for when we get up early and commune together. Hand-decorated ceramics and an assortment of apparel, headwear, and accessories for the most important meal of the day.

Over the last few years, the many and varied virtues of Liverpool’s transfer strategy have been recounted so often that they are deeply familiar: the data gathered and parsed by the (admittedly sinister-sounding) Research Department, staffed by astrophysicists recruited direct from CERN; the incorporation of that information in any decision; the absolute certainty that the wisdom of the system trumps individual opinion.

To many, Liverpool has come to represent a sort of gold standard, something close to a model of how an elite team should operate in the transfer market in 2025. That has been borne out by results: the club’s approach, once considered vaguely heretical within English football, has led Liverpool to two Premier League titles, a Champions League victory, another couple of finals, and sundry domestic cups. 

And that, as always, has brought aspiring imitators to the club’s doors. Though teams like Brighton and Brentford deserve no small portion of the credit, Liverpool played a key role in popularizing – or at least legitimizing – not just the use of data in soccer, but the idea that a club with any ambition at all should have what, on the other side of the Atlantic, would be called a Front Office. The structure of Liverpool’s hierarchy is, increasingly, a blueprint for other teams to follow.

That is what always happens, of course; it is one of the wonders of football that best practice spreads, now, so quickly and so thoroughly, that a good idea (and sometimes a bad one) can percolate through borders and brains in the space of a few weeks, a few months. There are plenty of sides across Europe who have tried to learn what they can from Liverpool’s methods, to adopt at least some of their principles.

There is one, though, that always strikes me as being overlooked. That may be understandable. It is one of those things that is so widely accepted that it is a longstanding cliché; maybe it is so obvious that nobody thinks they need to mention it. 

It is, though, an insight that very few teams seem able to remember as they hunt, desperately, for new signings every summer. Many, in fact, seem to ignore it completely or – worse still – to invert it. It is, though, at the heart of the way Liverpool operate, and it can be summed up with one pithy, distinctly familiar phrase: form is temporary; class is permanent.

Ryan Gravenberch is, perhaps, the best example of this. Like every major club in Europe, Liverpool had been aware of him before he established himself in the first team at Ajax, given the unenviable task of replacing Frenkie de Jong after his move to Barcelona.

Nobody in the Netherlands was surprised by his rise. Ajax had, in fact, been planning for it: in the spring of 2019, I went to Amsterdam to interview the club’s then-coach, Erik Ten Hag; he told me then that de Jong and his midfield partner, Donny Van de Beek, would have to be sold that coming summer so that Gravenberch could flourish. 

Within a couple of years, Gravenberch’s performances had caught the eyes of Liverpool’s data analysts. In 2022, the club thought sufficiently highly of him that he was included on a list of the three most promising midfielders in Europe; they were described as “game-changers.” The other two were Aurélien Tchouaméni and Jude Bellingham. 

All of this, so far, is pretty standard. A major team that employs dozens of scouts – both ones who watch soccer and ones who track numbers – spotting an obviously talented player is not even remotely unusual; speak to basically anyone in recruitment and they will tell you, with great pride, that they might have signed any standout star you care to name. 

Where the story of Gravenberch takes a turn is in what happens next. In 2022, at the age of 20, the Dutch midfielder got his big move: to Bayern Munich. (It is not quite clear why Liverpool did not attempt to sign him at that point, or why the club failed to get a move over the line if it did.) It would not be entirely fair to say that over the course of the next season he sank without trace, but it is worth noting that by the summer of 2023, there was no great clamour for his signature. 

This is roughly the point when most teams forget – or choose to ignore – that old maxim about class. Secretly, I’ve always wondered if it’s in some way down to pride; most major sides do not want to be seen to be taking another’s cast-offs. A kinder interpretation would be that they all operate under the assumption that if a player struggles at one giant, it effectively acts as a red flag for any other.

Liverpool, though, boasts not just a long memory, but a crystal clear one. A combination of patience and conviction are hallmarks of the club’s strategy. The club had first thought about signing Federico Chiesa all the way back in 2019, while he was still with Fiorentina. That never materialized, but when the opportunity arose to bring him in – at a relatively low cost – five years later, it did not hesitate. Liverpool remembers.

The same thing happened with Gravenberch. Some clubs doubtless saw his lost year at Bayern as a sign of some sort of failing on his part; it is reasonable to assume that Liverpool placed rather more of the blame on his environment. There is no such thing as a bad player, not at this level; there are only players in the wrong contexts.

In the event, that meant Liverpool signed Gravenberch for a fraction of what he might have cost. It also meant the club had to wait a year for his promise to flourish; he was a fringe member of the squad in Jürgen Klopp’s final season. Perhaps he might have remained one under Arne Slot, had Martin Zubimendi not decided to remain at Real Sociedad. 

Instead, Gravenberch emerged last season as one of the key components in a championship-winning Liverpool team. Watching him at Anfield, twice in four days, it became obvious that he has decided there is still more that he can do this time around: he is, as he told The Times of London, a little more free to attack in this incarnation of Slot’s team. He looks every inch the game-changer Liverpool believed he would be more than three years ago. It just required a little patience.

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Monchi might well be the ultimate modern football figure. He is famous not for his achievements as a player – although he had a decade-long career as a goalkeeper at Sevilla, his hometown club – or as a manager. He does not have a public profile because he is an owner, and therefore tremendously rich. He is famous, purely and simply, because of transfers.

He spent most of his career – the good bits, certainly – at Sevilla, where he oversaw the team’s transformation from also-ran into semi-permanent winner of the Europa League. Managers and players came and went, but for two decades (across two spells) Monchi was there, his eagle eye for talent bringing players like Dani Alves, Ivan Rakitić and Júlio Baptista to the club. He was, for a while, seen as Europe’s premier deal-maker: Sevilla, after all, did not just win trophies; they also turned a profit.

What is curious about Monchi, though, is quite how location specific his success seems to be. He had a brief, unhappy time at Roma around a decade ago; his spell at Aston Villa lasted a little longer – he announced his departure this week, having joined in 2023 – but it is not too harsh a judgment to say he has not quite been able to replicate his triumphs in Spain.

I’m not entirely sure why that might be. Villa spends most of its time these days blaming everything on the Premier League’s financial rules. It may be that Monchi’s preferred type of player fares better in La Liga than England. It is probably relevant that his first great calling card deal, the Brazilian striker Luis Fabiano, arrived in Europe 20 years ago.

Whatever it is, it’s a salutary reminder of one of the great truths of the transfer market: there is no such thing as a guru. Often, executives who thrive in one front office set-up struggle when they’re removed from it, because – in this, as in so much – the individual is far less important than the system.

Rog and Rory break down a HUGE week in Premier League football, recap a memorable Merseyside derby and dissect a dramatic clash between title contenders Arsenal and Manchester City. They also discuss what's going on with Enzo Maresca's Chelsea and when Manchester United will finally figure it out under Ruben Amorim. Watch on YouTube or listen here.

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Thanks, as ever, for all the questions and ideas and suggestions you’ve been sending to [email protected] – please do keep them coming. If you don’t, I’m just going to keep answering the steady stream of excellent queries coming from Michael Simmons. 

“Would the Premier League ever remove an owner for performance? We saw the precedent with Roman Abramovich, but I guess that was more the government and less the league. Is it possible for the clubs to vote out a scandalous or incompetent owner?” 

This is a great question and a timely one. The answer, as things stand, is no: there’s no mechanism by which the league can remove a privately-held asset from its owner. It wasn’t able, for example, to take Everton out of the hands of Farhad Moshiri, even in the midst of his financial troubles; he had to sell it himself.

However – this feels like a however moment – that will, in theory, change when Britain’s new Independent Football Regulator is up and running. That office is supposed to have jurisdiction over who gets to own a club, and by all accounts will have the power to remove owners. Whether it will or not is different; it already seems obvious that nobody is going to be suggesting nation states shouldn’t be allowed to own teams. English football has always been happy to welcome anyone if they’re good for the money. That won’t change.

A more personal enquiry comes from Thomas Goodwin, a Brighton fan based in South Korea, who has the temerity to ask for my Liverpool fan credentials. “As Rog reminds us, you are the Crown Prince of Harrogate,” he writes. “In the last edition of The Correspondent, you list Leeds as your hometown club. Your accent doesn’t sound particularly Scouse, as well. Can you explain the origins of your Liverpool support?”

I can, Thomas, and I am happy to, but I want to point out that I do not have to: we are all free to support whoever we like. My own story is not especially interesting, which is why I don’t tell it very often. My half-sister grew up in North Wales, where our dad lived at the time. That’s Liverpool territory. And Everton, I suppose, but she had a modicum of common sense. 

She lived with us when I was very young, and was the only active fan of a club in the house. She gave me a Liverpool jersey for, I think, my third birthday, and that was that. It has occurred to me later in life that this probably qualifies me as a glory-hunter, but it strikes me as very harsh to accuse a preschooler of such a thing. I am certainly not in the business of accusing preschoolers of anything.

I hope that helps! I find the hierarchy of fandom really interesting; that it endures, that so often people have to justify their subconscious decisions (and not just to Thomas) even at this stage always feels slightly anachronistic to me. But then, I suppose, the idea of choosing a team is one I don’t fully grasp, either. Mine was given to me.

Have a great weekend, and take care,

Rory