Every Man Has His Price

Assessing Liverpool Transfer Contract Lengths

"Players on long contracts don't move”

Dr. Ian Graham, Statsbomb Conference, October 8, 2021.

The gospel according to Saint Ian, the patron saint of transfers, rings around my head on a daily basis. When your job involves writing about transfer rumours, every morsel of information, whether it comes from The Guardian or Fichajes, has to pass the common sense test.

Research from Football Transfer League (below) shows that under a quarter of rumours come to pass. Some will have been reported in good faith and the move didn’t happen for whatever reason, but it highlights that you shouldn’t automatically expect your club to sign that player they’ve been linked with in today’s gossip column.

“Nobody knows anything.” WILLIAM GOLDMAN

When it comes to assessing Liverpool-related news, your best starting point is Transfermarkt. There you will find the player’s contract length, from which you can determine if the story passes the Ian Graham barrier.

Anthony Gordon? He’s only tied to Newcastle until 2026, so it seems realistic he could move. Takefusa Kubo? He signed an extension until 2029 just five months ago, there’s no chance of a deal. But he has a release clause? The transfer nonsense peddler’s get-out-of-jail-free card saves the day, keeping the story plausible.

Round and round it goes. One publication will tell you negotiations between clubs have begun, another will shoot the story down. But here’s the rub; every player is for sale, it’s just a question of how much they will cost. Put enough money on the metaphorical table and you can get anyone.

Despite what Graham famously said, players on long contracts must move occasionally. As someone who covers the Reds, I’m interested in whether such men ever wind up at Liverpool.

According to LFCHistory, the club signed 53 players in the Jürgen Klopp era (if we incorporate the summer of 2015 which narrowly pre-dated his arrival). That total includes loanees, youngsters purchased for negligible sums and free transfers, though. If we limit our sample to those footballers who had contract time remaining when bought, we find 34, signed for an average fee of €30.7m each, per Transfermarkt.

(That is the source for the data which follows. Contracts usually expire at the end of June, when a player might be signed in, say, August. To keep things simple, I’ve recorded players as having increments of 0.5 years left on their deal, rather than 10 months or whatever).

There’s no real benchmark for what counts as ‘long’ in contract terms. We’ll use a minimum of three years, as that leaves us with just under a quarter of the players in our study (eight).

And this is where it gets interesting, as they are split evenly between the original Michael Edwards era and the period after he left. Here are the four men signed with lengthy deals in place at their former clubs when Edwards was involved, and how long their contracts had to run:

Georginio Wijnaldum (4.0), Virgil van Dijk (4.5), Fabinho (3.0) and Alisson Becker (3.0).

Gini Wijnaldum might have left for free and Fabinho’s legs had gone by the time he was sold, but this is a quartet of players who started the Champions League final victory in 2019. Let’s ask an illustration of a volleyball official for their verdict on these signings:

Consider now the four players with long contracts who joined in the last two seasons. It’s too soon to definitively assess their time with Liverpool, but we have:

Darwin Núñez (3.0), Cody Gakpo (3.5), Dominik Szoboszlai (3.0) and Ryan Gravenberch (4.0).

Are any of them currently better than a ‘jury’s out’ verdict at this point? They’ve certainly all shown flashes of brilliance, though consistency has evaded them. Even ignoring trophies the return on investment is currently better on the Edwards quartet, as they collectively averaged 40.4 per 90 minutes per year at Liverpool, when the latter foursome has so far provided 28.2.

And these are the deals you simply have to get right. The players cost more, and with a wider margin between Transfermarkt’s market value and the price paid too.

The above figures include players still at the club, so the 90s played and years service data are correct today but will continue changing as time and matches go by.

Nonetheless, the trends are well-defined. With the 16 players who were signed and have since left the Reds, the seven who joined with under two years left on their previous contract averaged 75.6 per 90s and 3.5 years service, with figures of 120.4 and 5.0 respectively for the nine men with two years plus.

In short, Liverpool paid under the perceived going rate for players on shorter contracts but got less playing time out of them, with greater investment suitably rewarded. While there’s nothing mind-blowing in this research, the outcome shouldn’t be taken for granted. It highlights that the Reds bought well for Klopp.

The club also knew about fair value, with van Dijk the only player for whom Transfermarkt believe they paid more than €27m over what the website believed he was worth. He’s more than repaid that financial faith, and then some.

Virgil is the poster boy for Edwards’ first spell. The Dutchman showed that players on long contracts can move, and move well. With the former sporting director back pulling strings at Liverpool, you can be confident that any signing prised out of their former club surprisingly early will probably be worth it.